What is Indirect Feedback?

Indirect feedback is customer input that a business didn't solicit, but can access for analysis. For example, customer service interactions, social media comments, and verbatim text are all valuable sources of indirect feedback. Indirect feedback can be used in conjunction with survey scores (direct feedback) to derive a more comprehensive view of the customer experience.

Customers are often very candid in these indirect feedback forums and the information provided can help fill in gaps in an organization's customer knowledge. Effectively mining indirect feedback requires smart voice of the customer (VOC) analytics software that leverages artificial intelligence to understand and process human speech. Below are some examples of how that works.

• Customer service interactions: Some of the most valuable input happens when customers talk to service agents. The best interaction analytics software can comb through 100% of interactions from channels such as voice, email, and chat. This allows the application to identify trends and turn the indirect feedback into performance data that can be correlated to other inputs, including survey results.

• Social media comments: Modern analytics tools can monitor social media to capture conversations about a brand. It can then turn this indirect feedback into data that can be used with other information to produce useful insights about the customer experience.

• Verbatim text: Some of the most valuable feedback collected by surveys is contained in the freeform text fields. This provides the "why" behind survey responses. Aggregating verbatim text and transforming it into useful data is a task that analytics software can perform effectively.