Data-driven decision making is an unspoken axiom in today’s business world. It’s hard to imagine a company that has never tried to implement this practice—regardless of its location, size or industry. In the customer experience space, data plays an even more significant role when it comes to understanding customers—their emotions, feelings, experiential history and expectations toward their interactions with a brand and company. The corporate world must navigate this varied landscape through the design of comprehensive customer experience journeys, developing and bucketing consumers’ personas and high-value touchpoints.

Equipped with this knowledge and observations, we invest a good deal of money into strategic and tactical projects, and measure, evaluate, revamp, and re-launch them only to find out that the assumptions weren’t sufficient enough to drive a conclusion. In the moments of success and despair, we always come back to the data—the greatest friend and foe of businesses today.

Customer Experience Qualitative Vs. Quantitative Data

In the voice of the customer world, qualitative and quantitative data must be integrated and closely related; it is not enough to complement them. Imagine that you just conducted a relational Net Promoter System® (NPS) survey, and most of the feedback you received was about your product. Logically, it’s easy to assume the product should become your primary area of focus in outlining the action plan that addresses the major pain points of your customers.

However, analysis of frequency can play a cruel joke with you. It’s a good idea to correlate qualitative results with quantitative metrics. For example, analyzing our 2018 H1 Relationship NPS survey results, we found that satisfaction with a product doesn’t significantly impact the NPS rating of our customers. Customers are happy with capabilities and functionality; what we assumed was negative feedback, turned out to be more neutral. This perception offers suggestions on moves Genesys could take with our roadmap and future development. At the same time, the level of service experienced by our customers significantly affected their likelihood to recommend Genesys to their peers.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t invest in products and reallocate funds to service and support. It just means that the responsibility of Genesys is to equip customers to be successful with their products and make their lives easier through a consistent experience and level of service across all platforms and solutions. When qualitative and quantitative data act as a homogeneous organism, we can deliver exceptional customer experience instead of a quick band-aid solution.

Customer Experience Perceptions and Bias

What you look at is not what you see, but what you think you see. From a data point of view, there’s a challenge in the form of confirmation bias. When you have been doing something for some period, it becomes easier to assume. This is reflected when long-time employees assume they know exactly what the customer is talking about.

In reality, your 20 years of experience has tricked you. The survival instinct forces us to simplify everything we do and to preserve energy. We then must extrapolate our system of beliefs onto the piece of analyzed data.

Moreover, at the moment when the reality painted by the data contradicts our system of opinions and experiences, we tend to draw conclusions that bring convenience and comfort. The easiest way to confront confirmation bias is to cooperate with others to validate your findings. Twice a year, Genesys conducts a cross-departmental NPS workshop to review the results of our biannual Relationship NPS survey. It helps us achieve the universal truth through open discussions, validates (or invalidates) assumptions and build grounds for effective collaboration across Genesys departments.

Making Friends With CX Data

These are just two examples of how data can help improve customer experience.  It’s always a good idea to revisit your research design and findings—there’s always room for improvement. In the end, it should never be about data, Net Promoter Score or other customer experience metrics. It should always be about the actions you take behind the data. Data is a friend that assists you to provide measures and informs the improvements you make for your customers.

Check out the customer experience best practices and educational content for journey mapping, use cases, customer success stories, and more.