All successful businesses start by being customer-centric.
In the first phases of growing a successful digital business, it's easy to reach out to customers to learn about their wishes, needs and pain points because the numbers are small and gathering feedback is handled by founders.
Growth comes with responsibility
Once the model reaches market fit and the number of customers grows to hundreds, the company already has multiple departments. The founders, who initially were in charge of understanding the customers' needs, are now in charge of the business vision, and overall direction of the company.
The direct contact with the customer now falls in the hands of the support team and sales teams and a gap emerges.
The product team and the founders never forget how important it is to keep close to what is in the minds and hearts of their customers, so they ask for triage of the most insightful customer feedback from support and sales. That often doesn't work, so a new role pops in the mix: This role is not yet super defined and comes in different names (the voice of the customer, user analyst, customer insight manager) but what the person behind is generally in charge of, is to keep an eye of what the customer wants and to uncover hidden trends that can inform the product and stakeholders how to take user-centric decisions.
Beyond NPS and surveys
The question is how to extract insights from thousands of Zendesk tickets, intercom chats, google reviews, and Facebook messages that are piling up daily. How can we see through the lines of this huge data set and distil hidden trends of user behaviour, pain points and requests?
It looks like we have a scalability issue here: Once the business grows, it's hard to keep up with what users want. So what do companies do?
- NPS surveys
- Direct feedback from small batches of customers
That's great, but the puzzle is incomplete.
- What about the people that are not yet customers but pay a visit to the website asking questions about hidden customer wants, needs etc.?
- What about the hundreds of tickets that pile up?
- What about all the reviews submitted on websites like G2, Clutch, Captera, Trustpilot and so on?
- What about all the discussions on social media?
Aren't these sources of feedback?
Usually, when the customer decides to write something, the feedback is more truthful and urgent compared to when they are being enquired about feedback. And it's usually focused on one thing, one pain, and they are not trying to write down a generic answer.
Can AI be a solution?
What's AI good at?
- Continuous sustained effort
- Tedious and monotonous jobs
- Super fast
- High pattern recognition accuracy
What are humans good at?
- Taking strategic decisions
- Creativity
- Holistic understanding
So why not let the AI do the monotonous quantitative work of tagging customer feedback every minute of the day and transform all this data into actionable insights that can fuel strategic decisions for all the executives from product and marketing to CEO and founders?
This missing link in scaling digital companies can bring back the customer-centric team culture and close the gap between customers and decision-makers.
Having a dashboard with all these aggregated patterns from customer feedback can generate reports of dynamic trends in customer pain points and customer needs. These can be shared within the company and filtered into segments for each department according to their needs.
In conclusion, whenever there's a scalability problem involving tedious work that drowns the human spark of creativity and decision making, it's clear that AI can help. That's why we, at ClientZen are building all these tools that can fill the feedback gap between customers and decision-makers in growing companies.
Customer feedback made easy
Customer feedback tagged automatically
Real-time customer sentiment scores
Pain-points evolution over time
