Customer Feedback Unplugged: Transforming the Customer Journey with Customer Feedback

The rise of customer journeys

In a recent Gartner survey, the majority of customer service and support leaders (59%) said that delivering a seamless customer journey is among their top three priorities, and 15% said that it is their single top priority.^[1]

But as companies expand their omni-channel footprint, meeting customer expectations becomes increasingly challenging—and many companies are falling short.

Customer experience ratings have been on the decline for three years and Forrester’s 2024 CX Index study found that they have just hit a new low, with an average score of 69.3 out of 100.^[2]

So, what can CX leaders do?

We recently sat down for a video interview with Jeannie Walters, CCXP, CEO of Experience Investigators, to talk about why and how companies can harness the power of customer feedback to transform customer journeys in ways that have the most positive impact on CX. Jeannie has spent more than 20 years helping Fortune 500 and SMB companies alike find clarity in the world of customer experience.

Use customer feedback to tailor individual experiences

Customer feedback can be used to improve individual experiences, but before you start collecting and analyzing, you need to think about your goals—why you’re collecting feedback in the first place, and what you’ll do about what you learn.

If you’re asking customers a lot of questions and you’re not prepared to take action on their responses, then you’re wasting their time.

For example, Jeannie notes that if an organization knows that a specific journey has some sticky points or something that isn't as effortless or convenient as customers may want, direct customer feedback is a great way to really dig into the issue and find out exactly what customers are looking for. Then, organizations should apply those insights to take corrective action.

Closing the loop with customers is the key to building trust, loyalty and improving outcomes. Customers want to feel heard and valued, but most companies never follow up on the feedback they receive, which leaves customers with the sense that they’re shouting into the void.

Our blog post, Best practices for acting on VOC insights at scale, features three NICE customer case studies that demonstrate the positive results you can achieve when you effectively close the loop with customers.

Use customer feedback to guide strategic decisions

Moving on from one to many, organizations should also use customer feedback to guide their strategic decisions around customer journeys.

Customers just want to accomplish something, and they want it to be fast, easy and seamless.

Collecting feedback strategically along all customer journey touchpoints can help organizations answer key questions, such as:

• What are we missing with customers?
• What are they looking for that we are not delivering?
• What is their emotional state throughout their experience or journey?
• Are we delivering memorable experiences that create desired emotions and outcomes?

For example: we want delighted customers, we want customers who are willing to refer others. Are we offering something special enough to remember and share with others?

A journey-centric approach is critical to helping organizations understand what customers feel is missing now, and gaining insight into what customers really want in future digital experiences.

Combining customer and employee feedback

Employee feedback can also play an important role in improving customer journeys. Jeannie notes that a lot of organizations don't spend enough time on this—companies collect both structured feedback with surveys and transactional data points, but too often ignore unstructured feedback.

She says, “Our contact center agents have a lot to tell us. They interact with people every day. We need to give them a place to share that feedback because then we'll start finding digital journey pain points before they get to that crisis point, before they get to that critical mass.”

Customer-facing representatives should be encouraged to share exactly what they're hearing from customers about what is painful, as well as their own frontline view of what might become painful in the future.

CX teams can use a voice of the customer solution, such as NICE CXone Feedback Management, to aggregate and analyze all structured and unstructured feedback, proactively uncover pain points, and create a closed-loop process to address them.

Meet your customers where they are with omnichannel feedback

If your objective is to use customer feedback to enhance customer journeys, you need to make it as easy as possible for customers to provide real-time feedback across every channel.

That requires developing the right omnichannel feedback strategy and choosing the right technology to enable it. For example, with CXone Feedback Management, you can collect and analyze feedback across 30+ channels.

As Jeannie notes in the video an omnichannel strategy is critical: “We want to look at the customer journey and understand all the different ways that they interact with our brand and allow customers the right touchpoint at the right moment so that they can provide that feedback right when they want to give it to us.”

More companies are taking that advice to heart. A recent Gartner study found that companies are increasingly adopting an omnichannel customer feedback strategy, with email (74%), IVR/phone calls (59%) and social media (44%) being the top feedback channels.

What success looks like

When you use customer feedback to make informed, meaningful improvements to customer experiences, it delivers real business benefits, including:

• Increased customer loyalty and reduced churn
• Increased agent engagement
• Improved CSAT and NPS
• Improved business KPIs (higher revenue and LTV, reduced operational costs)

Global organizations of all sizes across industries have achieved impressive results by using CXone Feedback Management to gather, analyze, and take action on customer feedback, for example:

Harness the power of customer feedback

So how can you set your organization up to achieve similar results?

It starts by mapping the customer journey and creating a plan to collect and act on customer feedback at each key point along the journey.

Jeannie stresses that having an action plan is key: “Know who you will be sending feedback to, who is responsible for it, what are you reporting out on, and what are the actual improvements that you could make.”

Our eBook, Journey Mapping the Digital-First Customer Experience, co-written with Experience Investigators, can help you get started.

With your plan in place, the right voice of the customer solution can empower your team to transform omnichannel feedback into valuable insights, and to take impactful action on those insights, at scale, to improve digital customer experiences.

^{[1] Gartner: Create a Seamless Customer Journey (2023)
[2] The Wall Street Journal: Customer Experience Gets Worse. Again (2024)}