Who has time to read their customer feedback?

It is well accepted that to understand your customer satisfaction scores, you also need to investigate the drivers behind them. These can be quantitative things like delivery times and time to purchase you can correlate from other systems. Still, the qualitative stuff is also critical and often contained in the verbatim feedback given by the customer.

Yet how many businesses can honestly say that they read all their feedback? When you consider what your customers have invested in giving it to you, then the verbatim feedback should be regarded as gold dust.  I know some have teams of people to do this, and others delegate this to operational teams who are also trying delivering service. But frankly, both are expensive. 

Analysis suggests it takes on average approximately 1.5 minutes* for a human to read, assess and categorise any critical issues in a piece of feedback. When developments in AI are creating cost-effective solutions that can do this for you at accuracy levels that deliver real value, then it makes sense to consider implementing a system that provides this.

AI that's affordable can now do the job for you

OK, so we have all rolled our eyes at the hype around AI, and that's very fair when you consider the promises made and not delivered. But, as with all technology, it is maturing. AI that can read and analyse customer verbatim feedback automatically has been expensive, requiring big customer data sets and lots of heavy lifting to train the AI, making it the preserve of big enterprise. Yet, solutions are now appearing that are affordable for most SMEs. They do not need training, and deliver results from day one that, whilst not comparable with a human, provide the critical data necessary to drive the customer experience excellence continually.

With these systems being integrated closely into other customer experience management platforms like helpdesk software, you can correlate the quantitative data provided by the AI with other quantitative data to improve the view of your business significantly.

So even if you have looked at AI previously it’s time to dust off all that valuable customer feedback and look again. Otherwise, you may be ignoring the gold lying there in front of you!