Glossary of Terms

Deepen your understanding to drive your expertise, and share with colleagues to enlighten ideas and inspire innovation. This glossary of terms will help to elevate clarity, and guide conversations that bridge gaps across teams of shared interest in customer centricity.

What is Direct Feedback?

Direct feedback is customer input gathered by asking consumers what they think about a brand, product, customer service interaction, or other touchpoints along the customer journey. Direct feedback is typically gathered by surveying customers and the results can be used with other data, such as indirect feedback and operational data, to help businesses understand the customer experience (CX). Brands have been focusing on optimizing CX because great experiences can help increase loyalty and turn customers into brand promoters.

The surveys that collect direct feedback take many different forms and can measure different dimensions related to the customer experience. Below are some of the more common survey types.

  • Net Promoter Score® (NPS®). Surveys that capture Net Promoter Scores ask one simple, but powerful, question: “How likely is it that you would recommend [brand] to a friend or colleague?” The willingness to promote a brand indicates loyalty and is a predictor of future business growth.
  • Customer satisfaction (CSAT). Customer satisfaction surveys provide direct feedback about how a customer feels about a recent interaction or other component of CX. For example, a customer could be asked to complete a CSAT survey immediately following an online purchase or upon the completion of a customer service interaction.
  • Customer effort. A customer effort score (CES) is a measure of how easy or difficult a brand is to do business with. CES surveys are often sent out by contact centers to collect direct feedback about how much work customers had to put into getting their issues resolved.

Direct feedback can be gathered by automated customer survey tools. These applications can administer surveys in several different channels, including voice, email and chat, and then provide the results to Voice of the Customer (VOC) solutions to be included in a holistic analysis of CX and the customer journey.

About NICE Satmetrix

NICE Satmetrix is the leading global provider of Voice of the Customer (VOC) software used by the world's most forward-thinking companies to analyze and transform their customer service interactions. Our Customer Journey-based solution combines and analyzes customer interactions, solicited feedback, and operational data at enterprise scale to uncover blind spots, increase customer satisfaction and improve agent performance.

With consumers reaching out to contact centers for more reasons than ever before, providing consistent and optimized experiences is central to fostering loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value. NICE Satmetrix VOC enables businesses of all sizes to grow the value of customer service touchpoints and operationalize customer feedback.

With NICE Satmetrix VOC, the top VOC solution for contact centers, contact centers get access to:

Integrations with NICE inContact CXone and the NICE portfolio of contact center solutions

  • Superior analytics
  • Digital omnichannel and hassle-free IVR integrations
  • Customer Journey-based design
  • One-stop-shop for all your contact center VOC needs

NICE Satmetrix is the co-creator of the Net Promoter Score® (NPS®), one of the best indicators of customer loyalty and predictors of business growth. We've instilled our deep knowledge of consumer behavior into our VOC software to make NICE Satmetrix holistic VOC a true one-stop shop for Voice of the Customer with a self-service solution that meets the needs of organizations of every size.

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