For many customer experience professionals, a poor NPS result is more a benchmark for opportunity than an endemic problem.

When Carsales introduced its “Instant Offer” product where dealers reach out to buyers within 24 hours, the response from the market was underwhelming, says Deb Heaphy, Head of CX for Carsales.

“When we first launched that product, it had a negative NPS. Our product owner at the time read customer feedback every single day, he was in Qualtrics dashboards, reading what was coming in real time and he was totally focused on the feedback that was coming through," she says.

What happened next, according to Heaphy, was one of the best case studies on how to embed a listening program into the product. 

The result, says Heaphy who Mi3 caught up with on the sidelines of the recent Qualtrics X4 conference in Salt Lake City, was a long-term program that led to a 77 point improvement in NPS.

“He listened to feedback, he changed the functioning of that product and the structure of the product to a point where it is one of our most successful products. That has all come about through listening to customer feedback," she says.

With more sophisticated text analysis one of the obvious and early use cases for generative AI, we asked Heaphy about the potential impact of AI to drive greater and faster improvements as CX professionals look to turn those irritation mosquito bites buried deep in customer data into product improvement gold. Even with current technology, the problems can be surfaced fairly quickly, says Heaphy.

“Those mosquito bites can be unearthed pretty quickly when we're hearing a lot of people talking about one particular issue or topic. And we see that quickly because we're in the dashboards every day," she says. “In terms of terms of AI, we've been using AI in car sales for many years. And it helps us to be more efficient. We have an AI team, so there's a lot more work coming down the line.”

On generative AI, Heaphy sees even more efficiency on the way, along with "improvements in how we can quickly identify issues that might come up. Being able to transcribe and identify problems and take action.”

Prioritisation

Identifying a customer issue and the action to take is still only part of the problem. There’s also the small matter of getting actions prioritised. Bug lists in any company tend to be long and ever-growing.

The regard with which the Voice of the Customer team is held, and the centrality of the customer to Carsales' thinking, helps to ensure feedback gets fed quickly into product improvements.

“We're at a point now where the customer is such a big focus at Carsales... understanding the customer and customer feedback is one of our core pillars," Heaphy says. “We make sure that we're part of any kind of product discussions or product ideation sessions, we are now seen as that customer expert,” she adds.