The Hidden Traps of Customer Insight
Understanding and acting on customer feedback is crucial for success. However, many companies find it’s harder than expected to put this into practice. We’ve spent the last six months speaking to organisations attempting to improve how they handle their customer feedback data, and found some common challenges.
Quantitative Tunnel Vision
Many businesses fall into the trap of focusing solely on numerical ratings. This makes sense, because it’s so much easier to work with this type of data, and anyone with a spreadsheet can easily summarise how the scores are evolving.
Hoewever, while these metrics are important, they often neglect the richer insights hidden in qualitative comments. The scores can never tell you how to improve, and often the result of identifying a declining metric will be a follow-up survey or focus group, while the answers already sit there in the open-ended text, unused.
Even current comment analysis tools tend to only reveal key themes or aspects that are surface level. This narrow focus can lead to a superficial understanding of customer sentiments and miss any nuance.
Confirmation Bias
We find there's a human tendency to unconsciously seek data that confirms existing beliefs when analysing qualitative feedback, potentially overlooking contradictory information. That means you might miss an emerging concern, or unfairly focus attention on one side of a particular debate.
Negativity Bias
Similarly, It's natural to focus on negative feedback - after all, problems need solutions. The negative feedback tends to be a lot more emotive and spark more ideas. However, an overemphasis on negative comments can overshadow any positive insights. You need to represent both sides in order to fairly represent the voice of the customer.
Data Silos
Customer feedback often remains disconnected from other valuable data sources within an organisation. Everyone we’ve spoken to started by thinking about one main source of feedback - normally a customer survey - but then realised they had support tickets, public reviews, or other forms of survey that were just as likely to contain actionable feedback. Without integration, companies miss out on the rich insights that could be gained by combining feedback from multiple sources over time.
Analysis Lag
Many companies analyse feedback data infrequently or with significant time lags, even though customer feedback is typically an aways-on process. Focusing on point-in-time data can miss important trends and changes in customer sentiment over time.
The Broken Loop
Even the best analysis is worthless if insights fail to reach relevant departments or translate into concrete actions by the right owners. It’s hard to effectively communicate the insights gained from customer feedback, so having a platform that assigns the feedback to different personas within the organisation can help to start the right conversations, and lead to successful change.
The Path Forward
To overcome these challenges, companies need to adopt a holistic approach to customer feedback analysis. This involves implementing advanced analytics tools like Sunbeam that can surface deep and specific insights, while making sure they reach the right owners.
- Integration is key - both in terms of data sources and collaboration. Customer feedback is most useful when analysed in conjunction with other relevant data, and insights should be shared across departments with clear accountability for action.
- Insights have to be highly specific. Nobody is excited by broad buckets and themes - we have to capture the real sources of customer satisfaction (or dissatisfaction!) as precisely as possible.
- Real-time or near-real-time analysis capabilities are crucial for timely interventions. Longitudinal analysis should be employed to track trends over time, providing a more comprehensive view.
We think that solving these key issues will allow organisations to transform their customer feedback analysis into a powerful driver of customer satisfaction and business growth.
Don't let valuable customer insights slip through the cracks. You can email us about revolutionising your approach to customer feedback at hello@sunbeam.cx, or connect with us on LinkedIn.