The way businesses collect and use feedback from customers has evolved significantly in recent years. As earlier VoC feedback was collected in a one-way manner, where customers were asked to fill out surveys or provide feedback through other means, but there was no follow-up or conversation to understand the customer’s perspective in-depth. Traditional VoC feedback is slow to respond to changes in customer behavior and preferences, making it difficult for businesses to adapt quickly to changing market conditions.
While traditional methods like surveys and focus groups remain important, new approaches such as conversational feedback are gaining traction. The evolution of feedback methods has moved from traditional, one-way methods such as written evaluations or performance reviews to more conversational and ongoing methods such as real-time feedback and coaching. Conversational feedback is a more dynamic and ongoing process that involves real-time communication between customers and businesses through channels such as social media, messaging apps, and live chat.
Capturing conversational feedback provides organisations with numerous benefits such as improved self-service experience, faster response time, easier scaling and administration of customer support requests, increased agent efficiency, and more. The shift towards conversational feedback is driven by the need for more frequent, actionable customer feedback to help employees improve and develop in their roles during interaction and in generating prompt responses to customers. With the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, conversational feedback is becoming increasingly sophisticated, enabling organizations to analyze large amount of customer data and extract actionable insights.
According to Preshit Parab, Analyst at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions, “To make the shift from traditional VoC feedback to conversational feedback, organizations should prioritize investing in the right tools and platforms to enable real-time communication with customers. In the coming years, we can expect to see conversational feedback become even more integrated into organization’s overall customer experience strategies, with increased emphasis on using feedback data to drive decision-making across the organization. Overall, the incorporation of conversational feedback into VoC will help companies enhancing customer service quality, improving employee experience, strengthen product development and delivering better customer experience.”
Author: Preshit Parab, Analyst at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions