The Dark Side of CX: Why More Teams Need Customer Feedback Data

When the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to orbit the moon, they experienced the first human lunar communications blackout. For ten minutes they couldn’t communicate with the people at home. Finally, they emerged, and communications resumed. For many “behind the scenes” teams, even here on Earth, there may as well be a giant hunk of rock between them and customer feedback. To build transformative customer experiences, this must change.

There is no shortage of information on how CX, marketing, and even sales teams can build better customer experiences, engagement campaigns, and sales journeys. But these are not the only teams who have a vital interest in customer feedback.

In many ways, fulfillment, operations and other “behind the scenes” teams have an outsized impact on the customer journey, despite not being traditionally customer facing.

Why should these teams care about customer feedback when customers do not have visibility into their department? Because customers do not see the divisions of your business. When consumers order something online, they do not experience the flow of orders from eCommerce to payments processing to fulfillment and delivery services—instead they see this as a single purchase journey.

The feedback customers give can be extremely informative for back-office teams, warehouse, or other teams that normally do not interact with customers directly. Below, we will dig into a few examples of how some of Verint’s customers use Experience Management tools across the business and discuss what you can do to build a better customer journey, regardless of your department.

Targeted Operational Improvements Across Brand, Region, District, and Store

How can operations teams use CX data to improve their processes and create better results for their customers? It starts with creating a cohesive view of the brand as well as its subcomponents. While this structure of brand, region, district, and store location may not apply equally to every company, many retail businesses have a way of breaking down the brand into its constituent parts to ease logistics and operations.

By looking at customer feedback across the entire organization and drilling down to the performance of specific subdivisions, companies can identify the most successful stores and districts to learn best practices. Conversely, the lowest performing subdivisions provide the opportunity for targeted training, a reprioritization of stock or other changes to meet customer needs.

When viewed together in a custom dashboard, operations leaders can identify problems in real time, and act quickly on customer feedback. If one store is thriving while another a few miles away is struggling, the ability to look at customer feedback for those specific locations can identify where the disconnect is occurring.

Shifting operations toward a more customer-centric footing empowers operational leaders to help build an omnichannel company. By using targeted surveys, operations teams can even get specific customer information to answer questions critical to the business’s overall success.

Fulfillment Teams Can Deliver Better CX

Another area that’s critical to customer satisfaction and the overall customer journey is fulfillment. When a customer orders a product or service that requires delivery, organizations have complex systems to deliver what was promised. Especially when brands face production delays or require interstate or even international shipping, there are many points of failure where the customer experience can break.

Even as the final truck rolls down the customer’s street, the possibility for catastrophic failure exists. How can customer feedback help solve this challenge? While brands may know which points are sources of friction, customer feedback can inform which areas need targeted improvement.

Consider a retailer who has acquired other retailers in recent years. Despite offering the products on a single site, fulfillment takes place through the systems of the inherited retailers. A customer who tries to change the delivery address for their order may find that while some items are scheduled to be delivered to the updated location, others are not.

If they see a week later that all delivery addresses were changed back to the original, incorrect address, despite some having been fixed, this could cause them significant frustration. Imagine then that further attempts are also reverted multiple times until the customer finally cancels the order. (Author’s note: Yes, this is a simplified story about my own experience.)

How could a company know where something went wrong with the above scenario? While the customer provided feedback about the specific points of failure, the CX team did not have insight into the entire organization and no one in fulfillment team leadership ever learned this problem was occurring. By using customer feedback from every level of the organization, fulfillment teams can pinpoint these problems and fix them as they occur, resulting in more satisfied customers and increased revenue.

Bring Customer Feedback to Light

No matter what part of the organization you work in or lead, customer feedback can make the difference between success and failure.

That’s why Verint Experience Management is built to provide a holistic view of the customer, make their feedback digestible no matter the origin, and empower our customers to make tactical and strategic decisions to improve their CX.

If you want to learn more about how better experience management can help your organization make a CX moonshot, click here to learn more about Verint solutions.