Customer feedback is the life blood of every business that is focused on amazing customer engagement. With all that has happened with VOVID-19, what is the current state of affairs? Has it made a difference in response rates and ratings?

Whether you’re leading customer experience at a B2B or B2C company, I think you’d agree that 2020 certainly had an impact on customer feedback. This year’s unpredictable and unrelenting changes challenged us in every area of our customer experience program, particularly in customer feedback quantity and quality.

At the B2B company where I work, we use surveys to capture the majority of our customer feedback. This approach was effective until COVID-19 hit. During the first months of the crisis, we noticed our survey responses were down by as much as 50 percent and sentiment skewed negatively. When we took a closer look, the skewed results were not service or product-related. They were due to the impact the pandemic was having on people’s lives and it reflected in their responses as well as non-responses. This is when I went to my colleague and resident experience management expert, Rick Blair, to figure out what we could do to create a better mix of direct, indirect, and inferred customer feedback sources. Rick suggested that we revisit how we are using or not using feedback sources in order to get the most out of our data and potentially discover new sources of data that will help fill the gap.

There are three types of feedback: direct, indirect, and inferred. These common sources of data come together to create holistic and systemic VOC customer experience coverage for businesses across a variety of markets. When our survey methods were impacted by the pandemic, we had to take a step back to determine what other sources would provide the right insights based on where our customers were going to get information and value.

Source: Beyond Surveys: Finding the Right Balance Among Your Customer Feedback Sources | CustomerThink