Understanding customer needs and expectations has always been at the heart of customer experience. But for many companies, early forms of gathering customer feedback simply relied on data collected from surveys.
While this used to be enough, these surveys don't provide critical feedback across the customer lifecycle. Omnichannel engagement combined with omni-channel signal collection is the only way to establish and truly understand the connection between customer behaviors, thoughts, intentions, and needs.
The data richness of experience signals allows brands to identify the root causes of ongoing customer issues, opportunities for improvement, and even proactively see what customers are telling them. Even people who don’t engage when asked create vital signals which are captured in your operational systems.
Getting CX right starts with a clear understanding of what matters most to the customer. Done right, CX delivers tangible business impact–driving loyalty, reducing churn, and upselling new products and services.
Signals are customer experience data points that come from different systems, channels, in-house technology, and even third-party sources.
Signal types include digital clickstream data, e-commerce information, POS data, call center interactions, CRM data, service interactions, IoT data, HR data, sentiment captured from videos, sales and marketing tools, and yes, even survey data.
Signals from a diverse range of inputs allows for a more comprehensive understanding of customer needs at any given moment in time.
Structured data is made up of objective responses from a set of pre-determined inputs (i.e. surveys). Unstructured data is openended with feedback coming in many forms–such as call transcripts, messaging logs, website contact forms, social reviews, and more.
What customers and employees are saying about you–in channels that aren't expressly designed to measure feedback.
How customers and employees share their opinion about you when directly solicited.
Data from various, specialized systems of record across an organization, consisting of transactional and operational interactions.
Data and events that reflect customer and employee actions or behaviors that are either observed or inferred.
With customer expectations evolving and the demand for greater speed and agility, CX leaders are now looking to a broader, more diverse set of experience signals to truly understand how they're doing in the eyes of the customer. To see the whole picture and act swiftly, with confidence, it's critical now more than ever, for brands to have a complete and comprehensive view of customer needs.
Why aren't more companies using signals? For many organizations, timely and relevant experience signals are not leveraged because they exist in multiple, disparate systems, aren’t structured into usable datasets, and are not connected to known identities. In fact, many signals are expressed in ways that are invisible to organizations because they occur in operational and third-party systems that are not connected with the CX data environment.
