Listening to Your Customers at Scale and Velocity More Critical Now Than Ever
(Special Covid-19 Customer Listening Assistance at Bottom of Post)
Consumer Insights Managers and Marketing Researchers spend a lot of time thinking about new potential customers, especially that first trial and the decision to repurchase. There is also a lot of effort also spent on Customer Experience/Satisfaction monitoring such as Net Promoter programs. But where we often drop the ball is actively listening to our loyal customers when they need us most, when they proactively reach out. As we all know it is 5x more expensive to acquire new customers versus retaining the ones we have, and most marketers agree this number has been increasing.
Surprisingly then, our most recent research shows that over half of customers report having needed customer service at some point when ordering online, and yet companies have failed 1 in 5 customers who reached out to them via customer service/support channels. This is the general case across all industries, gender and age groups! [Though older customers, males, and especially younger males are far more likely than average to feel they have experienced a customer service fail.]
Customer Service/Support Satisfied VS Failed
Note that these are actual customers who have purchased products or services, sometimes several times without needing assistance, and the one time they do reach out they aren’t listened to and the relationship is soured.
Listening During Covid-19
In other research conducted by OdinAnswers last week in the United States we found that people most closely associate the current situation with what happened during 9/11. If you worked within market research, customer experience or customer service during that time you may recall initial customer reaction, in the most effected industries such as travel and hospitality, was generally one of understanding and gratefulness for service.
This presents a tremendous opportunity for us as businesses to rise to the occasion, listen carefully to our customer’s needs, offer to better serve them and equip our staff in these difficult times. At OdinAnswers we take our own advice of course. Below are recent changes we’ve made available to our new and existing customers to better help them listen to and serve their customers better during this critical time.
we can help you listen to your customers now
For the Analysts:
OdinExplore Higher speed & Unlimited Volume Free
Users of the OdinExplore customer listening platform will enjoy unlimited volume at no additional cost. We want you to be able to listen to ALL of your customers, regardless of data source or increased/unexpected volumes of feedback.
We will also offer unlimited training and support at no additional charge.
For D2C and Support Managers:
Real-Time Monitoring of Customer Support Tickets
Whether you are using ZenDesk or some other system to manage support tickets, contact us now to get in on our pilot program designed to help give you unprecedented insights into your 3 most important insight areas: Customers, Team Members performance, and Product specific issues. Simple to understand dashboards, with key insights surfaced when relevant. https://www.odinanswers.com/contact
For Market Researchers:
Last but certainly not least, we realize that a lot of you are doing ad-hoc marketing research to quickly gain insights around customer well-being. These will often contain a significant amount of comment/text data that need to be quickly coded and analyzed. Outsourcing costs may also be an issue for you at this time. Sources include traditional surveys, online ratings, social media, and various other sources.
SurveyTextResults.com
We are introducing a low-cost solution to help you process your open-ends quicker. Output typically includes banner tables with key customer segments and stat testing to total. Report to your external and internal clients what your customers are thinking. STR (Survey Text Results) was recently stood up to help in those situations when you have many customer comments and not enough time to read them. One of our internal analysts will use OdinExplore to make quick sense of these comments for you. More info here https://www.surveytextresults.com/.
Feel free to reach out and contact us about this managed service here
Thank you for your time. We’re here to support you and your customers during this challenging time.
If there is anything I can help with personally, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Yours sincerely,
Tom H. C. Anderson
Founder & Chief Research Officer
OdinAnswers.com
3 Responses
Your chart is tantalizingly close to making a real breakthrough. The central finding- that there are many more customer reported fails that firms care to acknowledge- is painfully obvious to customer service people. Yet the blog commentary falls short of laying out a strategy for tackling those fails. Customer Service more often than not doesn’t own the root cause of those fails. You point our product issues – that’s one, but what about policies, processes that involve handovers between departments and credit /collection complexities. Finance, Legal, IT Marketing and Sales /Distribution functions do. More please with emphasis on analysis
Thank you Carol
You are right, While I wanted to share some very quick high level info on the situation, the reason for this post was first and foremost to list some of the resources we’ve already made available to current and new clients. And these all allow you to go much deeper. I absolutely do want to share more high level cross industry insights soon as time frees up.
However, more importantly right now, as of early next week we’ll be pre-launching a completely free resource which will help companies track their customer health during this crisis. It’s a Customer Health Monitoring service, which will allow companies to understand how the crisis is affecting them based on data they are already collecting via various channels including support (zen desk etc.) as well as post transaction micro surveys etc. This will give these companies much needed additional insights into what is going on, importantly ability to see the trend, and thereby manage and serve their customers better.
More info on this including info on how to sign up for the free reporting system etc. to follow early next week 🙂
Tom