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To Keep Your Business Growing, Listen to Your Customers

Customer expectations are increasing and their desire to have a seamless customer experience is growing. Same day shipping, personalized and curated product offerings, instant streaming, and growing digital demand span only the most visible of the changes in customer expectations. And now, the chaos and damage caused by COVID-19 has accelerated these trends while also dramatically changing consumer habits. Many consumers will not return to their pre-COVID lifestyles and all customers will have new expectations. The new rules of customer engagement have paved a new path where businesses can only survive or grow if they are hyper focused in understanding their customer’s needs along every step of their journey and have the ability to act on that feedback to improve specific processes that cause the most pain, effort, and friction for them.

Sounds easy? You would be surprised as to how complicated this can be without a clearly defined, organizationally endorsed, and actionable set of Pain Points identified directly from customer feedback.

Do you know what are your customers’ biggest pains?

Knowing, prioritizing, and acting on the most challenging parts of your customers’ experience, your “CX pain points,” is the foundation of implementing a coordinated and successful customer experience program. This knowledge invites two questions. First, could you list your top customer’s top pain points right now? Second, how do you know that your list matches your customers’ list? Or, do you, like many businesses, have multiple “top pain points” but don’t know how to reconcile them.

Why are there so many lists of Top Pain Points in my Organization?

Most businesses become siloed as they grow, with many departments each taking the initiative to analyze and prioritize customer issues through their particular lens. The scope of a department’s domain restricts what their pain points can be. Your product team may say your pain point is limited customizability while marketing may say you need longer warranties. Customer Service says your customers are misled by marketing while the digital team outlines challenges in customer self-service. The list could go on, with each department’s pain points being constrained to their domain. The pain points change by industry, but the challenge of merging the voices of your customers through the lens of disparate parts of your business is consistent.

How do I come up with one list for my company?

The solution is omni-source listening with strong analytics built foundationally on how customers provide feedback on experiences, in the form of conversation that is unstructured. Omni-source listening incorporates every touch-point you can document and keeps it in one spot. This consolidation provides the unique ability to evaluate information from many parts of your business into one area that, with Natural Language Processing, allows you to identify the common themes throughout the organization. Those themes can be linked to the impact they make on your strategic metrics (Net Promoter Score, Satisfaction, Retention, etc.) to prioritize your pain points and outline the path forward to improving your customers’ image of you. The analytics come in to unearth the narrative behind those pain points, identifying high touch, high impact actions to improve each pain point.

How do I start?

The process starts with sponsorship, finding those critical partners to guide the work and create accountability. Then, you create a methodology that tethers your listening posts together and you implement that to find your top pain points. Finally, you act, listen, and then act again as you elevate your brand and business while adapting to each new challenge faster and more effectively than your competition.

Here at Farlinium, we are here to help you. Let us share our methodology developed and tuned over decades of experience enabling top pain point mapping for world class Customer Experience CX organizations.