What the heck do I do with all this feedback? (CHURN PART 3)

Anita Toth

“What the heck do I do all this feedback?”

That’s what one of my clients asked me after he ran a series of customer interviews.

He had a LOT of data.

It’s quite amazing how much data can be collected from a 30-minute conversation.

It can also feel daunting trying to make sense of it all.

It’s one of the reasons that businesses would rather put out numerical surveys like NPS or CSAT or CES. They’re very easy to calculate and give some indication of how happy customers are.

BUT …

Numerical surveys are very general and don’t give a lot of information.

Interviews are the polar opposite. They give deep data.

The challenge with interviews is figuring out which data to act on and which data to leave.

Businesses that successfully use interview data have figured this out.

They only act on the data that will get them--and their customers—the best results.

Here’s how they do it:

• Transcribe the customer interviews.
• Look for broad categories (product, sales, support, marketing etc.)
• Look for smaller themes (website issues, support times, missing features etc.)

That’s it.

Here are the details so you can do the same:

• Take each of the smaller themes and compare them to the team’s or company’s churn goals for that quarter and that year.
  
  
• The themes that will make the biggest immediate or short-term impact on those churn goals are the ones to act on.
  
  
• Compare the interview themes against your survey data.

 

This simple framework prioritizes those themes that have the biggest impact on churn. 

My next post will show you how you the 3 kinds of data you need to really understand what’s going on in the minds of your customers. (Heads up – you’re likely missing 1 of these 3 kinds of data. And by not having it, you’re missing out on a lot of valuable information about your customers.)