FWD Insurance

Gallant Lee

Customer Experience Authority

Expanding Our Listening Posts

As a Customer Experience practitioner, I love hearing from customers. I want to know what they like about us and, more importantly, what they don't. As the saying goes, your harshest critics are your biggest fans. It's often the voice of unhappy customers that deserves our closest attention because it tells us what we need to fix to deliver a better experience for everyone.

With that in mind, it comes down to how we set up our listening posts.

For many organizations, that still means customer satisfaction surveys. Whether it's a quick transactional survey after an Uber ride or a longer relationship survey such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), surveys have become the conventional way of collecting customer feedback.

The challenge is that surveys require customers to respond proactively. Today, survey fatigue is commonplace. Customers receive survey invitations everywhere they go, and many simply ignore them. What we end up hearing is the voice of the handful of customers who are willing to complete a survey, while many others remain silent.

This is where I believe GenAI gives us an opportunity to rethink how we listen. Rather than relying solely on surveys, we can start bringing together the many signals’ customers leave behind throughout their interactions with us. By expanding our listening posts beyond surveys, we can build a much richer understanding of what our customers are really experiencing.

Let Customer Behavior Tell the Story

The first opportunity lies in digital behavior.

Every interaction on our website or mobile app tells us something. Where customers pause, what they search for, where they abandon an application or which pages they revisit all provide clues about their experience. In the past, analyzing this amount of behavioral data wasn't easy. There was simply too much noise to separate meaningful insights from everything else.

Today, AI can do much of that heavy lifting. Instead of looking at individual interactions, we can identify patterns across thousands or even millions of customer journeys. Sometimes, what customers do tell us even more than what they say. More importantly, it allows us to identify friction before customers even decide to tell us about it.

Tap into Unsolicited Feedback

Digital behavior is only one part of the picture. Customers also tell us a great deal through the conversations they have with us every day.

They speak to our call center agents, visit service centers, chat with sales representatives, send emails and submit complaint letters. Unlike surveys, these conversations aren't prompted by us. They happen because customers genuinely need help, have questions or want something resolved. That makes them one of the most authentic sources of customer insight.

If we take the time to analyze these conversations collectively, recurring issues and opportunities begin to emerge. Those insights can often tell us just as much as a survey response, if not more.

Monitor Social Sentiment

Beyond our own channels, there's another source of insight that's becoming increasingly difficult to ignore: social sentiment.

Comments in the public domain aren't always easy to verify, and I wouldn't treat every post as customer truth. However, when similar conversations begin appearing repeatedly, they often point to broader shifts in expectations or emerging concerns. Looking at those discussions as clusters of commentary rather than isolated opinions helps reveal trends that may eventually influence customer satisfaction.

Going beyond surveys isn't about collecting more feedback. It's about recognizing that people are already telling us what they need in many different ways. GenAI is making it much easier to connect those signals, uncover meaningful patterns and turn them into action. The better we listen, the better we understand. And that puts us in a much stronger position to create experiences that truly matter.