A gift of a complaint

Recently, I read a success story from TUI regarding customer experience that stated: “A complaint is a gift that should be well received, not treated like it is unwanted and forgotten about”.

Now, most people are well-versed in gathering customer feedback. I want to bring two other intertwined aspects to your mind that can be game-changers for your business.

Customer feedback is provided through surveys to gather information about how customers feel about their service experience with your company. They provide insights into how they want to be served now and in the future.

Many people often treat customer experience and employee experience separately when considering new solutions and how to better serve their customers and employees. However, what if, together, their feedback could deliver an outstanding customer service experience beyond everyone’s expectations?

Gartner states, “Total Experience (TX) strives to improve the experiences of multiple constituents to achieve a transformed business outcome.” That is the overriding statement that encompasses what you can achieve by bringing together the customer and employee experience.

For example, customer service is evolving and becoming more demanding, and the need for efficiency is growing, hence the interest towards self-service. When designed correctly, self-service solutions can be a game changer for customer service operations.

Self-service solutions are fundamentally built on processes. Employees work with these processes daily and know the ins and outs of why they work and might not work so well. Taking their feedback is an essential part of exposing processes to your customers. You can also involve your customer service employees in the development process, empowering them to deliver more for your customer service operations.

When you look at self-service solutions for a customer, you want to make things as simple as possible. You want to make it easy for customers to do business with your company. Designing an intuitive UI is essential, allowing customers to feel at ease when communicating with customer service.

Marrying customer and employee feedback will enable you to analyse the entire process from UI to backend processes. It means you are building a solution that the customer wants to use and your employees find easy to process. Without feedback from both parties, your solution could become a mismatch, which leads to a poor customer experience, which, in turn, heaps more pressure on employees.

Customer experience and employee experience are intrinsically linked, so why not leverage the power of both parties to take your customer service operations to the next level?

Build solutions that allow customers to give feedback. Encourage employees to share their thoughts and not just live with poor processes. Involve them, reward them and reap the rewards of happy employees and loyal customers.

Retaining existing customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones, so customer feedback is essential to your toolbox to deliver above and beyond your customer expectations. We should consider feedback from customers and employees as a gift that can drive customer service to evolve.

Once mastered, obtaining feedback and converting it into actionable insights will set you up for long-term success.