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Why are forward-thinking companies turning to always-on, always-listening tools?

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The notion of CX + EX is all the rage these days. 

As a result, ensuring that customers and team members have a positive experience from the time they join the organisation until the day they leave has become more and more vital.

Always-on listening enables employees to proactively share feedback at any point in time (for example, think of the traditional “suggestion box”, the only difference is now you get it in real-time, rather than waiting for someone to eventually discover that you’ve got mail!)

Always-on listening tools can enhance your capability to continuously learn and adapt your approaches, delivering the best possible customer and employee experiences during this challenging time.

Feedback can include anything from improvement ideas, compliance problems, or ethical concerns. The feedback is reported to a designated person at the organisation who then filters it to the appropriate audience. 

So what’s the real benefit? 

Always-on listening can create cultures of trust, empowerment and creativity because it provides opportunities for people to act responsibly, use their strengths to raise important ideas, and reinforce continuous improvement.

Always on feedback mechanisms are especially important during this time when family, employee and consumer sensitivities are so great.

A continuous listening strategy is gathering feedback more often across the customer and employee lifecycle. 

This doesn’t necessarily mean sending out pulse survey, after pulse survey. 

Employee feedback can be collected on a large scale via surveys, and results should be real-time with appropriate actions taken based on the data.

In-person feedback conversations are also vital to creating a sustainable continuous listening strategy.

Basically, the rule of thumb is;  don’t ask questions you’re not ready to take action on, and only survey as frequently as you can act upon.

Once you’ve closed a survey and communicated results, choose a focus area to discuss with customers/relatives and your team members.

And by choosing the right forum to discuss the results of the always-on feedback,  keeps them involved in the continuous listening strategy process and ensures you engage them before you start implementing any actions for improvement.

Continuous listening still means taking action

A continuous listening strategy will fail if you simply listen to feedback and then do nothing. 

The point of collecting feedback more often across the employee lifecycle is that it enables you to take targeted action.

For example, a candidate survey provides you feedback on the candidate experience that you would not likely get elsewhere. You can take that feedback and improve the recruiting process leading to better hiring.

While it may seem overwhelming to view the components of a continuous listening strategy piece by piece, mapping them along the employee lifecycle can help you decide when to launch certain surveys or plan in-person feedback sessions.

Are you looking to implement an always-on, always-listen tool in your organisation?

Are you looking for support on how to get started?

Let our team help support you early on in planning the strategy, through to implementation and ongoing monitoring.