How to leverage customer experience insights

What is customer experience insight? 

CX insights are findings collected from consumer feedback and interaction with the product or service. This data can be collected from any research or survey showing how your customers and prospects interact with your product or service and how it influences their loyalty and purchase intentions. 

Customer experience insights allow brands to: 

• Study customer behavior and attitude

• Analyze new markets and anticipate consumer demand

• Indicate pain points

• Increase competitor awareness

• Find relevant influencers

• Reduce churn and build loyalty

How bad customer experience can affect your brand? 

According to Khoros, a customer service solutions provider, consumers will switch to another brand because of only one bad experience. At the same time, Qualtrics XM Institute's study shows that 90% of consumers say they trust a company whose service rate is "very good," while only 16% of those who gave the lowest service rate to a company trust it at the same level. Therefore, customer experience has a crucial impact on business performance. 

To improve the experience, you can use different studies to map user journeys, conduct deep interview sessions with customers to find out your weak spots, ask for feedback regarding new ideas, etc. Traditional qualitative and quantitative research methods help to extract lots of useful information; however, they are not able to track a brand’s performance on a regular basis. 

Instead, companies that prioritize meeting customer experience expectations can use social listening as a reliable way to be aware of all important events that engage customers online and get their unbiased opinions about your product or service. 

With social media listening, you can analyze information represented in numbers and focus on interesting facts and consumer experience insights. 

For instance, you can track the number of complaints your brand gets on social media over time. The example below shows the number of complaints the clothing brand Uniqlo got in a year. In December 2022, during the holiday season, the company received the highest number of negative mentions. Although customers faced problems that were not connected, the graph shows that the brand didn't manage to cope with the additional workload and holiday excitement. 

If you want to look deeper into the reasons behind negative feedback, you can analyze the different aspects that users value or criticize your brand for. In the case of Uniqlo, customer service is a weakness, while price, design, quality, and assortment are strong points. 

Even when users leave many positive reviews, there are always ways to improve. For instance, from reading one post, two weak points can be found: 

• An item of clothing was of poor quality

• Customer service couldn’t handle this type of problems

This example shows that social listening is crucial not only for reputation management but also for collecting product experience insights and improving consumer impressions about the brand.

Customer experience reporting

Social listening allows you to track real-time data and be aware of any change in the discussion of your brand. You can create a custom dashboard with y widgets and graphs so that all essential data is at hand. 

With YouScan, a social listening tool, it is possible to choose a template with recommended widgets to analyze customer experience outcomes. You may decide to modify the template according to your own needs or even create one from scratch to target all data you want to track. 

The standard template includes the following:

• Total mentions, engagement, and top authors

• Positive and negative mentions 

• Brand health pulse 

• Key topics of discussion, different aspects of user questions and complaints

• Recommendation mentions and the geography of negative mentions 

You can see below an example of this dashboard for Reebok.

Hereby are some key discoveries: 

• The main weaknesses of the brand are customer service, quality, and price.

• The biggest number of criticism the brand faces are on YouTube and Reddit. On YouTube, it was mentioned that the shoes have a negative health effect (causing back pain). On Reddit, users complained that the brand discontinued their favorite line, Speed TR. In addition, users mention that the brand’s shoes aren’t as good for weight lifting as they are for running. 

• Women discuss this brand more often than men (55.5% and 33%, relatively)

• The brand is mentioned more often in relation to fashion than sport

• Pinterest is the #1 source of social media mentions, while Reddit is the highest source  from forums and review websites 

Top customer experience management and insights platforms

Keeping aware of all the trends and topics that can improve your consumer experience is a time-consuming process. However, there is software available that can do a lot of the work for you and simplify this task. Here are some top platforms that will help you improve customer experience and get actionable insights. 

Zendesk 

Zendesk is a customer experience software that is mainly focused on customer support. It has many features, such as multiple channels of communication with customers (email, phone, chat, and social media), a knowledge base, and reporting tools. 

It enables the effective processing of customer inquiries and complaints, tracking and follow-up conversations, responses are adjusted to a specific tone of voice, all of which goes to leave customers satisfied with the quality of customer support they have received. In addition, Zendesk has a dashboard that updates in real-time and helps enhance customer experience through data and insights. With this functionality, companies can track customer satisfaction rates, discover new opportunities for growth and identify new trends in customer inquiries. 

Google Trends

This is another useful tool for studying consumers. With it, you can analyze searches on Google, how they change over time, and how they depend on different seasons and locations. 

Here are a few  data types you can analyze with this tool:

• Compare different topics and understand what is popular.

For instance, you can track which product delivery service is popular among users and include them in your offer. 

• Identify trends.

This feature allows you to track seasonal or event-driven trends and separate them from random spikes. This data will help you plan future promotions. 

• Discover new opportunities. 

With Google Trends, you can see which trends are gaining popularity and which are declining. For instance, in the graph below, you can see interest in zero waste has dropped in the last five years. 

YouScan 

YouScan is a powerful social media listening platform that allows you to analyze information related to reputation management, consumer insights, influencer marketing, etc. 

It collects data from around 500K sources with 95% sentiment accuracy. It means that you won't miss even a single mention and will be able to see and analyze all user feedback. One of the most useful features for customer experience data analysis is auto categories. The system automatically puts mentions into a specific group based on meaning. It can be a complaint, question, recommendation, etc. This feature is handy when you need to slice and dice data.

In addition, you can see what aspects of your brand users value or criticize. For instance, customers like Doritos for its taste, but they have concerns regarding health effects. 

Digital customer experience management conclusions 

Providing a high-quality consumer experience is crucial for brands that want to keep customers loyal and win against competitors. Customer experience insight software helps you turn numbers and other information into an actionable plan and improve your product and service. One of the best ways to track this data on a regular basis is by using social media listening tools and getting detailed analytics to improve customer experience. 

With social media listening, you can: 

• analyze the weaknesses of your brand and make improvements 

• build loyalty and reduce the chances your customers switch to competitors

• track customer behavior and the slightest changes in their attitude toward your brand

• analyze your audience by gender and other aspects. 

If you want to learn more about how social listening can help improve your consumer experience, try YouScan's free demo.