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No B2B Survey Responses? No Problem.

Shawn Phillips Shawn Phillips 03/17/2023
Trying to collect B2B customer data when you have no survey responses? Follow these steps.

Last week, I attended X4, Qualtrics’s experience management summit in Salt Lake City. From my conversations with B2B leaders, it became apparent that they were grappling with a fundamental question: How do you collect enough customer data when only a fraction of your customers respond to your surveys?

Even the most significant manufacturing companies lamented that they could not get enough data when mining the call center using XM Discover. Furthermore, another challenge is the size of their CX team. Many CX teams are not big enough to analyze larger volumes of feedback. And, CX teams often do not have the experience in the products or operations to analyze content coming in.

The good news? There is a solution. And B2B has an advantage.

Today’s CX teams have access to sophisticated tools that can help them collect better data faster and gain deeper insights from them. And in three steps, I believe we can crack the code. First, identify customer communication points. Next, use XM Discover to augment your customer feedback. And last, involve cross-functional teams in analysis using Echoes.io.

1. Identify customer communication points.

The conversations I had at X4 reminded me of a Customer Journey Mapping project Heart of the Customer undertook for a large SaaS provider. This initiative brought to light that customers and system integrators had to navigate through 20-30 separate links to access the systems they needed for product knowledge, support, and other communications with the company. We analyzed the various channels that customers were utilizing to contact them and developed a centralized community portal to direct customers to all the information they required.

An “Aha!” moment from this project was that in mapping these points of contact, we also uncovered where they could be listening to customers outside of surveys and call centers. The reality was that this SaaS company got hundreds of types of feedback from customers each day. We just needed to collate it so we could start listening and analyzing it.

This exercise could be done at any B2B company to uncover the rich data customers provide daily.

2. Employ XM Discover to augment your customer feedback.

There’s an opportunity from a common misunderstanding of the XM Discover product. XM Discover can listen to and analyze call center data (and does it amazingly well!). However, this technology also pulls insights from internal and external channels customers use to interact with and talk about your company, such as social media, websites, emails, contact centers, and CRMs, including ServiceNow, Salesforce and HubSpot, and Marketing Cloud.

XM Discover is one tool that can collate the various communication sources in the exercise I just discussed. Your 250 survey responses will be augmented by thousands of customer feedback points covering onboarding, service, order, and delivery. This “big picture” analytic view of your customer experience will help you identify where to focus — and how to fix.

XM Discover Example

A Fortune 500 health insurance provider rolled out an ACA program to 800,000 members, causing a spike in call center volume and the inability to provide personalized service. They employed Qualtrics XM Discover to categorize topics across secure messages, social media, survey results, and other structured data, analyze sentiment and emotion, and drill down to the root cause of customer satisfaction. They identified initiatives that could enhance the member experience and drive down costs by more than $5 million.

3. Involve cross-functional teams in analysis using Echoes.io.

Lastly, our passionate CX leaders and their teams do not have the time to tag and analyze all the data. Enter: Echoes.io.

Echoes is a Qualtrics partner and can bring unstructured data from Qualtrics and other sources into its platform. The secret sauce that turns a small CX team into a cross-functional powerhouse is how Echoes involves people from across the organization to analyze and update AI models as the feedback comes in.

My favorite part of Echoes is the combination of machine learning models that produce insights quickly with crowdsourcing and validation of the insights. Crowdsourcing and ML are real-time – the platform updates and learns in the moment. And, there is even a recommendation engine for relevant feedback (think: Netflix).

It is not just the CX team who looks at the responses. The operations teams look at fulfillment insights, and the product team looks at product insights. With SMEs seeing the data, you get two benefits. First, the experts train the ML models. Second, you have people across the company seeing insights based on VoC data. This large, cross-functional team is one of the guiding principles for those CX Change Makers. There could even be a competition, where different departments work towards reviewing the insights quickly. Get the whole company involved, and you can drive change.

CX can be a lonely profession. Echoes.io enables the CX team to make friends in the company and provides actionable insights. Did I mention that I love this product?

Echoes.io Example

A provider of Enterprise Resource Planning and Human Capital Management software was drowning in customer feedback and struggling to gain insights in a timely manner. Hours of manual review and categorization were immediately outdated when new responses were received. The company implemented the Echoes.io text analytics platform to update insights as soon as they received customer information across multiple channels. They added hundreds of employees to the platform so that functions including marketing, product, customer excellence, and operations could review findings daily and identify improvement opportunities.

Heart of the Customer Can Help

With Heart of the Customer, you’ll have the support and guidance needed to start taking advantage of customer listening opportunities. We can help you get started today. Talk to our team about discovery solutions and our additional CX customer listening and analysis services:

Shawn Phillips | shawn@heartofthecustomer.com

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