Data discovery is enabling companies to capture a 360-degree view of their customers by compiling and assessing customer behavioral, transactional, and sentiment data across the many channels customers use to interact with companies.
However, this data doesn’t necessarily reveal how customers perceive your company. Fortunately, there are ways to use data discovery to help decision makers walk in the customers’ shoes, as the saying goes.
Before executives use data discovery to understand the customer’s perception of a company, a great starting point is by actually being a customer of your company.
If your organization is in retail, you can see first-hand what a face-to-face interaction with a sales associate is like and how easy – or difficult – it is to do business with your company.
If your company sells life insurance, you can try calling an agent to find out whether it’s relatively easy or challenging to receive a quote by phone.
Customer surveys can help business leaders identify problem spots for customers or snags in customer-facing processes that you can then improve. However, there are at least a couple of shortcomings with customer surveys.
For one thing, survey questions aren’t always open-ended and they don’t allow customers to share information about a product or service problem your company might not know about. The other challenge with customer surveys is that customers aren’t always completely candid in their responses.
Indeed, there will always be a percentage of customers who start a survey with the best intentions only to grow weary of the questions. These consumers simply want to complete the survey and get it over with, so they provide snap answers.
Data discovery, on the other hand, is invaluable in helping decision makers detect early warning signs about customer dissatisfaction. Data discovery helps business leaders gain a more dimensional understanding of how customers view the company.
Text, sentiment, social, and speech analytics can be used to identify what customers are saying about your company across a variety of interactions, including social media comments and contact center interactions. Key word searches against customer sentiment can help business leaders identify where potential product or service problems may be coming to the fore with multiple customers.
Such insights can help trigger actions via data visualization that companies can take to resolve service issues before they become viral, while aiding customer satisfaction.
Many consumers feel empowered by social media and freely share their views and comments about their experiences with a company with hundreds, if not thousands, of other consumers. As Tamara Weintraub notes in a recent blog post, 60% of consumers expect companies to respond to reviews and comments made in social media channels.
Customers are increasingly sharing their views about their experiences with companies. Forward-thinking business leaders are making use of data discovery to keep a finger on the pulse of their customers’ views and take action when it’s appropriate.
