Sources of Customer Experience Insights

If you want to improve your products, deliver a stellar customer experience (CX), and be able to generate more revenue, it’s vital that you collect customer experience data. CX data collection gives you the ability to gain valuable insights into your customers’ needs and expectations. There are several ways that this data can be gathered. However, the proviso is that the quality of customer experience data is essential for good CX analysis. Let’s understand these data types, sources, and touchpoints where this data is gathered.

What Is Customer Experience Analytics?

Customer experience analytics is the process of customer experience data collection and analysis with the help of an AI-enabled sentiment analysis API to get greater insights into how your customers interact with your business. Based on this analysis, you can implement necessary measures and strategies to improve customer experience across every touchpoint of your business from your customer’s perspective.

Why Do Companies Need Customer Experience Analysis?

Companies need customer experience analysis for a variety of reasons including:

• Increasing customer satisfaction
• Improving brand engagement and awareness
• Improving sales conversions
• Making product improvements
• Enriching public relations
• Increased competitor awareness
• Better performance analytics

It’s important to remember that these are just some reasons why customer experience analytics are so important, and there are many others depending on the industry and audience demographic.

What Are The Various Types Of Customer Experience Data Sources?

With customer experience data collection and analytics, you can use one of three data sources: direct, indirect, or inferred. Let’s look at these data sources in more detail.

• Direct Sources

Direct sources include all data sources for customer experience data collection where you gather data as a result of direct interactions between the customer and yourself. These sources, for instance, include interactions on the phone, by email, through text chats, and by responding to surveys. We will examine these data sources in more detail later.

• Indirect Sources

Indirect data sources relate to customer viewpoints and opinions but are gathered from third-party platforms and websites like forums, review sites, and consumer pages. Although these sources might, as is the case with direct sources, suffer from bias, they could be more trustworthy because customers are likely to be more honest when they’re not directly speaking to a business’s representatives. More on some of these sources, social media, user review platforms, and news sites later on.

• Inferred Sources

Finally, customer experience data collection is also possible by inferring customer sentiment from customer behavior. This behavior is based on data that you can get from your website, user interface with your links and web pages, purchase history, and competitor data.

Which Are The Most Important Sources Of Collecting Customer Insights?

Within these three types of data sources, you can find eight subsets of data that are generally considered to be the best sources for voice of the customer. Let’s look at these sources a little closer.

1. Social MediaConsidering that social media is the go-to for brands and people for marketing and driving popularity, it’s understandable that it’s one of the main platforms where customers voice their opinions about you. People can reach out to you in brand mentions on Twitter, Facebook, your Insta handle, and others. And you can use this info and more through YouTube comments analysis, or TikTok customer insights, very easily with machine learning.Social media listening gives you different types of data in the form of text, audio, hashtags, emojis, and user-generated videos, which video content analysis makes easy. Repustate’s AI-driven sentiment analysis APIs gather data from all these sources efficiently and seamlessly.For this reason, social media listening is one of the best tools to gather a wealth of customer experience data and get valuable insights into your customers’ needs. Keep in mind, however, that it might be necessary to correct impulse responses from time to time.
2. Emails or Text ChatEmail and chats can be a vital touchpoint both before and after a purchase. For instance, email or chats are a vital component of a company’s support processes, while they can also be crucial tools in a company’s marketing processes. When it comes to analysis, they fall somewhere between phone calls and surveys in respect of usefulness. A benefit of these is that they’re text-based which makes them easier to analyze. The problem is that the text analytics API will need to deal with grammatical errors, typos, slang, and abbreviations in order to extract the data and, by implication, valuable insights.
3. Surveys Many companies use surveys for customer experience data collection and product feedback — whether they take the shape of pop-up forms on websites or sent by email. By getting answers to key questions about customers’ experience with products or services like customer care, after-sales, refunds, and returns, etc, companies gain valuable insight that informs the parts of their operations that they want to improve. For example, the Roomba sends out a quick phone survey after cleaning jobs every so often in order to collect ongoing feedback about its performance.Here, it’s important to remember that these surveys are typically completed by two groups of people. They’re either extremely unhappy about a product or service or they love it. You should take this into account when collecting the data.Learn more about survey data analysis.
4. Call Centers Call centers are important touch points both during the sale of a product and thereafter for customer support and success. Like support calls dealing with complaints, it’s good to note that it’s mostly the customers with issues who will phone in. So call centre logs usually give negative feedback about products or services. Despite this, these calls can offer deeper insights into the customer experience compared to other touch points because they provide information straight from the customer.
5. Website Use A company’s website is, in most cases, the first point of interaction a company has with a customer whether they stay on the website and buy a product or whether they leave. This also makes it an important source for customer experience data collection that can help shape the customer journey. Hotels, holiday stays, spas, convention halls, retail websites, are good examples where customers use brand websites to a large extent.A product page that produces a lot of visitors but not many sales is a sign that the product offering is not something the customers want, or the website is not well-mapped with the user interface. In addition, where your visitors come from and where they’re going after they leave your site could give you valuable insights into what your customers want and what they’re searching for.