Customer experience pros turn to AI as surveys fall short: Medallia
WASHINGTON, D.C., UNITED STATES — A new industry survey by Medallia reveals that three-quarters of customer experience professionals find traditional feedback surveys insufficient for a complete understanding of client needs, as reported by CXDive.
This growing recognition is accelerating investment in AI-powered conversational intelligence, which analyzes service call transcripts to provide real-time and scalable insights.
Traditional customer surveys miss critical insights
The main weakness of survey-based feedback is its biased nature, as it only captures the responses of customers who were highly motivated and either extremely happy or extremely unhappy. This abandoned a huge middle zone of the customer base, and this places considerable disparities in data.
This means that leaders are likely to make decisions based on one side or the other instead of considering the holistic picture of the entire customer journey, and as such, it cannot be used to understand it fully.
This problem is widespread, with fewer than three in five customer experience practitioners currently leveraging conversational data from service interactions to complement their surveys.
The survey of over 500 professionals, conducted by Medallia, confirms that a majority of programs operate with an incomplete picture.
Relying solely on surveys means missing the nuanced, unstructured feedback that emerges in natural conversations between customers and agents.
AI and conversational intelligence enhance feedback quality
A conversational intelligence application is a form of artificial intelligence that enables the conversion of unstructured data into real-time and actionable knowledge using call transcripts, interaction summary processing, and analysis.
The benefit of scale that comes with this technology is that it is effective in the processing of thousands of conversations that would be difficult to review manually. It is also quick, allowing organizations to identify and address problems in real-time while the customer is still on the phone, rather than waiting for survey results to come back.
“This allows organizations to act while the customer is still engaged with an agent, rather than waiting for periodic reviews that may happen days or weeks later,” explains Andrew Custage, Senior Director and Head of Research Insights at Medallia.
The tool’s usefulness lies in its ability to identify specific experience failures, including the reasons customers hang up or the locations of chatbot interactions. It enables leaders to implement accurate changes, such as setting guardrails for AI agents and optimizing training programs for employees.
“AI is also essential for making sense of open-ended and unbiased feedback in these conversations, which creates a more complete and holistic view of the customer experience than surveys alone can provide,” Custage stated in an email to CXDive.
Consequently, two-thirds of CX practitioners expect to invest more in this technology, and 64% of them connect the progress of AI in making data usable as the determining factor.
