What is it like to shop us? Why do people come to us instead of them? Or them instead of us?
You know these questions. We all do. They’re the questions every customer-facing business asks itself. And spends millions on trying to answer.
But getting an answer is hard. You can ask customers what they thought of your service. You can get them to pick a number of stars, click on a smiley face, talk to the helpline, complete a short a survey at the end of the call. But is the data you get the truth?
Customer truth. That’s what we’re all looking for. The real, unvarnished view of what it’s like to interact with your customer organisation. It’s the information you desperately need to make wise investments.
You’ve got a truth problem
There are lots of existing tools that are meant to give you customer truth. Big customer analytics solutions like Qualtrics, Medallia and NPS.
But they don’t. Their analytics rely on self-selecting noisy customers, over-emphasise online customers and over-index complaints.
These mechanical customer analytics systems have no way to register the emotional need state a customer was in when they made a decision. They can tell you if a customer was satisfied and if they would recommend you to a friend, but they don’t tell you what the customer wanted to do when they came to you, how they felt about it, and what made them choose you over a competitor.
They miss the reality. They miss the customers who love you but don’t tell you, and the ones who love your competitors and never come near your star ratings. They give you a percentage of smiley faces against frowny faces, but they’re silent on what made the customer happy or irritated, or how they might feel on a different day.
Lying customers
Customers lie. They might not mean to, but they do. Humans barely understand why we make some of the biggest decisions in our lives, like sweeping everything off the desk and walking out of a job or cheating on a partner, so trying to get us to explain why we bought a cup of coffee from Café Nero instead of Starbucks is an impossible ask.
Customer feedback relies on humans remembering correctly and reconstructing complex emotional responses to a situation that made them behave in a certain way. That is hard.
And even if you’re lucky enough to find a customer remembering the truth of why they did what they did, is it the whole truth and nothing but the truth? What about the customers who didn’t bother clicking the smiley face, or hung up before your survey?
Current customer feedback metrics are full of noise. If you rely on feedback you don’t get customer truth. And if you don’t have customer truth you can’t make good investment decisions.
So, what now?
The Uncrowd approach to analytics is different. Our platform shows the data in every context; the context of what customers are trying to do and what mood they’re in when they’re trying to do it.
These crucial pieces of information transform smiley faces into actual, actionable information. We have the only metric on the market able to show quantifiable data-driven truth — your customer truth.
