5 ways to capture data and optimize your customer service

Optimizing the experience your customers have, no matter how the contact happens, is the key to making your brand stand out and growing your bottom line. However, to do this, you need the information to work with to help identify any weak links in your customer service chain.  It isn’t hard to compile relevant data – and the best way to obtain it is directly from your clients.

Keep reading to find out 5 ways to ensure that every interaction with your company is memorable for your customers – for all the right reasons!

Customer Surveys

Customer surveys are one of the most reliable methods of gathering customer opinions. Make surveys short, even fun. If you’re launching an online survey, limit the number of questions, tell them how many there are, and keep it to one per page.

Avoid bland or leading questions.  Target them specifically to address areas where you believe you may require improvement. In addition to rating scales, provide space for people to express their opinions about your brand – allowing people to get things off their chest can provide frank and unexpected insights.

To get the most from your survey data it’s important to provide opportunities across all channels –  face-to-face, after phone calls, email inquiries, post-support interactions, and on social media platforms.

Start Social Listening

Monitoring tools on social media monitor keywords on social media. Social listening tools spread the net wider monitoring blogs, forums, etc across the web. Gaining an insight into what people are saying about your brand can help understand where you’re addressing customer needs well, and where you’re falling down.

Use speech analytics

A call-tracking system with a speech analytics tool, for your incoming calls, will allow you to review the contents via a transcription – you’ll really ‘hear’ what your customers and potential customers are telling you. It will also identify words and phrases customers repeatedly use –to use as keywords for your marketing or highlighting friction points that need to be addressed to enhance the customer journey.

 Understand customer LTV

Customer LTV (lifetime value) is an essential metric to understand the investment required to acquire a customer via a particular channel, versus the value your company receives from them over the lifetime of your relationship. It can help in understanding where your most valuable customers are sourced, where you should focus your marketing efforts for the greatest long-term return, and what you need to do to maintain and grow the relationship over time.

Customer Support Trends

Customer support can be a great source of information about the customer experience. What are the recurring problems your customers experience? Could your product guides or videos be improved?  Support tickets provide insight into how long it takes to resolve a query or a problem and post-call experience ratings can be revealing about the efficiency of the support process.

Data Security

One final piece of advice. Your business must ensure the privacy of all the data you hold. With the recent hacking scandals and the public’s growing mistrust of the way their data can be mis-used, you need to reassure them that their information will be stored securely.