What is a Listening Post?
Within the world of customer experience management, a listening post is a point in the process where companies can collect and analyze feedback from their customers. Organizations tend to assume they understand what their customers want and need. Listening posts are a way to confirm or disprove that assumption by hearing feedback straight from the source. Getting direct input from customers through listening posts can give organizations insight into areas such as product issues, barriers to making purchases, and overall customer satisfaction. The ultimate goal is to use the listening post feedback to enhance the customer experience.
Listening posts are a collection of tools and methods many companies already use to collect customer feedback. Some listening posts happen organically but many are deliberately created by organizations. Social media is probably the best example of an organic listening post because customers will freely share their opinions without prompting from the business. Companies need a good way to collect, consolidate and analyze the feedback. Conversely, organizations will use tools like customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, Net Promoter® surveys, and focus groups if they want more structured listening posts.
Listening posts and contact centers
Contact centers make rich listening posts because they communicate with customers every day. The first place to start is by talking to agents, who can summarize what common themes customers talk to them about. That information can be supplemented by AI-driven interaction analytics. This technology can summarize call reasons and customer emotions based on what was said during the interaction. Another powerful tool is the automated administration of surveys, which enables surveys to be presented to customers immediately following the contact. Analytics tools can quickly calculate survey results and present them in insightful formats.
Listening posts are invaluable for understanding what customers truly think and feel. Savvy organizations are collecting and assessing customer feedback in order to improve the customer journey.
How NICE can help
NICE CXone is the market leading contact center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world to help them consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences. Our survey and interaction analytics solutions turn contact centers into powerful listening posts. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its contact center operations. CXone includes:
Workforce Optimization – unlocks the potential of your team by inspiring employees' self-improvement, amplifying quality management efforts to enhance customer experience and reducing labor waste. These solutions include workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), recording and performance management (PM).
Analytics – turns insights into results by making data relevant, easy to consume and actionable to drive measurable improvements and understand the omnichannel experience customers receive. These solutions include interaction analytics, customer surveys, reporting and performance management.
Automation & Artificial Intelligence (AI) – leading-edge, intuitive technology that eliminates mundane tasks and speeds the resolution of customer issues for better business outcomes. It provides self-service, agent-assisted and fully automated alerts and actions.
CXone also includes pre-defined CRM integrations and UCaaS integrations with most leading solutions on the market. These integrations provide a holistic contact center software solution capable of elevating customer experiences for companies of all sizes.
