Many businesses invest heavily in creating a positive customer experience (CX), with the goal of having a streamlined customer journey, diverse but helpful touchpoints, and interactions that address all customer needs. Even the best-laid plans, however, don’t always reflect the actual customer experience.
This is why it’s so important to consider the Voice of the Customer (VoC), which captures what customers are actually saying about your business, products, or services. VoC is inherently customer-centric, focusing on what customers say about their experience with your business and the expectations they have.
By listening to actual customers instead of just conducting generic market research, you can improve your strategic decision-making, successfully invest in strategies that create better customer experiences, and improve overall retention.
In this post, we’ll take you step by step through the process of a customer experience research framework, which you can use to gather qualitative and quantitative data about your customer experience and what you can do to improve it.
Step 1. Preparation
Preparation is the first step in any research initiative, including our customer experience research framework. This stage of the process may involve cross-departmental efforts or multiple stakeholders.
Define your goals
Start by identifying which aspects of the customer experience you most want to understand. You may want to learn how satisfied customers are with a new product feature, for example, or understand their ease in navigating your website.
All touchpoints and processes in the customer journey should be researched at some point, but you want to start with singular, specific goals to guide your data collection and analysis.
If you focus on too much upfront, you’ll get thin and potentially unclear data that likely isn’t helpful or actionable.
Define your target audience
Determine which specific customer segments you want to focus on for your data collection.
If your goal is to get customer feedback about your onboarding process, for example, it may make sense to reach out to new users who will have a strong memory of that experience — having just gone through it.
Similarly, if you want to discover how customers are benefiting from a new service, connecting with high-value customers who often use that service may be a good choice — especially if you want to acquire more of these customers in the future.
You can segment your audience by the following:
- Product use case or overall usage
- Purchase history
- Lifetime value (LTV)
- Length of contract or relationship
- Geographic location
- Demographic data, including age and gender
- Previous interactions with your brand, such as filing a help ticket or returning a product
Leverage existing data
Before you start reaching out to customers, review the data you already have. Comb through past surveys, customer support tickets, and social media mentions to get a baseline understanding of what customers are saying.
If you’re already using CX software, this data will likely be readily available.
You can use this data to form interview questions that will help you get to the core of a potential need or pain point. Doing this can help you better grasp your customer experience (and what can be done to improve it).
Step 2. Data Collection
After you’ve prepared, it’s time to get to the actual data collection. Unlike market research, which pulls general focus groups from the public, you’ll be gaining valuable insights from direct customer feedback.
The qualitative data you get through direct customer research is essential. This research method allows you to gain clear insight into the following:
- Customer expectations
- User experience
- Quality of customer interactions
- Core pain points and business needs
- Opportunities for improvement
No one knows your company’s products and services quite like your customers, so getting their feedback can be game-changing and should be treated as a critical part of customer experience management.
There are three types of data collection: surveys, call conversations, and email conversations. Ultimately, we recommend using a combination of all three to collect as much data as possible.
Surveys
Customer surveys can be helpful, and many businesses use them regularly. However, it’s important to note that people most likely to take automated customer surveys are those who have very strong opinions either way, so you won’t get insight from your “middle ground” customers.
Many businesses use embedded surveys on a daily basis. These are often post-interaction surveys that are integrated into emails or calls following a customer support call, purchase, or other interaction.
Targeted surveys, however, may be more helpful when you’re collecting customer feedback on specific business features or products, such as a new company service. Utilize your contact center software to send targeted surveys to specific customer segments based on previous interactions.
Finally, you can set up automated net promoter score surveys to gauge overall customer loyalty. Your net promoter score tells you how likely a customer is to recommend you to friends, family, or colleagues based on their experience, and it’s a vital customer service and loyalty metric.
Call conversations
Having a live phone call with customers gives you the opportunity to hear directly from your clients how they feel about a product, service, interaction, or your business overall. It goes beyond quantitative data, allows you to ask clarifying questions, and can provide exceptional insight into complex parts of the customer journey.
Calls are incredibly helpful, but they are even more powerful when combined with other customer data like product purchases, tenure, and historical interactions.
Make sure that you’re recording these phone conversations. This is essential, allowing you to listen back, conduct analysis, and ensure that nothing critical is missed.
Once you’ve completed your call conversation, CX software can help you detect patterns with the following features:
- Keyword Search: Utilize keyword search functionalities within your Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platform to find calls mentioning specific topics or issues.
- Sentiment Analysis: Leverage built-in sentiment analysis tools to identify positive, negative, or neutral calls.
- Call Recording Categorization: Categorize call recordings based on themes, using predefined categories within your CCaaS for easier analysis.
While it may be difficult to get some customers to agree to a phone interview, long-term or high-value customers may be more likely to do so. The depth of data you can get from phone interviews is easily worth the time commitment and resources required.
Email conversations
Email conversations can give you the best of both worlds, offering convenience and slightly more depth in customer responses.
Customers are able to complete the email conversations on their own time, though you may need to send reminders to increase response rates. Customer service automation can streamline this by automatically sending reminder emails to customers.
After receiving email responses, your CX software can help you begin the analysis process with the following features:
- Pre-built Reports: Utilize pre-built reports on customer service emails categorized by topic or department within your CCaaS.
- Keyword Filtering: Filter emails by keywords related to your research goals (e.g., product feedback or billing inquiries).
- Sentiment Analysis: Employ sentiment analysis tools to understand customer emotions expressed in emails.
Step 3. Analysis and Reporting
After collecting your hard-earned data, it’s time to conduct data analysis. This can help you gain the insight needed to form a customer experience strategy and create great customer experiences.
Data visualization tools
Use CX software like Nextiva to leverage built-in data visualization tools (or an integration with data visualization tools) to represent survey findings. You can categorize call or email sentiments for clear and actionable insights.
Let’s say your brand offers tiered support based on the software plan customers subscribe to. You may find through sentiment analysis that your high-paying customers report having a great experience with your support staff, while lower-priced customers consistently express frustration, which is likely tied to high levels of recent churn.
Real-time dashboards
Utilize real-time dashboards to monitor key customer experience metrics consistently, allowing you to quickly detect any significant changes before they impact your business.
You can track quantitative data, like your net promoter score or your customer satisfaction score. Use data analytics to track trends and inform your content experience strategy over time.
Customizable reports
The best CX software comes with the option to generate customizable reports to analyze individual aspects of the customer journey. These customer experience insights may, for example, help you assess how customers feel about a customer service interaction they had through email compared to phone.
Create and customize reports for cross-departmental stakeholders, getting product, marketing, sales, and customer support teams on the same page with data that’s relevant to them.
Tips To Keep In Mind When Conducting Research
When conducting research that’s designed to fuel good customer experiences, there are a few best practices that can help you track trends, analyze data, and generate stronger and more actionable insights from the feedback you’re collecting.
Automated alerts
Set alerts to notify your team when specific keywords or sentiment trends emerge in your customer surveys. You can, for example, set alerts if you notice that overall customer sentiment is trending downward or if certain audience segments start using keywords like “frustrated” or “cancellation.”
By receiving real-time alerts, you’ll be able to detect changes — good or bad — and react swiftly.
Collaboration tools
Many agencies focused on improving the contact center experience rely heavily on collaboration features that are designed to share findings and insights with your team as you discover them.
With CX software like Nextiva, your team can collaborate in multiple ways across multiple channels, such as sharing reports, holding team chats in shared project rooms or your main workspace, and scheduling video meetings. Your team can work according to your preferences for exceptional collaboration.
Segmentation analysis
Analyze data by segmenting customers according to demographics, behavior patterns, or use cases for a more granular understanding of their specific experience in the customer journey.
If you want to improve the overall customer experience, bear in mind that each audience segment may have its own unique pain points, needs, and obstacles.
Everything in One View With Nextiva
Conducting in-depth customer research is essential to fully understanding your VoC and improving your customer experience. And today, a strong customer experience is a powerful differentiator, giving you a distinct competitive advantage.
Nextiva’s easy-to-use platform can make CX research a breeze. It can help you gain more insight into your customer relationships and get a deeper understanding of the entire customer journey, allowing you to attract new customers and foster stronger brand loyalty.
We offer team collaboration features, detailed analytics, and integrations with key providers for an omnichannel experience.
