There are a lot of routes you could take in attempting to nail a customer experience strategy for your organization. How do you know what’s the right answer? What efforts will bring better brand recognition, increased loyalty and a proven ROI?

Those are often answers that will be relative to your specific brand, but what translates across industries are the things to avoid when mapping out and implementing your strategy. As told by ForeSee’s CEO, Larry Freed, at the Next Generation Customer Experience conference, these are the potholes to avoid in your customer experience strategies.

1. Don’t confuse feedback with measurement. These two are not the same – you can get feedback, but measuring it is yet another – crucial – step!

2. Consumers are not simple. VOC measurement is not simple. Don’t think that this process is going to be easy. Understanding and measuring the voice of the customer is a complex process but when done right it will pay off.

3. Satisfaction is not simple – it cannot be observed. While many aspects of consumer behavior can be easily watched and analyzed, how a customer feels about his/her experience is altogether more complicated and can vary with time and experiences. Make sure you’re measuring satisfaction regularly based on various criteria.

4. Beware of relying mainly on task completion. If you set your customer experience department up like a data entry factory, expect to get similar results. Customer experience officers and their staff need to be motivated to create long term results and that’s often about much more than just crossing things off a to-do list.

5. Word of mouth is important but don’t assume those who don’t recommend are detractors. Just because someone doesn’t say something about your brand to his/her friends in public doesn’t mean s/he is not doing so in private, or isn’t satisfied with your products.

6. Remember that it is not just VOC but a scientific analysis of that concept. Understanding the VOC will help but it’s the scientific analysis of it that will ensure success.

Once you’ve figured out your strategy and what you will NOT be doing, bring everything together into customer satisfaction analytics and answer the following three questions:

1. How are we doing?
2. What should we do next?
3. Why should we do it?