For the past month, I’ve been reading a 900-page book. It’s a book that had been sitting on my shelf for a while, and when I finally decided to pick it up, I was intimidated before I even opened it. Nine hundred pages felt like a lot. I remember looking at the book and wondering how long it would take me to get through it.
Once I started reading, a different question came to mind: Where is this going? For the first few hundred pages, I was trying to figure out the story. There were characters and details I wasn’t sure would become important, and I couldn’t quite see how everything was going to come together. But I kept reading.
Yesterday, I reached the halfway point, and suddenly, I understood it. Pieces that had seemed disconnected started to make sense. I could see the buildup that had been happening all along, and for the first time, I had a sense of where the story was going. And now, I’m hooked.
It made me think about how we look at the customer experience.
A customer’s experience is made up of more than one interaction. There are different moments and experiences that shape how they view a company. A single survey response or CSAT score can give us an important piece of the story, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us everything.
The more context we have, the better we can understand what is behind the feedback and what it means for the overall experience. Asking the right follow-up questions, looking at responses over time, and considering the different touchpoints in a customer’s journey can help us connect those individual pieces and see the bigger picture
Just like a book, sometimes you have to look at more than one chapter to understand the story. And sometimes, that means being patient enough to let the story unfold. The more we take the time to understand the full story, the more meaningful the insights can become. The goal isn’t just to collect feedback. It’s to understand what the feedback is telling us.
Madison Gorneault – Junior Research Coordinator
