The Complete Guide to Unsolicited Feedback

“Thank you for calling. Your call may be monitored for quality and training purposes.”

Does this sound familiar? It should. This common phrase precedes most calls between companies and their customers.

This means companies are amassing millions of recorded customer conversations every year and those conversations are chock-full of insights about what customers think, what they feel, and what they wish the company would do.

But is anyone actually listening?

Most organizations today don’t recognize the potential being stored and ignored in these customer interactions. But the reality is that when you aggregate those conversations, themes emerge. And from those themes, companies can answer their most burning questions.

This is the untapped potential of unsolicited feedback.

1. What is Unsolicited Feedback?
2. Why is Unsolicited Feedback Valuable?
3. How Do You Access Unsolicited Feedback?
4. What Does It Look Like to Take Action On Unsolicited Feedback?
5. See Authenticx in Action

What is Unsolicited Feedback?

Unsolicited feedback is the organic thoughts, feelings, and opinions your customers share without being prompted or asked. Unsolicited feedback can be found by listening to recorded call center conversations, reading customer support chat transcripts, or watching customer video calls. Wherever bi-directional human conversations are happening with customers, you’ll find unsolicited feedback.

Why is Unsolicited Feedback Valuable?

Unsolicited feedback is an unbiased, renewable source of customer insights. Unlike survey data, which is skewed based on the population that responds and limited due to the inherent bias of the questions being asked, unsolicited feedback surfaces what’s truly top of mind for the customer in their own words.

Think about it – when a customer calls a contact center, they have a reason for reaching out and a perception that goes into everything they say during that conversation. The whole reason for their call is to share what’s on their mind – and that’s a tremendously valuable source of insight.

How Do You Access Unsolicited Feedback?

Your contact center is overflowing with unsolicited feedback and new insights are being recorded every single day. You don’t need to send another survey or place any additional burden on the customer to collect unsolicited feedback – this renewable data source already exists within your organization. All you have to do is listen.

You can get started by listening with the resources you already have or by leveraging software to help you listen to your customers at scale.

What Does It Look Like to Take Action On Unsolicited Feedback?

Here’s an example: Most healthcare companies have a digital self-service portal and they’re hoping customers will use it. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.

Many times, companies who look at unsolicited feedback will find that a good percentage of customer calls occur because the self-service portal didn’t meet their needs. At this point, it becomes the contact center agent’s job to quickly resolve the problem. But throughout that conversation, the customer is telling the agent:

• What they were doing on the website where they had the problem
• What buttons or fields they didn’t understand
• Where in the navigation they got lost
• What words were used where they couldn’t figure out what the company meant

The customer is providing a mountain of unsolicited feedback about what led them to call in the first place and they’re very specific.

When a company accumulates thousands of calls like these, they start to observe trends like:

• 20% of customers were talking about the button on this screen and how it doesn’t function all the time
• 40% said they were really confused by this specific phrase on our website

Now, these insights can be shared with their UX team, who knows exactly what to fix because they have data straight from the mouths of their customers.

And after these changes have been implemented, they’re able to confirm the problem was solved because customers have stopped calling about that particular issue.

You can see how this example could be translated to different problems and different departments, unlocking tremendous potential across the organization.

Interested in leveraging the power of unsolicited feedback in your organization? At Authenticx we believe that nothing replaces listening. You can read more about our approach to listening at scale or request a personalized demo to learn more.

See Authenticx in Action

Learn more about how Authenticx analyzes customer conversations to surface recurring trends in this two-minute video.