When it comes to customer experience (CX), businesses often lean heavily on feedback from customers as the main source of insight. After all, hearing directly from your customers sounds like the best way to understand how they feel about your service, right? Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
While customer feedback is undeniably valuable, it can be misleading or, more often than not, incomplete. Relying on it as the sole metric for improvement can result in a CX strategy that misses critical opportunities to improve satisfaction and loyalty.
To deliver truly exceptional CX, businesses need to dig deeper into their customers’ needs, pain points, and expectations—elements that direct feedback often fails to fully capture. This blog outlines why Engine believes that a nuanced, comprehensive approach is necessary to create meaningful customer experiences, transforming moments of frustration into loyalty and dissatisfaction into delight.
The limitations of customer feedback
Surveys, reviews, and NPS scores are common tools that capture customer reactions, but they provide only a glimpse of the overall picture. There are several limitations that CX professionals should keep in mind:
Surface-level insights: Feedback often skims the surface, capturing immediate reactions without necessarily revealing the underlying reasons for those reactions. For example, a customer might rate an experience highly due to a friendly interaction with a staff member, but might still feel frustrated by other issues that weren’t expressed in the feedback. Over time, these unaddressed pain points can erode loyalty, as customers continue to experience discomfort that isn’t addressed.
Customers don’t always know what they need: Many customers don’t have the language to describe their deeper needs or may be unaware of what’s driving their dissatisfaction. As a result, feedback might not reflect what would truly enhance their experience. For example, a customer might not specify that they need better guidance during an onboarding process but instead might simply report that they felt “lost”.
Feedback is often “in-the-moment”: Customer feedback tends to capture a specific point in time rather than a holistic journey. It doesn’t always account for the cumulative experiences that impact long-term satisfaction. To create CX that builds lasting connections, it’s important to understand the customer journey in its entirety.
Positive feedback may hide unmet needs: It’s also possible for customers to give high ratings despite having unmet needs. Customers might report a positive experience overall yet still leave the service if they find an alternative that better addresses their long-term needs. By relying solely on positive feedback, businesses might miss these critical gaps.
Understanding your customers
Beyond feedback, it’s essential to understand who your customers are, what they value, and where they encounter frustrations. This deeper comprehension of customer needs allows businesses to craft experiences that resonate on a personal level and create loyalty.
For example, when Engine conducted research across eight countries to understand the behaviours and preferences of travellers, we uncovered insights that were instrumental in designing a seamless visitor experience.
Knowing what matters most to travellers at each stage of their journey – from planning to the trip’s end – allowed us to design touchpoints that met specific regional needs, creating an experience that was as memorable as it was practical. This level of personalisation and understanding is difficult, if not impossible, to capture in a single feedback survey.
Uncovering areas of improvement
The process of delving into customer pain points and frustrations reveals actionable areas for improvement. Addressing these challenges not only resolves existing dissatisfaction but also proactively prevents negative experiences.
A mobile telecoms operator, for example, doubled its revenue within three years when it listened to its customer pain points and addressed them.
By mapping out the pain points, companies can create services that directly address their customers’ unique stresses and concerns. Instead of asking customers how they feel about a process, it’s important to understand their journey on a granular level, resulting in products and services that better support them through the journey.
Broader ways to gather insight
Improving CX requires going beyond traditional feedback methods like surveys or NPS scores. A variety of approaches can provide the depth of insight necessary for designing experiences that resonate deeply with customers.
Customer journey mapping: Visualising the entire customer lifecycle helps pinpoint moments of friction that often go unnoticed in feedback. Journey mapping gives a holistic view of the pain points across different touchpoints, allowing CX teams to address these consistently.
Trend analysis and forecasting: Studying trends and anticipating the needs of future customers allows businesses to create experiences that are proactive rather than reactive. By staying ahead of customer expectations, companies can avoid scrambling to address frustrations as they arise.
Speaking to customers in real-time: Nothing replaces the value of speaking to customers directly. As CXD podcast guest Bryan Thompson highlighted, observing customers in their natural environment or interacting with them in real-time often yields insights that would never emerge in a survey response.
Mystery shopping: Experiencing the journey as a customer helps businesses see firsthand where frustrations arise. This exercise reveals small details that impact the experience, from website navigation to customer support interactions.
Customer personas: Creating detailed personas helps businesses step into the shoes of their customers, allowing them to anticipate needs based on demographics, behaviours and motivations.
Service blueprints: Service blueprints help visualise internal processes, linking back-office functions to customer-facing touchpoints, so businesses can ensure seamless experiences.
At Engine, we embrace an ‘outside-in, inside-out’ approach, where we integrate both the customer’s perspective and the business’s perspective, bridging the gap between the two for a CX that’s both practical and satisfying.
Aligning with customer expectations
Customers increasingly want businesses to understand their unique expectations. According to a Salesforce report, 66% of customers feel they are often treated as just a number.
At Engine, we believe that a company can only truly align with customer expectations when it moves from a feedback-centred approach to a needs-centred approach. This requires looking beyond scores and percentages to truly understand what motivates, frustrates, and inspires loyalty in customers.
For example, if feedback consistently shows that a call centre resolves issues efficiently, this may appear as a CX success. However, if in-depth research reveals that customers would rather avoid calling altogether, the business has an opportunity to introduce self-service options or other methods that meet customers’ preferences more effectively.
The complete journey
Ultimately, customer feedback serves as a valuable component of a CX strategy, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. To design customer experiences that promote loyalty and delight, businesses need to go deeper – understanding customer expectations, identifying pain points, and addressing unmet needs.
By exploring the complete journey of your customer and engaging them in a way that respects their unique needs, your business can build experiences that go beyond momentary satisfaction, creating the foundation for lasting relationships.
