Combatting Low Customer Experience Survey Responses: 3 Ways to Evolve Your CX Strategy

Although customer experience surveys are still an incredibly reliable and successful channel for feedback collection, they come with challenges—especially as consumers continue to evolve and change the way they interact with brands.

One of the biggest challenges in collecting customer feedback using only customer experience (CX) surveys is low response rates. This, in combination with additional limitations of traditional surveys (e.g., types of questions asked, quantitative/qualitative limitations, questions built to derive specific answers), is driving brands to implement new solutions—going beyond how feedback has historically been collected and leaning into emerging technology. These solutions are empowering brands to proactively get out in front of customer input and adapt quickly in the field, loosening the reliance of CX improvement on the number of survey responses.

Conversational AI, AI text analytics, and real-time, role-based reporting are important elements to bridging the gap from survey feedback to holistic CX insights. Businesses benefiting the most from these solutions are those dedicated to driving action to the front-line and developing a customer-centric mindset. By broadening their customer experience programs to include automated solutions that require less work from their teams and solicited feedback from customers, they can scale their CX programs to drive loyalty and grow their bottom line.

In this blog, we’ll share three solutions you should evaluate to proactively engage your customers and strengthen the impact of your CX strategy.

AI text analytics

Text analytics has evolved and is now one of the strongest ways to structure and gain a deeper, holistic understanding of customer feedback—which goes way beyond what’s provided in the standard customer experience survey. SMG’s machine-learning approach through AI text analytics interprets the feedback the same way a human would, seeking more holistic context vs. focusing on single words. Industry-leading text analytics solutions enable businesses to:

Accurately gauge customer sentiment
Identify and group like comments
Retain context through native-language processing
Surface trends across channels

The benefits of AI text analytics on your CX strategy

Learn more

What’s next? If you’re manually mining open-ended customer comments, it’s time to explore an AI text analytics tool that will alleviate this lift. To truly see success and prove CX program impact, you’re going to need a high-level read on reoccurring topics + changing sentiment, a way to navigate those changes across multiple business locations, and a strategy for targeted drill-down analysis to take action.

Learn more about how to turn AI text analytics comments into action in our blog.

Conversational AI (think “AI chat bot”)

Chances are, you’re likely employing a chat or messaging solution to navigate customer conversations (e.g., What’s App, SMS, website chat bot). While helpful, the feedback you’re collecting with these tools doesn’t always integrate cleanly into your customer experience survey data. A dynamic chat bot powered by conversational AI will automate this work.

Conversational AI is used to analyze speech or text to get data-driven insights from call centers, chat bots, or other customer feedback channels (e.g., the traditional customer experience survey). Worth noting for brands who want to get ahead of their competition: AI Business predicts AI will power 95% of customer interactions by 2025.

What next? Conversational AI—or what we’re calling conversational feedback—can help you drive business growth through greater and deeper insights. Organizations that seek to create more human, immediate, and automated ways to capture feedback to drive focused action will benefit from this technology. Begin by looking at problem resolution for your brand.

See our guide on how to close the loop on customer issues and understand the impact this has on loyalty.

Real-time, role-based reporting

Empowering your front line remains critical to delivering a strong, valuable customer experience. But if your associates don’t know when + where to take action—or even why it matters—they can’t proactively identify issues. They can only respond to them (and by that time, it might be too late to recover).

Three key solutions that will provide your front line with the confidence and motivation they need are:

Real-time customer recovery
In-the-moment front-line alerting
Issue prioritization based on predicted traffic impact

What’s next? Dispersing insights to the front line—especially when trying to get out in front of customer experience survey feedback—is a shared challenge amid brands with multiple locations. Role-based reporting dashboards that contain all this intel for the unit manager, mid manager, power user, and the executive team is the fastest way to connect your field to your boardroom. The key here is the dashboards need to update in real time. If you haven’t already employed a solid reporting and analytics framework that aligns your entire organization, a good place to start is by addressing field engagement and how they are obtaining CX insights.

For tips on how to spark field engagement, read our best practice guide.

Future-proofing your customer experience strategy (not just surveys) is critical for success

To evolve your CX strategy, you must move beyond using customer experience surveys as your only form of feedback collection and invest in solutions that will allow you to gather a more holistic view of customer sentiment. If your plate is full or your team is at capacity, that’s a tall order. Consider collaborating with a partner who acts as an extension of your team. SMG is a leader in experience management (XM), changing the way brands act on customer and employee insights. We work with 500+ retail, restaurant, and consumer service brands around the world to deliver real-time business insights through our intuitive XM technology and expert advice to strengthen a brand’s business strategy. If you’re interested in learning more about conversational CX and how it could benefit your business, let’s talk.