In this fiercely competitive business landscape, customer satisfaction is the cornerstone of success. It is no secret that dissatisfied customers often seek alternatives without providing feedback, leaving businesses in the dark about their shortcomings.
Despite this, direct feedback isn’t the only way to get a clear picture of how customers are experiencing your business. Below, 18 Forbes Business Council members share some tried-and-true ways to evaluate your customer experience without relying on explicit customer feedback.
1. Determine If Company Expectations Were Met
One way to evaluate customers’ experience is to evaluate if the experience of your customer went according to the company’s expectations. See if the process, project and due dates that involve the customer went as planned. – Pedro Barboglio, Remote Team Solutions
2. Understand Your Users Through Testing
Implement user testing or usability testing sessions with representative users. Observe how they interact with your product or service, and analyze their behaviors, frustrations and areas of confusion. This direct observation can provide valuable insights into the customer experience and highlight opportunities for improvement. – Trey Ferro, Spot Pet Insurance
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3. Look For Customer Complaint Patterns
Unhappy customers are far more likely to share negative experiences. Monitor your online presence and manage consumer reviews across different platforms. Uncover patterns in customer complaints and address frustrations by providing timely responses. By interacting publicly with customers and solving their problems, you improve customer experience, build brand loyalty and gain customer trust. – Michael Podolsky, PissedConsumer.com
4. Analyze Your Data
One effective way to critically evaluate your customer experience without relying on direct feedback is through data analysis. By analyzing metrics like usage patterns, frequency of interactions and churn rate, you can identify areas where customers are struggling or not getting value. For example, if a feature is rarely used, it may be time to remove it or make it easier to find. – Lee Blakemore, Introhive
5. Read Reviews Online
Online reviews tell the whole story. Although not directly from customers, negative feedback is often shared twice as much on review forums. This provides us with valuable insight into areas that need improvement. – Tammy Sons, Tn Nursery
6. Observe Customer Behavior And Engagement
Analyze customer behavior and engagement data, including studying website traffic, click-through rates, conversion rates, customer retention and social media interactions. You can gain insights into customer preferences, pain points and overall satisfaction levels. Additionally, these indicators can provide valuable information about customer sentiment and areas for improvement. – Chris Gerlach, Synergy Life Science
7. Locate The Bottlenecks
To understand the intrinsic and extrinsic motivators of your customers, companies must rely on the power of data to tell stories. Through the use of data mapping, event tracking, visual monitoring and segmentation, you will be able to understand the journey that your customers are traveling through when engaging with your business. This data will identify the bottlenecks for you to fix. – Christian Brown, Glewee
8. Reflect On The Customer Journey
Mapping and evaluating your customer journey is a great way to consider user experience and spot any inefficiencies. If the journey doesn’t impress you as the owner or manager, you can be confident that your customers aren’t impressed either. Service matters. – Marian Evans, Elevate BC Ltd
9. Maximize The Value You Offer
Data collection is crucial in the service industry. While it can be challenging, it’s not impossible to gather feedback-free data. Assess how clients utilize your service to identify areas for improvement and stay ahead of their needs. Create educational content that maximizes the value they get from you. It helps in spotting inconsistencies and proactively improving without client complaints. – Raquel Gomes, Stafi
10. Hone In On Customer Behaviors And Patterns
One way to evaluate customer experience without direct feedback is through data analysis. Analyze behavior, purchase patterns and engagement metrics to uncover insights and improve satisfaction. Consider conversion rates, retention, average order value and website traffic. Use data-driven analytics to enhance the experience, boost satisfaction and foster loyalty. – Chris Kille, Payment Pilot
11. Try The ‘Secret Shopper’ Method
To get quality customer experience insights, you need objective information about current and potential future customers and your competition’s system. The “secret shopper” concept, which involves outsiders who are trained to get such information, is a priceless solution. The quote attributed to Ford was right in saying that users of horses and carriages would only ask that they be faster. You need fresh insights on how to improve in a changing world. – Jerry Cahn, Age Brilliantly
12. Ensure Your Company Is Up To Industry Standards
Take an in-depth look at the metrics that matter. A lot of issues can be avoided by looking at your core data on customer churn and return rates and comparing it to industry standards. Have your managers spend some time in the customer service department at your organization. Companies like Zappos employed this technique effectively to build customer-centric organizations. – Simon Vielma, Bidwise Inc.
13. Conduct User Experience Testing
A method to critically evaluate customer experience without direct feedback is by implementing user experience (UX) testing. This involves observing real users as they interact with your product or service. UX testing provides insights into where users encounter problems, helping to identify areas for improvement. By analyzing these interactions, you can enhance the customer experience. – Jeremy Bradley-Silverio Donato, Zama
14. Analyze Customers Using Artificial Intelligence
In today’s world of virtual and online interactions, we have to leverage AI-led voice and video monitoring tools. These tools can analyze a customer’s tonal and emotional sentiments as well as facial expressions and body language to predict true customer experience and loyalty. – Safir Adeni, Ineda Group
15. Talk With Your Employees Regularly
It is essential to engage in regular conversations with your staff. As they are directly in touch with your customers, they have developed relationships and possess valuable insights into their preferences and satisfaction levels regarding the services provided. You will gain a deeper understanding of what customers like and dislike, allowing you to improve the overall customer experience. – Yasmin Walter, KMD Books
16. Use Sales As An Indicator
The Bud Light beer example is particularly instructive. If a customer is unhappy with a product, they may just pick a competitor and move on. Outside of the social media ruckus, which can be considered direct customer feedback, the fact that sales numbers are down for a very long time and down several standard deviations beyond normal variations shows you what people think of a product. – Zain Jaffer, Zain Ventures
17. Look At Project Delivery Metrics
For a software consulting and development service company, evaluating customer experience could involve analyzing project delivery metrics. Examine the frequency of missed deadlines, the number of bugs found post-delivery and the efficiency of issue resolution. These can offer insight into the quality of service and client satisfaction, even without direct feedback. – Andrei Neacsu, HyperSense Software SRL
18. Observe Customer Communications
You need to understand the customer’s journey, especially the last few weeks or months before they quit. You can understand what exactly triggered them to move on by analyzing their communications, complaints and requests. In one or the other way, at some vague point, they expressed their dissatisfaction. You need to formulate a strategy to extract those communications, analyze and figure out the cause. – Raj Maddula, Global Squirrels
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