Unlocking the Voice of your Customer: How analyzing customer feedback drives business success

The challenges of unstructured data scattered across numerous platforms, websites, and channels – and the sheer volume of it – may be daunting, but tapping into this wealth of insights offers massive opportunities for brands. If your sentiment analysis only leaves you with an understanding of whether feedback is positive or negative, it’s time to apply a more statistical approach to maximize your customer experience efforts. This can be done by unlocking the voice of your customer.

Today, AI-powered customer feedback tools can uncover valuable insights from across the customer base and analyze even unstructured data. We call this enhanced understanding of your customer’s end-to-end journey “Voice of the Customer (VoC).” It’s an approach that opens every channel and breaks down data silos to provide brands a transparent, customer’s-eye view of their experience.

How can your company uncover and activate insights buried in social media conversations, emails, chat logs, call records, and survey responses? In this guide, we’ll explore how text analysis contributes to a successful customer experience (CX) program, learn the business benefits of statistical text analysis, and share tips to help you get started.

The power of unsolicited customer feedback

Asking customers to share their feedback in reviews and surveys is essential, but there’s a great deal of insight to glean from unsolicited feedback. In fact, Gartner estimates that up to 80% of an organization’s information assets are unstructured content.

The customer issues you’re unaware of could be the most critical ones to address, and these unexpected insights are more likely to come up through open-ended questions or unsolicited communications than surveys with multiple-choice answers.

People often provide positive and negative customer feedback when they have an extreme experience. For example, you may see restaurant reviews on Yelp that are either glowing or critical. This is because people feel they can gain social capital by sharing positive experiences or warning others about negative ones.

Scouring the web for these mentions and conversations is made possible by technology, but it’s what you do next that determines the value of this feedback from customers.

Our software helps you understand the entire customer experience thanks to its proprietary combination of AI and Human NLP techniques to organize, structure, and categorize text. We also provide the full support of our analysts to ensure your AI algorithms align with your business objectives and evolve with your customers’ behavior and preferences.

How customer experience text analysis works

There’s no dark magic here – just the power of AI and natural language processing (NLP) using proprietary algorithms at work for your business.

Let’s say your restaurant brand collects 17,000 diner survey responses each month. You’ve kept the survey short and direct to improve completion, and so it asks for a customer satisfaction score and includes one open-ended question: “Why did you assign this score?”

This open text field will contain all kinds of feedback about food temperature, restaurant atmosphere and cleanliness, table service, app feedback, delivery timeliness, packaging, order timing, and more. How do you make sense of all of this unstructured feedback when it’s collected at a grand scale?

Text analysis categorizes these comments into concepts and assigns sentiment or “qualifiers.” Integrating this data into other CX analyses gives your restaurant brand (or any other brand) month-over-month customer satisfaction trends through the rating score.

It also surfaces important insights about the specific reasons customers were satisfied or dissatisfied and the business areas, products, and services that contributed to that experience. This rich level of actionable insights enables you to determine where to prioritize and what to maintain.

And that’s just what customers chose to share directly with the brand via the survey. Now, imagine all the feedback customers share on other channels – across email, social media, local review sites, and customer forums. Tapping into these rich insights can benefit the business in several impactful ways.

Text analysis in action

Here’s a real-world example from a popular fast-casual Mexican restaurant that wanted to eliminate common pain points and friction in its customer journey. Creating better local experiences at each location meant this brand needed to identify common themes and feedback in its online reviews.

We put Rio SEO’s powerful Genius® Text Analytics solution to work. We began by grouping positive review sentiment into several key areas so the brand could see where its location excelled. Negative sentiment around ordering and delivery processes called for deeper analysis, and the brand was able to pinpoint customers’ exact concerns.

Quickly implementing a plan of action to remedy those issues led to its overall Google average star rating improving over just two months. The proportion of 5-star reviews grew exponentially within that same timeframe.

How analyzing customer feedback benefits your business

Unlocking customer insights using state-of-the-art statistical analysis techniques offers valuable business benefits. Here are just a few examples of the impact VoC capabilities can have.

Identify new delivery issues early

By monitoring feedback in customer reviews, social media, and customer support interactions, businesses can quickly identify and address delivery issues as they arise, rather than waiting for more significant problems to develop.

For example, suppose a business notices multiple customers report delays or missed deliveries. In that case, they can investigate the root cause and take corrective action before the issue affects more customers. Similarly, businesses can improve their packaging and quality control processes if customers report issues with damaged or incorrect items.

Analyzing customer feedback also helps businesses to understand customer expectations and preferences, which can inform future improvements to their delivery process. Regularly monitoring feedback enables businesses to better understand customer needs and tailor their delivery processes to meet them.

Recognize and capitalize on emerging trends

Advanced statistical analysis can help businesses recognize and capitalize on emerging patterns and trends to stay ahead of the curve. Companies can identify new opportunities and potential market segments, develop new products or services to meet those needs, and maintain a competitive edge in their industry. By leveraging customer insights, businesses can develop products and strategies that resonate with their target audience and drive growth over the long-term.

Reduce operational costs by addressing common customer support issues

Monitoring feedback channels such as customer support tickets can unveil insights into common inquiries and complaints. This can inform improvements to products or services that reduce the number of support requests. Businesses can also choose to allocate resources more effectively. Both of these actions can translate into significant cost savings.

When brands tap into VoC insights and focus on delivering customers a high-quality product or service, customer satisfaction and loyalty improve. Customers who can resolve issues quickly and efficiently are more likely to continue using a product or service and to recommend it to others. This can help businesses increase their revenue and profitability over the long-term, while also reducing their customer support resources.

Develop innovative products and new features based on customers’ ideas

Involving customers in the product development process can help to ensure that new products and features align with customer needs and preferences. By soliciting feedback and incorporating it into the design process, businesses can develop products more likely to be well-received by customers and achieve commercial success.

Staying up to date with customer feedback helps brands identify new growth opportunities and differentiate themselves from competitors.

Understand the root causes of customer satisfaction scores

Even unstructured customer feedback can provide great insight into customer experiences and expectations, with the right technology and expert support in place. Active listening and text analysis can help businesses identify the specific factors driving customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

For example, a business with a high customer satisfaction score might see in its text analysis that product quality, customer support, or ease of use are most important to customers. Identifying the root causes of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction enables the company to prioritize, focus on high-impact areas, and take corrective action to address issues and improve customer satisfaction over time.

Getting your Voice of Customer program started

At Rio SEO and Forsta, you’ll find all the technology and expert support you need for a successful Voice of Customer (VoC) program. Whether you’re conducting a simple or complex survey – or an online, phone, or face-to-face interview – our platform’s intuitive interface makes quick and easy work of advanced text analysis.

Our dashboard offers multilingual capabilities, is compatible with any device, and is simple to configure so you can display data according to your preferences. Sort and filter by line of business, product, region, or other criteria to get the insights you need. You can easily schedule all your projects on your Forsta calendar and see all your options and costs for instant sample audience providers, too.

Customer insights are scattered all over the place – in social media, emails, chat logs, call records, and survey responses. Text analytics help you make sense of and structure all of that data and turn all that rich text into measurable, understandable, and actionable insights that drive customer loyalty, increased sales, and more positive feedback in the future. Want to learn more? Get in touch for a demo.