In our recent blog posts, we discussed the importance of being proactive with positive experience design, managing your touchpoints, and then measuring for your success. In this post, we will cover three reasons why you should have real-time feedback at your organization. Before getting into the three reasons, we want to clarify what real-time feedback is and what it is not. Real-time feedback is where you see the results instantly. It is not hours or days later as some businesses would claim. When you see “real-time” feedback being advertised, make sure it truly is instant feedback.
Below you will find three important reasons your organization should have real-time feedback:
Changing Emotions and Expectations
The world is constantly obtaining new technologies and knowledge. The speed of this movement in and of itself causes stress on individuals to keep up. The current Covid-19 pandemic is adding more strain on consumers, patients, and employees. As a result, how people see their world is changing rapidly as they adapt to this current environment. As an example, from a study earlier this year, it shows how initial fears from the Covid-19 virus moved to anger. As an organization, it is difficult to “guess” how people feel inside. Since emotions and expectations are changing so quickly, it is imperative that organizations be on top of these changes if they truly want to bring great experiences.
By using real-time feedback, your organization will be proactive in understanding how these emotions and expectations are changing. You will be able to pick up patterns of when and where people are seeing their experiences differently. Organizations that are spending a lot of resources in service recovery are not in front of these changes. Just like individuals, organizations have a limited amount of energy each day. This energy can be proactive or reactive. Successful organizations are proactive in providing great experiences.
Omni-Channel
People want a smooth experience as they move along their journeys with a business. They expect great service from each touchpoint, whether it be a physical touchpoint or a digital touchpoint. This makes it important for organizations to capture feedback at all major touchpoints to make sure the experience is moving smooth. Using real-time feedback, pain points can be identified quickly to identify where in the experience there are service setbacks.
Real-time feedback allows organizations to know at exactly what time someone is having a negative emotion. This data can be compared along channels to see where the friction is occurring. As technology moves forward, there will be more channels for customers to experience. This will require businesses to be even more aware of how customers see these new touchpoints.
Competition
We live in a world where customer service separates organizations. Building the best Human Experience is where the world is heading. Having a way to measure sentiment along the experience is imperative if you want to be the top service provider in your field. Using real-time feedback is becoming the standard versus being a luxury. If one organization does not take advantage of capturing their customers emotions in real-time, another one will. As a result, their service will be better, and more customers will come their way.
As social media and internet usage increases, perception management becomes even more important. A bad experience can go viral and damage years of brand building and trust. By being proactive with real-time feedback, businesses can be on top of service blunders as they happen and quickly make changes. Real-time feedback also improves the culture of service that will reduce service errors.
Wrapping it up
As the pandemic continues, customers are demanding better service. A top way to provide better service is to listen to customers in real-time. With real-time feedback, businesses can be on top of changing emotions and expectations as they occur. This is important now as emotions are changing faster during Covid-19. Proactive service is standard now and real-time feedback will help you in that effort. As technology increases, more channels open for customers to interact with their favorite brands. They also expect a smooth service transition between these channels. Capturing these transitions in real-time helps businesses find the pain points to quickly make changes. Lastly, if your business is not proactive with real-time insight, your competitor will be. Great service wins and part of that great service is the ability to understand customer sentiment as they feel it. Consider real-time feedback at your organization to raise the level of service and improve the human experience.
About SmileyAnswers
SmileyAnswers is the leading reseller of the HappyOrNot® Reporting System within the United States, Canada, and the U.K. HappyOrNot® has over 1.5 billion feedbacks to date and is a leader in capturing the real-time insight of customers, patients, and employees. With the recent addition of the Smiley Link and Smiley Digital, SmileyAnswers is in the unique position to capture a whole journey Live by using the Smiley’s for both digital and physical touchpoints. Organizations can “listen” to how people feel at all the important touchpoints. After capturing real-time feedback at these touchpoints, organizations can then “learn” what and where the hidden pain points are to make immediate positive changes. Finally, successes can be shared with Live Sharing, Social Sharing, digital boards, social media, email, power points, and more. This process can be repeated daily throughout the year to constantly improve human experiences.
