Perhaps every business dreams of having the ability to peer inside the minds of their customers to know what they honestly think about the company s products and services. Finding out if your market loves or loathes your brand is like top feat, as it lets you in on what you need to do to get things right and win the industry lead. Luckily, you don t need superpowers to extract truthful insights from your audiences—they can tell your Philippine call center agents directly.

Call centers, particularly those that receive inbound customer service calls, can double as surveying bodies just by doing their supposed role. Customers contact them with a problem at hand, which they typically report along with their opinion about the brand involved. Using analytics and the traditional practice of deducing, your call center team can translate actionable insights from complaints, concerns, and even speech patterns.

But the question is: how? You can t simply listen in on every call and jot down buzzwords. Get feedback-gathering right through these four basic steps.

1. Channel the information inflow

As most call centers nowadays offer multi-channeled customer service solutions, you can use more than just the phone lines to gather feedback. But you have to pinpoint which type of information concentrates where.

For instance, if tech-related issues usually go to call center agents, then use voice channels to know how you can improve the quality of your electronic products. If your social media accounts get more questions about store locations, then you can base on tweets and Facebook comments when you need to measure how well distributed your contact numbers and addresses are.

2. Know the right timing

Timing is essential in nailing customer surveys. If you wait too long to ask about how your product fared, your customers may not be able to recall the experience well. But if ask too early, you won t likely get accurate responses.

Whether getting feedback proactively by asking or just by interpreting collected data, you need to consider the proper timing and purpose for your action. Measure how long it would take before customers could really judge your product s efficiency, and only get their opinion by then. You should also know when the information you previously gathered can be useful. The record of requests for SMS assistance may be useless now, but the time to actually use this may come once you start considering text messaging as a customer support platform.

3. Arm your staff

The very people handling your feedback channels—your employees—should know what type of information to gather and when to watch out for it. Therefore, listening for cues should be part of their training. Teach them what words or phrases hint complaining, praising, or even inconsistency when reporting an issue. They should be able to spot trends in the calls they receive: frequent complaints about delivery delays may mean that you need to check your courier service.

4. Be proactive online

Gathering feedback neither starts nor ends in your call center. There is a massive mine of customer insights on the Internet that is waiting to be discovered, so don t just rely on incoming calls and messages to sense trouble involving your brand. Your customer service representatives assigned to social media accounts can monitor your market s web activity to fix issues before they even get reported. Tools as simple as hashtags can be your weapon in keeping up with product trends and gearing up for brewing issues.