For CX, case studies can at a single incident such as a reported grievance or multiple cases such as a reoccurring outage. Case studies are typically used in research that describes the development of an individual, group, or situation over a period of time in order to provide a detailed account of what occurred with context.

Correlational studies seek patterns or relationships between two or more customer experience deltas. These don’t necessary show causal factors, rather a factors between two or more outcomes customer are experiencing. For example, a study might be designed to determine if there is a relationship between the number of complaints during an outage in a particular community and the season with impacts dependency.

Longitudinal studies surface information about how customers progress over time with the brand. They focus on a cohort (or marketed audience) of customers across time, measuring the same behavior multiple times. For example, we may want to determine if customers are more loyal if competition becomes more or less scarce. A research design to this could include two different markets - an urban and remote rural group.

A researcher intentionally modifies a customer experience studies to evaluate the impact to the experience. Two subsets is either testing a randomized group of customer or a single-case with a customer.

Trial studies are a randomized customer segment or cohort study of an experience. trial They are likely to be evaluated in a controlled setting. Similar to experimental group studies, trial studies employ an experimental and control group. Participants randomly are assigned to an experimental scenario where we evaluate their feedback.

Evaluate your current listening posts. This may include sources like surveys, social media, emails, online reviews, and contact center calls. Feedback comes in different varieties, including solicited and unsolicited, and can be connected to other data, such as purchase history, for deeper insights. Driving sustained CX improvement, LEGO toymaker collects feedback throughout points in the customer journey through “online surveys, customer phone calls, and in-store comment cards” Forrester found.

It’s important for your CX teams to evaluate the feedback for useful insights tagged to common, key themes. This allows you to then begin prioritizing necessary actions to the feedback. Forrester found that Health insurer Florida Blue connects “customer feedback and data from several sources, like CRM, call center transcripts, social media, and surveys, to better understand customer context.” By using software tools from Clarabridge, it “applied text analytics to the customer feedback to better understand and respond to customer concerns as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded.”

Consumer feedback is rather useless if you don’t apply it for active change. Customer feedback can include both response to the individual customer concerns - as well as improving broader business decisions with policies, products and procedures.

To drive actions, VoC leaders must collaborate across functions and embed VoC insights into business processes. For example Forrester found that to avoid metrics obsession, company ABN Amro did not include Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) “on frontline dashboards and instead focused its employees on closing the customer feedback loop.”

To show the value of CX VoC teams, track target improvements from the program. A CX measurement program that connects key interaction, perception, and outcome metrics across the journey will significantly help executive leadership correlate to business performance. Quantify the quality of the experience and business benefit.

Forrester found Marks & Spencer “has been able to demonstrate the VoC investment impact an average 23% improvement in overall satisfaction (OSAT). One key market was able to show the impact in the form of £284,000 in new revenue.”