How are you Leveraging the Data you Already have?

How are you leveraging data you already have?

We like efficiency. You probably do too. So why do so many businesses ask their customers questions that those very same customers have already answered? There’s an entire industry – the survey industry – mostly devoted to just that. We’ve all received these emails: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or family member?”

Don’t get us wrong, that’s a great question, and one that you should know the answer to! But we think that your business may already have the answer. Here’s what we mean: if your customer, hypothetically, told your business that they’re going to return your product because they’re tired of having to reboot it every day, we kind of know their response to that survey question: not likely to recommend. Furthermore, we even know why!

“Okay”, you say, “I’ll agree that customers who say they don’t like our product are unlikely to recommend it, but where do we find this insight?” 

A good place to start is in your business’s support tickets and customer call recordings. Think about it: by definition, these are the folks who have taken time out of their days to share with you some valuable feedback about your business. They are also the people who tell you the root cause behind it (as we see in the example above), oftentimes in great detail. They’re even the actual customers who tell you what you can do to fix it. What a gold mine!

The challenge lies in extracting this insight in some useful manner. By nature, customer support platforms (and people) are programmed to achieve a singular objective: solve the customer’s problem. That is, by all means, the right objective, but there is untapped potential there as well. Many businesses realize that and dedicate auditing and reporting teams to summarize conversation trends and deliver the insight to key decision makers. That’s great, but it is also time-consuming.

In a nutshell, that’s why many businesses don’t look inward for customer insight. It can be less overwhelming to blast out a customer survey that places a significant-enough number of responses in a nice, easy-to-use container for the business to generate some reports with. Customer conversations – which are comprised almost entirely of unstructured, qualitative feedback – are analog, nuanced beings that take a great deal of effort to understand, as rich and detailed as they are. It has been historically difficult for algorithms to extract insight from these conversations.

Customer insight is worth its weight in gold.

For any of us who’ve watched Gold Rush, it’s one thing to know that there’s gold in the ground but another thing entirely to extract it while turning a profit. Valuable customer feedback is the same. There’s a ton of it out there, but it can be expensive to separate it from the surrounding rubble.

But times have changed. What if, at the end of the support event or ticket, your support platform could then analyze the customer interaction and file away each and every aspect of that conversation automatically, even decoding context and topics? That is essentially what we designed the SupporTrends platform to do. And we can get you set up and gathering insights from these interactions in far less time than it would take to create and distribute a survey.

If you’re not looking inward for feedback already, don’t worry, it’s not hard. Give us fifteen minutes to try it out. Your customers will thank you.