Get to know what's working, and the key touchpoints to improve
It’s best to start at the end, and reverse-engineer your system: start by thinking through your organization’s goals and how you want to visualize the data, then ask the questions that will get you there.
You’ll also want to consider what metrics will move the needle within your organization and how you’ll want to visualize the information. First, consider how you should visualize your data with an emphasis on verbatim analysis of unstructured data and powerful predictions about future behaviors.
To create a System of Action, it’s essential to map out what information should reside where — for example, you might have everything in your customer experience platform, but may also want to pipe data into other tools used by your digital team to get insights ot the right person in the organization.
At Qualtrics, we integrate with platforms such as SAP, Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, JIRA, Slack and more, so everyone can incorporate CX into their existing workflows.
The listening posts established during this phase set the baseline for all future Digital Experience projects on your website or app. To better understand what needs to be improved, you first need to understand the overall site or app experience.
In your interaction with customers, there are plenty of key insights to glean.
Several of these metrics include:
The best way to understand what these metrics and key drivers are is to collect information on a visitor’s overall experience, which you can do by deploying an active feedback request (also known as an intercept) coupled with an “always on” persistent feedback channel that is more passive in nature.
Persistent feedback offers a way for visitors to vent their frustrations, like if they’re experiencing issues on the site or looking to engage with support.
Ideally your persistent feedback will include questions to distinguish the nature of the feedback being offered as well as an open-ended text field for additional information sharing and/or clarification — this helps you to uncover more meaningful analysis through text analytics to understand trending topics and sentiment.
Depending on your closed-loop strategy, you may also include an option for customers to request a follow-up and provide a form asking for contact information if and when appropriate.
Data coming in through your persistent feedback is likely to skew negative as people are going out of their way to tell you something, and it’s usually that something is wrong. So avoid questions around CSAT or Ease of Use here, keeping those questions to your active feedback requests.
The X-Data you gather on your overall site/app experience is a perfect place to start — and when you combine it with O-Data from your web analytics and/or session replay data to get a more detailed understanding of their issue, it’s even more powerful.
While establishing these foundational listening posts, you should also be sure to leverage contextual and embedded data wherever possible. It can also be helpful to use this request for feedback to determine who is on your digital property.
Demographic and customer information may reveal key trends between customer segments. That said, many of your operational metrics can come into play here - you never want to ask the customer for information that you already have access to.
Here’s a list of potential O-Data points to consider as you’re getting started:
Page views
Search terms