AI-Driven Customer Feedback for Growth

Insightful offering. AI helps brands use real-time customer feedback to craft personalized, engaging customer experiences.

AI helps brands use real-time customer feedback to craft personalized, engaging customer experiences. Tech adoption. Brands like Spotify and Netflix successfully employ AI for real-time feedback to adjust content and customer interaction.

Brands like Spotify and Netflix successfully employ AI for real-time feedback to adjust content and customer interaction. Addressing challenges. With high-volume data, AI and analytics tools help tackle the challenge of sifting through and making sense of customer feedback.

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in customer experience (CX) platforms has enabled brands to tap into real-time customer feedback which allows them to determine the “next best step” using data-driven insights. Many customer experience platforms are available that leverage AI and real-time customer feedback, enabling personalization and customer engagement at a level that was previously out of reach for many brands.

How Does Real-Time Feedback Improve CX?

Real-time customer feedback — which is collected as a normal part of a brand’s everyday business processes — has become a necessity for understanding customer needs and preferences. Because real-time feedback is continually collected throughout the customer journey, it arrives at a rate with which it can be effectively used. By analyzing this feedback, brands are able to obtain actionable insights that, when acted upon, lead to enhanced customer engagement and trust.

Additionally, real-time feedback allows brands to identify the pain points in the customer journey, which provides opportunities for improvement. It enables brands to deliver more personalized experiences, and provide targeted offers, data-driven recommendations, and personalized support.

Real-time feedback also enables brands to stay ahead of emerging trends, identify changing customer preferences, and proactively respond to changes in the market. By using advanced analytics and AI, businesses are able to process large amounts of data, enabling them to make informed decisions and prioritize CX strategies.

Michelle Huff, CMO at UserTesting, a human insights platform provider, told CMSWire that real-time feedback is essential for modern customer experiences as they often have numerous digital interactions and touchpoints. “As companies become more software-centric, the pace of creating these experiences has accelerated over the years. Traditional feedback methods such as focus groups have become too time-consuming to fit into fast product development iterations,” said Huff. “Real-time feedback provides agility, enabling companies to incorporate human insights while working on designs and concepts, save on costs, and mitigate risk.”

Which Platforms Support Real-Time Feedback?

Many CX platforms that support real-time customer feedback integrate AI for feedback and sentiment analysis, as well as the analysis of chat logs and customer service calls. Here are some of the most popular platforms:

1. Medallia is a customer feedback management platform that uses AI to collect and analyze real-time feedback from various sources, such as surveys, social media, and contact center interactions. Athena AI, Medallia’s native AI, enables the platform to analyze customer sentiments, identify trends, and prioritize improvement areas.

2. Qualtrics offers an experience management (XM) platform that uses AI and machine learning to capture feedback in real-time. The platform enables businesses to design and distribute surveys, track customer interactions, and deliver insights using advanced analytics.

3. Sprinklr’s AI-driven customer experience management platform enables brands to collect and analyze real-time feedback across all of a brand’s channels. The platform uses AI algorithms to interpret customer feedback, prioritize issues, and trigger alerts for timely responses.

4. Thematic is an AI-driven feedback analysis platform that specializes in understanding customer feedback. The platform uses machine learning to categorize and analyze customer comments and feedback from various sources, including surveys, reviews, and social media.

5. Zonka Feedback is a real-time customer experience and product feedback platform that uses AI-driven analytics to gather and analyze customer feedback across channels. The platform provides sentiment analysis, text analytics, and customizable reporting.

These software platforms leverage AI’s capabilities to transform the way businesses collect and use customer feedback in real-time. By incorporating AI-driven sentiment analysis and advanced analytics, these platforms enable brands to gain valuable insights and make informed decisions that drive continual improvement in customer experiences.

How Is AI Used for Real-Time Feedback?

AI uses natural language processing (NLP) to process and understand unstructured text data, such as social media posts, customer reviews, and chat conversations. By using NLP, these platforms are able to understand the sentiments and intentions of customers, enabling businesses to better understand their customers’ needs. AI-driven sentiment analysis also enables these platforms to recognize the positive, negative, or neutral sentiments in customer feedback, as well as the mood, tone, and attitude of the customer. This allows brands to quickly gauge customer satisfaction levels and respond accordingly.

Social listening tools use AI to monitor customer feedback on social media platforms, allowing brands to quickly respond to the concerns of customers. Finally, AI chatbots interact with customers while collecting feedback, answering questions, and providing immediate support. This improves customer engagement and allows brands to obtain valuable feedback.

“Chatbots and virtual assistants can play a significant role in interacting with customers, such as answering questions, providing customer support, and collecting feedback,” said Huff. “AI tools further enhance their capabilities by analyzing public social media posts, reviews, and comments to gather valuable insights about a brand’s products or services, enabling sentiment analysis.”

How Are Brands Using Real-Time Feedback for CX?

Ashu Dubey, founder and CEO at Helix, an accurate AI company, told CMSWire that real-time feedback is crucial to many brands’ CX strategy. “While all feedback provides value, real-time input from customers is a way to personalize content, recommendations, and products to the customer,” said Dubey. “It helps in driving sales by understanding the customer’s preferences, which can change rapidly.” Dubey suggested that by using generative AI to manage feedback, brands can display the right item at the right time to the right customer.

Brands today know that a deep understanding of customer feedback in real-time can significantly influence the customer experience and their overall success. As such, many of the largest brands are incorporating real-time feedback into their CX strategy.

One of the most well-known and effective examples of this is Apple, whose approach to feedback stands out because of its simplicity and directness. After a purchase or service interaction, customers are often sent Net Promoter Score (NPS) style surveys, either via email or through its Feedback Assistant. The questions are based on the customer’s overall satisfaction and ask them to rate their experience on a scale of one to five stars. Apple’s success here lies not just in the survey’s simplicity but in their effective, non-invasive delivery methods and their consistently well-trained customer support staff.

The YouTube video platform has incorporated an incentivized CSAT, or Customer Satisfaction Survey, into its ecosystem. By attaching a CSAT question (like rating a specific video) to an incentive (like skipping an ad), YouTube not only provides a seamless user experience but also increases the number of responses it receives. This strategy allows it to gather more diverse data from various demographics, which then improves its service delivery.

The Uber platform employs a two-way feedback system, encouraging both drivers and passengers to rate each other. This mutual evaluation keeps both parties accountable and can enhance the customer experience over time. Uber Eats, the company’s food delivery arm, allows customers to review multiple aspects of their order, from food quality to delivery times.

A brand’s use of real-time feedback isn’t strictly limited to customer preferences and sentiments. Aron Ezra, chairman of Plan A Technologies, a software development and digital transformation company, told CMSWire that data is what modern companies run on — not just how much data they collect and sift through, but how quickly they obtain it.

Ezra pointed out that although global commercial shipping is faster and more reliable than ever in human history, consumer demand for purchase fulfillment has outstripped even that. “So if you have a company that sells a product that happens to have become the must-have accessory in 2023 for sci-fi cosplayers, you need the real-time feedback that tells you that your store at Fashion Valley in San Diego is running out of stock and needs 100 more of the item with overnight shipping before Comic-Con is over,” said Ezra.

Ezra’s firm works with a lot of casinos, and real-time customer feedback is essential for both the casinos and the customer experience. “Both they and their customers want those digital customer profiles to be updated to the millisecond — it can have an impact on everything from accessing the digital wallet to making restaurant reservations,” said Ezra. “For the company, it means they can make better data-driven decisions second-by-second, increasing player engagement and revenue. For the customer, it means they get a more personalized experience, driving up satisfaction and offering them more experiences that ensure they leave the resort wanting to come back again.”

What Are the Challenges of Using Real-Time Feedback?

Obtaining real-time customer feedback presents brands with valuable insights into their customers’ needs and preferences; however, using this feedback effectively comes with its own set of challenges.

One of the primary issues faced with real-time feedback is dealing with the sheer volume of data that is generated. As feedback flows in continually, it can quickly become overwhelming. Filtering through this huge amount of data and identifying meaningful insights requires AI-driven analytics tools to avoid getting lost in the noise. Additionally, distinguishing valuable feedback from irrelevant or spammy content adds complexity to the process. “One prominent challenge of using real-time feedback is data overload, where analyzing vast amounts of data without AI becomes difficult and slow, making it a challenge to generate key insights,” said Huff.

Often, businesses tend to focus on technology, rather than using the insights that come from real-time feedback to empathize with their customers. Mattia Santin, CMO at Hotjar, a product experience insights platform provider, told CMSWire that while data can help us make informed decisions, the foundation of marketing is about finding creative ways to empathize, connect, and impact people. “Pairing data with creativity to make marketing decisions is ultimately going to make the greatest impact. Data-driven marketing, design, and customer insights will drive the next wave of marketers, but the differentiating factor for those who succeed will be how they pair their analytic knowledge with their soft skills.”

“The quicker technology moves, the more rapidly marketing needs to keep up,” said Santin, who explained that by using real-time AI-generated surveys and reports, customers are able to fast-track their research efforts by instantly creating surveys, gathering insights based on end-user feedback, and receiving actionable recommendations for the next steps.

Collecting real-time feedback often involves the exchange of personal information. To maintain customer trust and regulatory compliance, brands must prioritize data privacy and security. The implementation of robust security measures is vital to protect customer data from potential breaches and ensure transparency in data handling practices.

“Global companies face major challenges in ensuring data privacy and compliance with local laws and regulations when collecting, analyzing, or anonymizing customer feedback,” explained Huff. “There can be many obstacles in obtaining opt-ins or approvals to track customer feedback effectively and synthesizing it in a way that can be translated into actionable insights.” Additionally, Huff suggested that merely gathering feedback in real-time is not sufficient; it must be presented in a format that can influence customer experience decisions.

Final Thoughts on Real-Time Feedback

Real-time feedback provides brands with unique opportunities to obtain and use actionable insights throughout the customer journey. By using AI, ML, and NLP functionality in CX platforms, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their customers in real-time, allowing them to proactively solve issues before they become problems, personalize the customer experience, and enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.