Running a business is not for the faint of heart. Beyond a great product or service, customers expect more. Businesses need a guide to understand how customers feel about a brand—but how? Where do they start? That is where Customer Experience Management shines.
Every customer has a voice, and you want to hear what each of them has to say. After all, how can you create those “wow” moments that make them want to become brand advocates if you’re not listening?
Well, listening is actually the first part of carrying out an effective Voice of the Customer (VoC) program. In CXM, we call this “closing the loop.”
Closing the feedback loop involves 4 key steps
Imagine you’re hosting an event for the first time. For you, it was a great success. To gauge how your attendees felt after the event, you send them a post-event survey. You realise after manually going through 30 pieces feedback that you’re tired and exhausted. Manually sifting through feedback is no easy task!
“How do I even know which feedback to act on? What’s the next step?” you ask yourself. There are just too many variables to know which ones to focus on.
Having a streamlined Voice of the Customer (VoC) program that involves 4 key steps is the answer. Let’s get to it.
Why having a VoC program matters (and why you should care)
Think about it: every interaction a customer has with your brand is like a tiny building block. Stack them right, and you’ve got a loyal customer for life. Mess it up, and… well, let’s just say they might be checking out your competitors faster than you can say “customer satisfaction.”
That’s where “closing the loop” comes in. It’s all about:
- Listening to customer feedback;
- Acting on it;
- Discovering opportunities and paint points; and
- Improving and making systemic changes based on accumulated insights.
This approach is vital for developing long-term strategies prioritising customer needs and fostering loyalty.
The concept of closed-loop feedback goes beyond simply acknowledging customer input. Results must follow. Often, companies struggle to make data-driven decisions. Hearing straight from the customers open up opportunities for making strategic decisions. Companies who listen are 14.4x more likely to have high customer satisfaction, and 4.6x more likely to have high growth levels
Difference between inner and outer loops
To better understand and manage the feedback process, many organisations adopt a framework that distinguishes between the “inner loop” and the “outer loop” of feedback management.
This concept, popularised by Bain & Company when they introduced the Net Promoter Score (NPS) system, provides a structured approach to handling different types of feedback and driving improvements at various levels of the organisation.
Think of CXM like a double-helix. You’ve got two strands working together:
Inner Loop
The Inner Loop is your rapid-response team. It focuses on promptly and effectively addressing individual customer feedback. It is the more immediate, tactical response to customer input. When a customer provides feedback, whether through a survey or direct contact, the inner loop process kicks in to address that specific instance.
Frontline and customer-facing teams, such as customer service or support typically manage the inner loop. But what if there are issues that go beyond the frontline knowledge and expertise? This is where the outer loop comes in.
The Outer Loop
While the Inner Loop deals with individual customer interactions, the Outer Loop takes a more strategic, big-picture approach. It focuses on addressing systemic issues that affect multiple customers and driving larger-scale improvements in the customer experience.
The Outer Loop drives strategic changes across the organisation based on the insights gathered. It typically requires support from senior management. It may involve cross-functional teams working together to address complex, multi-faceted issues that impact the overall customer experience.
Effective management of both the Inner and Outer Loops is crucial for a comprehensive CXM and VoC strategy. The Inner Loop helps maintain customer satisfaction in the short term. It provides valuable individual insights, while the Outer Loop drives long-term, strategic improvements that can significantly enhance the overall customer experience and business performance.
Implementing AI in Your VoC Program
While the benefits of AI in VoC programs are clear, implementing these technologies effectively requires careful consideration and planning. Several factors should be taken into account when choosing AI tools for customer experience management.
One platform that stands out in meeting these criteria is the Resonate CXM platform. This comprehensive solution offers a suite of AI-powered tools designed to enhance every aspect of the customer experience management process. From customised feedback collection to advanced analytics and personalised coaching for frontline staff, Resonate CXM exemplifies the potential of AI to transform VoC programs.
Resonate CX features
The Resonate CX platform offers a range of innovative features that leverage AI to enhance customer experience management. Let’s explore these features in detail:
Tailor feedback channels for better response
Like we mentioned earlier, listening is the foundation of a VoC strategy. While standard surveys remain a valuable tool, incorporating machine learning to tailor feedback channels to different customer segments is also essential. Here are the different ways AI is used to collect feedback:
Conversational way of collecting feedback
The AI-driven system analyses customer data and behaviour to determine each segment’s most appropriate feedback channels. For example, younger customers might prefer quick, chat-based feedback options, while older customers might be more comfortable with email or verbal surveys through call. By tailoring the feedback channels, Resonate CX ensures higher response rates and more meaningful feedback.
Nowadays, the way businesses collect feedback has changed. Thanks to modern technologies, it has become more conversational, and people find it a lot easier than answering multiple questions. Feedback collection becomes more personalised as if you are chatting with a friend.
For example, website-integrated chatbots engage visitors in real-time conversations, ensuring prompt and efficient feedback collection while enhancing user experience and bringing brand personality to life.
Collecting feedback without asking a single question
Facial Analytics is another exciting channel that has emerged through AI adoption that goes beyond just sentiments and inputs.
With AI facial analytics, retailers can now see the customer experience through a new lens by observing their emotions and sentiments as they walk through the physical locations. Cameras are strategically placed in critical areas in a brick-and-mortar retail store, such as the entry, checkout, and exit points.
Facial Recognition is the solution for retailers that usually miss out on gathering feedback from customers who don’t want to respond or have dropped off mid-journey. It solves the problems of low response rates, insufficient information about the customer, and survey fatigue and provides a revolutionary way to get insight into customer emotions.
It uses the latest AI facial recognition technologies to quantify shopper emotions. These, in turn, provide businesses with a demographic view of overall retail sentiment over foot traffic.
Through the Resonate CX platform, for example, the Facial Analytics capabilities allow users the following:
- Real-time feedback: Capture the in-moment emotion of the interaction and collect surveys without asking a single question. AI can identify emotion—which demographics are happy, unhappy, etc.; the number of people who visited a store; and correlate recommendations to time, gender, and demographics.
- Integrate natively with the Resonate CX platform: Shows vital stats and emotional heartbeat of the physical space
- Measure sentiment change over time: Shows changes in business units and products in real time
The best part is that no personal information is collected, so the shoppers’ personal information is safe and adheres to privacy laws and data protection regulations.
Collecting feedback from voice channels to convert into text
Converting verbal feedback from phone calls into text makes feedback collection more convenient for people who cannot find the time to give feedback using other channels. Using AI’s quick capabilities to transcribe verbal feedback into text empowers retailers to harness their most valuable asset—the Voice of the Customer.
Businesses that receive a high volume of verbal feedback can perform deep verbatim analysis, act on insights immediately to recover unsatisfied customers, and implement feedback loops instantly, while competitors take months.
Through collecting feedback from speech to text, retailers can:
- Enable accurate and high-value service recovery: Understand pain points and resolve issues on the first call. Proactively drive service recovery through instant customer sentiment analysis across channels to reduce churn.
- Improve operational efficiency and reduce the cost of service: By transforming high volumes of speech into text and running verbatim analysis into your VoC platform, Resonate CX empowers teams to excel while handling higher call volumes efficiently, slashing labour costs and reducing the need for extensive hardware infrastructure.
- Get omnichannel insights fast and accurately in one place: Instead of waiting days for feedback, businesses can instantly capture them live from calls, emails, chats, etc.
Tailored CX Coaching through the Frontline CX Gym
The CX Gym dashboard is the frontline team’s best sidekick. The Frontline CX Gym is not just your typical gym, but a place for frontline teams to gain CX muscles. It utilises AI to gather and analyse feedback. For example, if the AI detects that a company struggles with a certain driver, it will detect which specific driver needs focus to improve NPS and overall score. The system provides coaching, identifying wins and losses, and offers suggestions for improving communication or resolving issues more effectively.
By providing this tailored, ongoing training, the Frontline CX Gym ensures that all customer-facing staff continually improve their skills, leading to more consistent and high-quality customer interactions across the organisation.
Text Analytics
You know that invaluable insights often lie hidden within customer comments and unstructured text. But with the overwhelming volume, where do you even begin? With Resonate.CX’s Text Analytics, you no longer have to wade through the noise.
Text Analytics uses AI to pinpoint vital sentiments and transform overwhelming volumes of text into comprehensible insights.
With its advanced AI and machine learning algorithms, the platform distills sentiments, topics, and themes from customer comments, presenting them in an intuitive dashboard that highlights both positive and negative feedback trends
Conclusion
Closing the feedback loop requires 4 key steps: Listen, act, discover, and improve.
By embracing AI-powered solutions like Resonate CX, businesses can take a significant step towards creating more responsive, personalised, and effective customer experiences. In doing so, they can build stronger relationships with their customers, drive loyalty and advocacy, and position themselves for long-term success in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
With the right AI tools, you can close the feedback loop faster, boost customer satisfaction, and watch your business soar.
Remember, in today’s world, the experience you deliver is your brand. Make it count.
