Make feedback actionable with Digital Experience Monitoring & Voice of Customer

On its own, a Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) solution is a great help to identify and fix sources of friction in your journeys (such as technical errors, slow load times, or poor UX/UI design) that are frustrating, obstructing, and repelling customers. 

A good DEM solution (like Contentsquare’s) helps you uncover these issues, understand the scope, assess the business impact, and troubleshoot to find the root cause and minimize impact.

Likewise, a Voice of Customer (VoC) solution provides tremendous value on its own. Getting customer feedback in the form of survey responses, comments, interviews, and user testing will help you understand your customers pain points and desires, how they feel about your brand, and what keeps them coming back.

But as valuable as these tools are individually, combining them can supercharge your customer experience results. 

DEM + VoC allows organizations to align objective, data-driven performance metrics with subjective customer perceptions, leading to actionable insights and impactful improvements. It’s a 1 + 1 = 3 scenario if ever there was one.

And the key to this equation is provided in two words: actionable feedback. 

Let’s explain…

An example of how DEM makes VoC feedback actionable

If you already have a VoC solution, you’ll know that sometimes you get feedback that looks something like this:

“Your site is terrible! I’m never coming back again.” 

(In real life, there are probably more unprintable words in this sentence—but you get the idea.)

The question is, what do you do with this kind of non-specific feedback? If you’re using VoC on its own, the honest answer is that you feel bad about it for a minute and then you move on. 

Well, what else can you do? Without more context, this is not actionable feedback.

That’s not ideal. We know that for every person that takes the time to fill out a survey, there are probably ten more people who feel the same way but don’t bother with the survey. They’re just gone—never to return again. 

In other words, negative feedback like this is just the tip of an iceberg—and your digital experience is far from unsinkable. You need to understand what’s prompting these negative reactions.

And that’s where the power of an integrated DEM/VoC solution comes in. 

Now let’s see what the process looks like when you have both VoC and DEM to work with.

Step 1: see what they saw 

The first thing to do when getting vague, non-actionable feedback is to put yourself in the shoes of the user who gave it. The best way to do this is by viewing a replay of the user session that resulted in the feedback.

With an integrated DEM/VoC solution like Contentsquare, this is as simple as clicking a button when viewing the VoC survey response. This takes you directly to a replay of the specific session that culminated in the user’s comment.

Caption: By clicking ‘Go to Session Replay’, the Contenstquare platform user can see the session behind the feedback

After viewing the session that preceded the survey response, you may also want to view any past sessions from that same user. Contentsquare DEM makes that easy as well: just filter sessions by the user’s email address to review all sessions for that user. 

Caption: Filter sessions by email to review all of the users’ previous sessions 

Step 2: identify the issue

Now we can see exactly what the user saw—and we also have a wealth of additional information to help understand the issue.

It could be that slow page performance caused the user to be frustrated. If so, our replay summary will let us know, telling us if the user experienced sub-standard load times, or other web performance issues like excessive layout shift or poor interactivity.

Caption: Each Session Replay summary includes a listing of any performance issues such as slow loading time

We can also see every event that happened during the user’s session: every click, every gesture, and any errors that may have occurred. 

In the below example screenshot, we can see that every time the user clicked on the ‘Add to cart’ button, an API error was triggered. After trying this a couple of times, the user started ‘rage clicking’ (rapidly, repeatedly clicking), a clear sign of frustration. 

Now we’re really onto something.

Caption: This session summary shows all of the activity that led up to their negative feedback—in this case, multiple API errors 

Step 3: see how many others are having the same issue

Now that we understand the issue that caused the customer to feel so frustrated, we might ask ourselves if this issue has been experienced by others, and is causing them similar frustration.

If only one person has been impacted, that’s still not good, but there are probably more important things to worry about. 

Fortunately, using our DEM solution we can quickly and easily find out how many other sessions have been impacted.

If we pull up the error detail on our Session Replay timeline, we see there is a ‘Quantify’ button. 

Caption: Clicking ‘Quantify’ on an error detail pop-up will show you how many other users experienced the same issue

Clicking here takes us directly to our Impact Quantification screen. Here we can see that this user is not alone. In fact, over 3,000 other users have experienced the same issue during the past 30 days.

Caption: Impact Quantification shows that over 3,000 users have experienced the same issue as our VoC survey participant

Step 4: See how much it’s costing your business

So, now we know that thousands of visitors are impacted by this issue. With that information alone, we know that this is something worth fixing. But Contentsquare goes a step further and gives you an estimate of what this issue means to your business. 

Caption: Impact Quantification shows the impact of the issue on KPIs

We can see here that users who experienced this error are converting at a much lower rate than users who didn’t have the problem. 

Further, if we assume these 3,000+ users would have converted at the same rate had they not experienced the issue, the result would have been an additional $278,892 in revenues over the past 30 days.

This is definitely something we need to fix: ASAP.

Step 5: Get the information you need to fix it

Contentsquare’s DEM solution gives you all the technical details your team needs to solve the problem, including the status code and request/response details for the API call. You can open a Jira ticket directly from the troubleshooting screen, or share the details with your technical team.

Caption: Digital Experience Monitoring lets you access the technical details behind issues that you need to solve them

Unlocking actionable feedback is easy with VoC + DEM

If you’re already using Contentsquare’s DEM solution, you should consider adding our Voice of Customer solution to the mix. It’s a breeze to set up, because it leverages the same Contentsquare tag you already have installed on your site.

Creating your first survey can be accomplished in seconds, thanks to AI-powered survey generation. Just enter your goal and Contentsquare creates the survey for you! Of course, you can completely customize the survey to your liking.

Caption: Set up customizable surveys in seconds with Contentsquare’s AI-powered VoC solution

Once your responses start rolling in, Contentsquare’s AI-powered analysis tools can summarize the key findings, automatically categorize responses, and give you actionable next steps. 

And by integrating with Digital Experience Monitoring, you can:

• Dive deep into individual responses,

• find out why users are frustrated,

• see how many other users share similar frustrations, 

• assess the cost to your business, and

• get the details needed to fix the problem fast.

By combining DEM with VoC, organizations create a feedback loop where technical performance and customer sentiment continuously inform and enhance each other, leading to superior digital experiences and stronger customer loyalty.

Ready to learn more? Book a demo today to see how the combination of VoC and DEM can benefit your organization.