It's no secret that customers are tired of surveys.

We get too many, they take too long to complete, and many fail to adequately capture how we really feel about our experience. There has to be a better way.

Conversations are an untapped resource. We talk to customers face-to-face and over the phone. We have written conversations via email, chat, sms, and social media. This conversational data, often referred to as "unstructured" data, represents a treasure trove of customer insight, but customer experience leaders struggle to capture and organize it all.

Nate Brown, Co-founder of CX Accelerator, has discovered a novel way to solve the problem. He's designed a simple process that allows frontline representatives to quickly and easily capture data from customer conversations.

Brown shares his simple process in this 20 minute interview. We cover:

Why capturing data from customer conversations is so important
How to turn a simple USB webkey into a “CX Magic Button”
Where in the customer journey to look for data
How to encourage employees to capture and share customer feedback
Simple ways to quickly analyze and act on the data

You can get step-by-step instructions from this post or follow him on Twitter at @CustomerIsFirst. You’ll also get more customer feedback help on this survey resource page.

You can get low-cost USB webkeys with your company’s logo from Lev Promotions.

Updated: December 15, 2023

I frequently use subscriber feedback to improve my Customer Service Tip of the Week email newsletter. Yet I've never used a survey.

Customers are inundated with surveys, so think carefully before rolling out yet another one. You can get a lot of useful voice of customer feedback from several alternative sources.

Here are five ways to collect and use customer feedback without a survey.

Business people sitting around a conference table analyzing survey data.

Issue Alerts

Create a process to alert you to issues in real-time.

My weekly email will occasionally have a small issue such as a typo or a broken hyperlink. I try to proofread each email and test all the links, but problems occasionally do happen.

Typos are my kryptonite.

Thankfully, I can count on subscribers to let me know when there is an error. It's usually just a handful of people who email me about the problem, but that's all the feedback I need. Keep in mind most customers won't bother to tell you about small issues, but that doesn't mean they don't notice!

I have a process in place where I can flag a problem and fix it the next time I send out the same tip. In some cases, such as a broken hyperlink, I may re-send the email with the correction, although I try not to do this very often because I don't like swamping people's inboxes with extra emails.

Discussion question: What process do you have in place to allow your frontline agents to resolve or report problems?

Investigate Icebergs

A customer service iceberg is an issue that seems small and isolated on the surface, but is actually a sign of a much larger and more dangerous problem that's hidden from view.

Someone recently emailed me to let me know she had tried to sign-up for the Customer Service Tip of the Week email, but never received a confirmation. This was a classic iceberg because it was easy to dismiss the problem as a one-off where maybe she just missed the email or the confirmation wound up in a spam folder.

I was tempted to just manually subscribe her to my list, but I decided to investigate.

My research led me to a helpful exchange with a support agent at MailChimp, the company that powers my newsletter. With his help, I identified a technical setting in my account that would make my emails more recognizable to corporate email servers.

Here comes the kicker—my weekly subscription rate instantly doubled!

Some of those extra subscribers undoubtedly came from a marketing campaign I was running. But some of that huge increase was certainly due to this technical issue. I never would have found it if I hadn't investigated the iceberg that came from just one email.

Discussion question: What do frontline employees do when they encounter a strange or unusual problem? Are they trained to search for and identify icebergs?

Invite Conversation

There are a few books that have absolutely changed the game for me. One was Kevin Kruse's book, Unlimited Clients.

A key piece of advice in the book was to invite conversation with your customers. The first version of the book had Kevin's phone number and email address right on the cover, and I can tell you from experience he actually responded!

So I took Kevin's advice and added a special invitation to the welcome email I sent to new subscribers.

Excerpt from Customer Service Tip of the Week welcome email.

Subscribers have always been able to reply to any email and send a message directly to my personal email address. However, this invitation substantially increased the number of people who actually emailed me.

It's not everyone. (Thankfully—I don't know if I could keep up!) But a couple times a day I get an email from a new subscriber who tells me a little about themselves.

It helps me learn more about them and I often try to share something helpful in response. I've also learned those subscribers are more likely to share their feedback as they begin to receive the weekly tips.

Discussion Question: How can you invite individual customers to engage in a one-on-one conversation?

Catalog Unstructured Data

Something really amazing happens when you take all those individual conversations you have with customers and categorize them.

I went through hundreds of emails from subscribers and categorized the customer service challenges they shared with me. When I decided to put my weekly tips in a book, I put the top ten challenges in a chart and identified tips that could help with each one.

Going through several hundred emails may seem like a lot of work, but it really doesn't take that much time. I probably spent an hour.

It goes even faster if you catalog feedback from individual customers as it comes in. A lot of customer service software platforms have a tagging feature that allows agents to do this on the fly. If your technology won't do it, you can have agents use a spreadsheet or even a piece of paper.

Here are some resources for capturing unstructured data:

Give your agents a “CX Magic Button”
Try applying sentiment analysis

Discussion Question: How can you capture and analyze unstructured data?

Be a Customer

I learn a lot by subscribing to my own email.

This was a trick I learned from working in the catalog industry. Catalog companies would mail themselves a copy of each catalog so they could time how long it took to arrive and could verify each catalog arrived in good condition.

Subscribing to my own email allows me to do something similar.

For example, the Customer Service Tip of the Week goes out each Monday at 8:45 am Pacific time. One week, the email didn't arrive as expected. I double-checked the system and discovered I had set that particular email for 8:45 pm.

Oops! Fortunately, I was able to quickly change the send time and the email went out only a few minutes later than normal.

Discussion Question: What can you learn from being your own customer?

Take Action

Here are all the discussion questions in one spot:

What process do you have in place to allow your frontline agents to resolve or report problems?
What do frontline employees do when they encounter a strange or unusual problem?
How can you invite individual customers to engage in a one-on-one conversation?
How can you capture and analyze unstructured data?
What can you learn from being your own customer?

All of these questions can yield terrific customer feedback without ever resorting to a survey! Best of all, the feedback you get from these sources can often be quickly used to make improvements.

You can get five more survey alternatives from this old post.

And, if you really want to use a survey, my course on LinkedIn Learning can guide you. Here's a short preview.

Welcome from Using Customer Surveys to Improve Service by Jeff Toister