How to Choose the Right Customer Feedback Platform

Does your telecom business truly understand its customers?

A recent Hubspot study found that 58% of brands collect some form of customer feedback, but in such a competitive market, just gathering feedback isn’t enough. Brands need to read between the lines of survey responses–they know how their customers feel, their pain points, what drives their engagement, and what inspires their loyalty. Barring psychic intervention, the best resource telecom brands can leverage to accomplish this are customer feedback platforms (CFPs).

CFPs can provide brands with a slew of critical customer experience services like survey generation, multi-channel customer interaction, feedback collection, analytics, and more. Yet, brands must still be cautious. Not all CFPs are created equal, and choosing the wrong CFP for your brand could seriously diminish your ROI.

With so many different CFPs to choose from–each boasting a different suite of expansive capacities–choosing the right CFP can be a daunting task. In this blog, we’ll review in-depth the most important CFP functions for telecom brands and how to choose the best CFP for your business.

Benefits of a well-fitting customer feedback platform

The telecom industry already knows improving CX is key to customer retention–with 70% of companies considering customer experience as one of their top priorities. To achieve an optimized CX, you’ll need to find a CPF best tailored to your brand.

Some of the benefits of a well-fitting CPF include:

• Increased customer loyalty: A 2020 Small Business Trends report found 71% of millennials prefer buying from brands that share their values. Simply gathering customer feedback surveys may reveal what a customer wants, but a well-fitting CFP can reveal–and embody–what they value.

• Improved business performance: Improved CX isn’t just good for your customer, it's also for your employees as well. The turnover rate among contact center agents is a chronic problem–as high as 58%, according to an ICIM study–so improving CX using a proper CFP can help them feel satisfied and empowered to help customers.

• Take corrective action in real-time: When it comes to customer retention, the best defense is a good offense. Telecom brands that leverage a proper CFP can recognize costly pain points in real-time, allowing them to take corrective action before poor customer experience drives you toward your competitors.

• Make insightful decisions: Data-informed decision-making is the best kind of decision-making. Properly calibrated survey outreach, feedback collection, and analytics ensure your customer data is just as solid as your decision-making.

Not all customer feedback platforms are created equal

Given how many customer feedback tools and platforms are available, you may be tempted to choose the cheapest or simplest option and call it a day. However, some CFPs may be better suited for specific industries; others may be optimized for quantitative feedback over qualitative feedback. Every CFP is different, and what works for one brand may not work for yours. Let’s examine two popular CPFs: Typeform and Hotjar. 

• Typeform is a customer feedback platform used to create interactive user forms and surveys, all viewed within an intuitive, user-friendly UI. However, it lacks some technical features, such as HTML code editing.

• Hotjar is a behavioral analytics platform that utilizes heatmaps, recordings, incoming feedback, and recordings to help brands learn how and why customers interact with their websites. While it is an excellent tool to identify macro trends, it lacks the options to segment users or creates user profiles.

In the broadest sense, CFPs are defined by the capabilities they possess–or lack. To determine which CFP is the best fit for your brand, you first must identify your brand’s needs.

Define your brand’s customer feedback needs

Before you can get what you want, you must know what you need. Here are some of the most important capabilities for telecom CFPs:

• User relationship management: User relationship management (or customer relationship management) is a powerful tool that can increase customer retention by building rapport and driving user engagement. Some examples in telecom include awareness-building activities, social justice initiatives, or loyalty incentive programs. 

• User surveys: Surveys are the backbone of any customer feedback strategy. There are many ways for telecom brands to measure customer satisfaction, but when choosing a CFP, you should hone in on which CX metric is most relevant to you. Quantitative metrics such as NPS or FCR may make the most sense for large brands like AT&T, but brands that cater to small businesses, like Century Link, may wish to prioritize quantitative metrics instead.

• Behavioral insights: Behavioral analytics and insights are one of the most valuable resources derived from customer feedback. Whether brands wish to find new customers or retain current ones, knowing what–and why–customers think is an invaluable resource.

• Feature request management: Encouraging users to submit feature requests is an excellent way to drive engagement and make users feel heard. Equally as important are the insights gleaned from your most active users, which could even lead to exciting and satisfying innovations.

• Customer experience management: CFPs with CX management capabilities can help your brand coordinate cross-functional CX initiatives. Considering that 52% of customers expect their offers to be personalized, ensuring your all teams move in lockstep towards exceeding a customer's expectations is paramount.

• Specific, actionable feedback: Brands that struggle to glean actionable insights from feedback should consider a CFP capable of identifying the most engaged customers–i.e users most likely to provide detailed feedback–and users that encounter specific pain points. By targeting feedback to hyper-specific events, brands can respond with hyper-specific corrective actions.

• Scalable UGC strategy: A recent Hubspot report found brands are overwhelmingly investing in UGC strategies–44% of marketers consider social media to be their most valuable communication channel. However, this doesn’t mean your marketing team should shower a random influencer with cash. Maximizing your UGC and ROI strategy requires a careful hand at the till; marketers need to be ready to scale their strategies to the fluid social media landscape.

• Real-time user feedback gathering: If your brand is still tinkering with survey language or communication channels, consider a CFP with real-time user feedback gathering. This will allow you to interact with anonymous users in real-time, which can help increase response rates and quickly identify pain points.

• Reputation and review management: User reviews can impact not just your reputation, but your brand’s bottom line–Statista found that 62% of consumers consider online reviews before making online purchases. CFPs with reputation and review management capabilities allow brands to control the narrative by quickly identifying and addressing negative reviews.

• Visualizing consumer behavior: Customer feedback is only as useful as your ability to understand it. A CFP with intuitive behavioral visuals allows brands to share insights across their entire organization in a visual way–regardless of technical expertise.

• Debug and quality testing: In addition to survey generation, some CFPs, such as Instabug, provide bug reports, crash reports, and app performance monitoring. For smaller brands lacking a dedicated debug team, this capability can be a lifesaver.

A guide to finding your customer feedback platform match

By prioritizing the capabilities that matter most to your brand, you’ll be able to narrow the field down to a few choices. Before committing to any CFP, ask yourself the following questions:

1. 1. Does it capture unstructured feedback such as interviews, social media comments, or contact center interactions?
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3. Just because feedback is unstructured doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore it. To capture this data, consider a CFP with voice and text analytics tools.

1. 2. Is it easy to set up?
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3. A CFP isn’t helpful if it is too complicated for your teams to use. Before committing to a CFP, consider how user-friendly it is and whether its post-sales support service will be able to assist your team should problems arise.

1. 3. Does it scale?
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3. Gathering too much data can be just as detrimental as not gathering enough. Consider the capabilities listed in the previous section–if your CPF could accomplish all of them, would your brand possess the bandwidth to store, ingest, and analyze all that data? Unless you’re leveraging a customer intelligence platform, that may not be the case. Consider a CPF capable of decreasing feedback collection if you don’t need it, and can increase it if you do.

1. 4. Is it a self-service model, or automated?
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3. Self-service models provide brands with immediate, direct control over surveys and feedback gathering. Automated models will automatically communicate with your customers at regular intervals. If your brand is new to feedback collection and wishes to experiment with different methods, a self-service model may be the best fit. If the scope of your brand makes direct control unfeasible, perhaps automation would suit your brand better. Keep in mind, that there are typically CFPs that are both self-service and automated–a blend of the two might be another good option for you.

1. 5. Does it provide real-time results, updates, or notifications?
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3. Can your brand afford to wait until the end of the quarter to react to customer feedback? Leveraging customer feedback into actionable insights requires dynamic decision-making only possible in real-time.
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5. 6. Is it easy for customers to use?
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7. An effortless customer experience is a key to driving customer loyalty; this includes ease of providing feedback. Considering that only 30% of customers respond to surveys, it is imperative that brands remove as many high-effort obstacles as possible.

1. 7. Have you tested it?
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3. Finally, remember to perform a trial run of your CFP before confirming your purchase. This should include every team that utilizes survey data in the trial–marketing, sales, customer service–so everyone has a chance to provide input. If possible, a cost-benefit analysis should also be performed to gauge the long-term viability of the CFP.

Selecting the right CFP brings your brand one step closer to optimizing its customer experience. However, you still need to make sense of all that customer data. Fortunately, Scuba’s customer intelligence platform can do just that.

Turning customer feedback into actionable insights

Scuba’s real-time analytics platform elevates CFPs by gleaning dynamic behavioral insights from your customer feedback data, all within our intuitive, no-codel UI. Whether tracking communication macro trends or optimizing individual customer journeys, no insight is too big–or small–for Scuba. When used with the right CFP, Scuba provides telecom brands with the competitive edge they need to improve CX, reduce churn, and inspire loyalty.

To understand your customers, harass the power of real-time analytics–no crystal ball necessary.

Want to learn more about Scuba can elevate your customer feedback platform? Request a demo today or talk to a Scuba expert.