{"id":973252,"date":"2020-09-28T11:21:25","date_gmt":"2020-09-28T18:21:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/customerthink.com\/?p=973252"},"modified":"2020-09-28T11:21:25","modified_gmt":"2020-09-28T18:21:25","slug":"be-hungry-for-negative-feedback","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/be-hungry-for-negative-feedback\/","title":{"rendered":"Be hungry for negative feedback"},"content":{"rendered":"

The topic of the Voice of the Customer (VoC) has many branches and sub-categories.\u00a0 Just on the topic of surveys alone (which is only a part<\/em> of VoC), there are tons of thoughts: We discuss things like the formatting of surveys, the proper response rates, how and what sorts of questions to ask, which channel we should use to survey, even whom<\/em> to survey.\u00a0 Beyond that there are numerous other methods of collecting the Voice of the Customer:\u00a0 market analyses, social media (SoMe) monitoring and analysis, competitive comparisons, and of course we can\u2019t forget Walking in the Customers\u2019 Shoes.\u00a0 Each of these other methods likewise comes with their own set of approaches and execution methods.<\/p>\n

But what about what comes out<\/em> of those efforts?\u00a0 Sometimes we concern ourselves so much with the day-to-day transactional concerns about collecting<\/em> the VoC, we forget why<\/em> we\u2019re doing it in the first place.\u00a0 In the worst case, we substitute raw winning vs. losing<\/em> motivations for insights, and devolve the entire process to: \u201cWhat\u2019s the score today?\u201d\u00a0 Let\u2019s back up a bit, though, and recognize what I\u2019ve said so many times I should just make a bumper-sticker out of it:\u00a0 VoC insights are of no use if you don\u2019t use<\/em> them to improve your Customers\u2019 experiences.\u00a0 That leads to a remarkable\u2014and to some, shocking\u2014conclusion:<\/p>\n

You should be hungry<\/em> for negative feedback.<\/p>\n

Sure, everybody likes a good pat-on-the-back from time to time.\u00a0 But if you don\u2019t get a kick-in-the-pants, you\u2019ll never improve your work.\u00a0 Think about your experiences with your own VoC results and you\u2019ll probably agree that, while it\u2019s certainly nice<\/em> to get 9s and 10s (Promoters<\/em>) on your NPS survey, dig into the verbatims or attribute data from those responses and ask yourself if there\u2019s much insight to be gained there.\u00a0 Likely a ten on the top-line likelihood-to-recommend question is accompanied by a string of similarly gratifying tens down the line from resolution to ease of effort to time spent on solution.\u00a0 That\u2019s good for a tip of the hat, but not so actionable.\u00a0 Similarly with the verbatims (open-ended text responses) on those particular survey responses:\u00a0 \u201cYou all were great!\u201d\u00a0 \u201cThe agent was incredibly efficient and polite.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cYou rock!\u201d\u00a0 Again, heartwarming, but now try to turn that into something you can do<\/em>.\u00a0 (And yes, I do recognize the rest of the leadership team will be happy to see those tens, but it\u2019s your<\/em> job as a CX leader to actually drive more<\/em> of them, not just rah-rah when they arrive.)<\/p>\n

On the other hand, when you dig into the Detractors<\/em> (those scoring you 0 through 6 on your NPS likelihood to recommend question), you will often get chapter and verse about what went wrong with specific incidents.\u00a0 While they\u2019re not nearly as much fun<\/em> to read, these comments can\u2014and often do\u2014point to specific work your organization can accomplish to directly and positively impact your Customers\u2019 experiences.\u00a0 After you pick through the sometimes-ungracious way your Customers may have of phrasing their displeasure, more often than not you can identify not only what went wrong and where, but also\u2014with aggregation\u2014identify trends and pockets of concern.\u00a0 Through these trends (and using tools such as a Pareto analysis), you can identify the most impactful improvements you can make in order to improve your CX.\u00a0 This goes for the verbatims as well as the quantitative attribute data…you can find correlation between how they score you on your top-line (i.e., NPS) score and how they respond to the other \u201cOn a scale from zero-to-ten\u201d questions.\u00a0 And it\u2019s those insights that are at the heart of the purpose of your VoC program in the first place.\u00a0 Frankly, it\u2019s the oxygen for the entire system, without which there\u2019s no reason to have<\/em> a CX effort in the first place.<\/p>\n

Simply by the nature of surveying (or any other way of collecting the VoC), you\u2019re likely never to have a shortage of negative feedback anyway, but you still should be constantly looking for it.<\/p>\n

If you could get 100 positive survey responses that simply say, \u201cYou\u2019re great!\u201d or 100 negative responses that can be categorized and further studied, yielding insights into what areas of your business need the most CX attention, which would you prefer?\u00a0 Your ego may say one thing, but you\u2019ve got to listen to the business (through the Voice of the Customer!) and always be looking for those opportunities to improve the work you do in service to your Customers.<\/p>\n

So be greedy.\u00a0 Be hungry.\u00a0 Stay curious about what your Customers want you to do better (or stop<\/em> doing).\u00a0 Then use that negative feedback to improve what you do.\u00a0 Act on that insight, and then<\/em> you\u2019ll see a lot more tens!\u00a0 (But don\u2019t stop looking after that…)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

(Originally Published\u00a020200924<\/a>)<\/p>\n

– LtCol Nicholas Zeisler, CCXP, LSSBB, CSM<\/p>\n

– Principal,\u00a0Zeisler Consulting<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The topic of the Voice of the Customer (VoC) has many branches and sub-categories.\u00a0 Just on the topic of surveys alone (which is only a part of VoC), there are tons of thoughts: We discuss things like the formatting of surveys, the proper response rates, how and what sorts of questions to ask, which channel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16767,"featured_media":927873,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[128,115],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973252"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16767"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=973252"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":973256,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973252\/revisions\/973256"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/927873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=973252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=973252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=973252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}