How can a business best manage and make use of customer feedback?

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With mobile technology and social media helping consumers become more informed than ever about purchasing options, it's increasingly vital for companies to "wow" their customers with incredible experiences. Customer feedback holds the key to that wow factor. But how can companies keep a handle on the huge amounts of feedback they receive, and make sure it gets to the right people in time for them to act on it?

To answer this question, we sat down Sam Keninger, director of product marketing at Medallia – the company helping brands such as Nordstrom, PayPal and Four Seasons build their industry-leading customer experiences.

TechRadar Pro: What are your top three pieces of advice for companies implementing a customer experience program?

Sam Keninger: The first step is getting executive buy-in. The best customer experience program in the world won't succeed if people at the top of your organisation aren't engaged with it.

Once you've done that, it's also very important to make sure your program isn't stuck in an ivory tower. Employees throughout your whole organisation, particularly those on the front line, need to be involved. When feedback is operationalised – or integrated into every aspect of your company's business operations – you'll be able to maintain a more consistent focus on customers' needs.

Finally, the program must encourage employees to act on the feedback they receive, and use it to resolve customer issues. The more your employees are enabled to respond – particularly in real-time – the stronger your customer relationships will become.

TRP: How has the customer journey changed with mobile and social media? How is it defined today?

SK: Customer journeys have always varied from industry to industry and company to company. It's hard to have a catch-all definition, and trying to find one can actually make it harder for companies to see what makes their own customers' experiences unique.

In general, mobile technology and social media give customers more ways to interact with companies. This has meant more work for companies in engaging with customers, wherever they are. But the good news is that companies can use these new touch-points to solicit customer feedback and get a more nuanced understanding of the experiences they're providing.

Since mobile and social platforms are so prevalent, customers are going to say how they feel about companies one way or another. You can work with that, or try to fight it. We have found that companies able to collect and respond to mobile and social feedback are more closely aligning themselves with the customer – and they're the ones that are flourishing.

TRP: What tools and processes do companies need to map customer journeys?

SK: To do it properly, customer journey mapping takes a lot of effort, as you need input from people all across your organisation. It can be a bit overwhelming at first. A useful strategy is to focus initially on one critical journey that spans multiple business units – for example, the phone activation journey for a telco – instead of trying to map every possible journey at once.

If you're able to understand that one important journey, you'll gain insight into a wide variety of processes at once. You'll also be able to see how well different customer touch-points are sharing feedback with one another.

When mapping customer journeys, remember that the voice of the customer is also typically the voice of reason. Companies need tools that unify feedback from different touch-points and channels, make the customer's voice accessible to people all over the organisation, and show how it impacts business results. Your employees should see how their actions play out not only on end customers, but on their co-workers downstream as well.

TRP: What are the challenges companies face with the large amount of customer feedback they receive (social, etc.)?

SK: The main challenge is simply aggregating all of it! Especially in large companies, different business units often struggle to gather all of the relevant feedback that's available and share it with each other. This means they're unable to get a full view of how customers are responding to different steps of their journeys. Thankfully, customer experience management systems have come a long way in helping companies manage this aggregation.

Making sense of feedback and getting it quickly to people who can act on it is another common challenge. How can you be sure frontline employees across many locations and channels are seeing and acting on every piece of feedback that's relevant to them? Even a few unacknowledged complaints can be disastrous. And without a system in place to help, employees will probably be too busy to analyse feedback and develop personalised, strategically sound responses on the spot.

TRP: What kind of customer sentiment should companies track and capture?

SK: The short answer is: all of it! The beauty of feedback is that it's almost always associated with a valuable sentiment of some kind, either liking or disliking some aspect of the customer experience.

Positive and negative feedback are both very useful. Positive feedback helps companies focus on their own key differentiators and find new business opportunities. They can also strengthen existing relationships by simply thanking customers for the compliment. Negative feedback helps companies resolve individual problems, prevent churn, and identify processes that need to be fixed.

TRP: How does real-time feedback integrate into a company's customer relationship management program?

SK: Ironically, Voice of the Customer (VOC) – or Customer Experience Management – platforms have done a better job understanding the customer "relationship" than CRMs. Now that the customer experience has become such an important issue for CEOs, and since the technology needed to operationalise feedback has improved, customer experience platforms have found logical integration with CRM systems.

There are many ways integrating a system like Medallia's with CRM platforms can help companies handle feedback in real-time. For example, negative feedback can immediately trigger an alert in the CRM system, so users can close the loop with the customer by responding to their comment in a timely fashion. Also, data is typically passed both ways between the systems, helping employees better understand how these individual pieces of feedback tie into inferred, operational and financial data.

TRP: "Voice of the Customer" programs have grown as a result of social media – how have these programs evolved?

SK: In general, social media has increased the number of sources and touch-points for customer feedback. More feedback is always good for companies if they're able to understand and act on it.

Of course, effective Voice of the Customer programs must allow companies to look at social feedback in the context of larger customer journeys. They also have to help companies act on that feedback. But good VOC programs use social media proactively, too.

For example, in the hospitality industry, review sites like TripAdvisor play a big part in customers' booking decisions. Historically, those sites have tended slightly towards negative feedback. But hospitality companies with the right customer experience tools can actively solicit a wider range of feedback for those sites on a broad scale, so their ranking is more representative of their entire customer base.

TRP: What other ways has mobile technology impacted customer experience initiatives?

SK: Aside from helping organisations quickly access and respond to feedback, mobile technology allows customers to provide feedback immediately after – or even during – an interaction with a company. These comments are valuable because the customer's memory of the experience is still fresh. They're able to provide accurate, nuanced details about what worked and what didn't. That's something all companies should be curious and excited about.