Getting decent survey response rates is hard and getting harder for customer experience (CX) professionals. The reason? Customers have become:

  • Wary. Overly long surveys and tone-deaf or irrelevant surveys have left customers gun-shy. Now, when customers see your survey invitation, they assume the worst.
  • Resigned. Customers feel their feedback won’t matter because they have not seen firms make changes as a result of past surveys.
  • Annoyed. Many surveys interrupt customers’ workflow by trying to collect feedback as they pursue a goal such as shopping or getting help (website-intercept surveys are frequent offenders).
  • Indifferent. Other surveys ask customers about experiences they don’t really care about — so why would they take them?

To overcome this challenge, you need to go beyond surveys. That means you need to start mining other data that can give you a sense of the quality of the experiences your customers are having.

To support you in this quest, I will present the findings of my research into going beyond surveys to measure CX at CX North America. In my session, I will answer key questions such as:

  • How have companies reduced reliance on surveys to measure CX?
  • What types of tools, data sources, or research methodologies are companies starting to tap into?
  • What are the challenges in going beyond surveys, and how have CX professionals overcome them?

The research is still ongoing, but a pattern is already emerging:

  • For measuring CX at the transactional level, companies will move to mining data about interactions that occur in digital channels and in the contact center. For example, vendors like Clarabridge and Tethr mine call transcripts to detect customer and agent effort. And vendors such as Quantum Metric, Decibel Insight, and FullStory detect digital experiences that are most likely frustrating.
  • For measuring CX at the relationship level, it’s a bit more complicated. For that, companies will shorten surveys and augment the data they collect with data from other sources (e.g., operational data, interviews, and sentiment analysis) to get a picture of the general health of customers’ experiences with the firm.

If you want to hear more, join me in our session at CX North America. And if you want to read more about what’s changing in CX measurement programs, check out my four-part blog series on CX surveys and beyond.

And if you want to share insights on how to go beyond surveys as input into my research, please be in touch via mschmidt@forrester.com.