It used to be that retailers considered the four “P’s” of marketing when pushing their wares to consumers: product, price, promotion and place. Today, however, not many brands can rely on a single “P” to differentiate, but are instead dependent on one big “E:” experience.
It used to be that retailers considered the four “P’s” of marketing when pushing their wares to consumers: product, price, promotion and place. Today, however, not many brands can rely on a single “P” to differentiate, but are instead dependent on one big “E:” experience.
While the rise of Amazon originally created a serious question about whether fast, easy, and varied e-buying would largely replace traditional brick-and-mortar retail, the last year has turned the conversation to something more complex. Amazon, Warby Parker, and other born-digital brands have increased their investment in physical stores, bowing to the undeniable fact that some experiences — or components of the experience — simply can’t happen in the digital sphere.
Our 2018 Retail CX Trends study asked consumers whether a “recent, enjoyable” shopping experience occured at a physical store, digitally, or through a combination of physical and digital. More than half of consumers (53 percent) said it was in a store.
The research also showed an interesting trend: The younger the consumer, the more likely they are to have enjoyable retail experiences in the digital realm alone, and as a hybrid blend of digital-physical. Brick-and-mortar stores will continue to be essential touchpoints, but retailers must elevate and embed digital elements to become and stay relevant to their next-gen customers.
Our researchers wanted to know what elements of a retail interaction elevate a mere purchase to an experience. In looking at both the quantitative and qualitative data, we saw a interesting story emerge. Coming in at No. 2 was Personalization. Part of what elevates a brand experience is making customers feel special. And while retailers are directing the large majority of resources toward digital personalization, 30 percent of respondents said personalized treatment in stores is what elevates a mere purchase to an “experience.”
Now for the top-ranked response: Product quality. At first read, this may feel anticlimactic. After all, quality doesn’t have the same sparkle as some of the other options, like multisensory elements like smell, taste, touch, or access to experts. What this rather mundane-sounding selection indicates consumers’ focus on the experience beyond the initial purchase — the enduring impression that a good, quality take-away creates long after the transaction. Each time your customers engage with the item or service reinforces a positive or negative impression toward the brand.
The Forgotten Experience
Retailers often forget that giving feedback about an experience is actually part of the experience. They over-survey their customers with questions that they want answers to, and do so in old-school, multiple choice formats.
Our researchers wanted to know what kind of feedback experience consumers consider the “ultimate” experience. The top pick, by far, was the ability to give ratings at 88 percent. Thanks to the ease, quickness, and increasing gamification of ratings, this was not a surprise.
The next three picks included participating in focus groups (35 percent), speaking naturally via voice assistants like Siri or Alexa (26 percent), and sharing images (25 percent).
While making feedback fun and simple is nice for customers and can produce a mountain of valuable structured data to analyze, their stated willingness to use new technologies to share more detailed, more personal data is worth noting. In line with other topics in the study, younger consumers are more willing to engage with brands in “intelligent” conversations; a gift that brands should embrace.
To learn more about what your consumers need and want from their retail experiences, get your free copy of “The 2018 Retail CX Trends Report” today!
I’ve heard a lot of CX and marketing pros declare the old-school type of loyalty -- “faithfulness to which one is bound by pledge or duty” according to Merriam-Webster -- is dead. We wanted test this assumption while also exploring whether there might just be more complexity to customers’ commitments.
Last week, I covered findings from InMoment’s 2018 US Retail CX Trends Report that discussed how brands can earn their customers’ trust. This time I’ll delve into the second theme: Loyalty.
I’ve heard a lot of CX and marketing pros declare the old-school type of loyalty — “faithfulness to which one is bound by pledge or duty” according to Merriam-Webster — is dead. We wanted test this assumption while also exploring whether there might just be more complexity to customers’ commitments.
We started by asking about the object of consumers’ loyalty: do they feel more connected to brands, or to they tend to gravitate to specific products or services?
More than half of consumers gave a mixed response, saying that it depends on the brand or product/service. Slightly more (26 percent versus 21 percent) of customers said they tend to feel more loyalty to brands versus products. Millennials were the most definitive group, with 30 percent saying they feel loyal to brands.
For retailers, this is a critical distinction. Consumers are loyal to what and where they find value. Brand-level loyalty may be more about lifestyle or aspiration, while fealty to specific products may be more about efficacy. Of course there are products that have achieved near-brand status like iPhones that probably combine both motivators.
Knowing why customers commit can inform an incredible range of business activities, from brand messages and new product development, to demand generation campaigns and experience design.
The next topic we looked at round loyalty is how and why it develops, anas well as unravels.
The data revealed that for both scenarios, it’s a journey. The large majority of shoppers — 80 percent — said they “grew to love” a brand over time; the cumulative effect of great products, service, buying experiences, positive reviews and recommendations from others. Fifteen percent experienced “love at first sight,” and 7 percent committed after a glowing recommendation from a trusted source.
When it comes to breaking up with a brand, nearly two thirds (58 percent) of US consumers said it takes several “really bad” experiences in order to make the hard choice to leave; with 34 percent saying it’s more a matter of “growing apart” as they experienced a gradual decrease in what was special. Just 19 percent of customers said they only give a brand one chance to fail before they leave.
So what does this mean? Brands shouldn’t get too comfortable, though. While the research demonstrates that today’s retail customers can be quite loyal, there’s a limit to their commitment. Nearly 50 percent of customers say they’ve left a brand to which they were loyal to go to a competitor that is better at meeting their needs. Failing to stay relevant will accelerate the exit of even your most loyal customers.
For those fortunate brands that achieve loyalty status with their customers, the benefits are tangible and significant.
Long-term Relationships: A whopping 77 percent of consumers say they’ve held relationships with specific brands for 10 or more years. This is even true of 60 percent of Millennials, despite being relatively young.
More, More, More: 61 percent of loyal customers go out of their way to buy from them, and 60 percent will make more frequent purchases (that number rises to 70 percent among Millennials); 50 percent will purchase more products.
Tell a Friend: 75 percent of loyal customers will recommend a brand to friends and family.
Because we’re in the business of customer feedback, we also wanted to know how loyalty affects customers’ willingness to share data generally, and their feedback about their experience specifically. Here’s what the data revealed: Customers who feel high levels of trust and loyalty are significantly more likely to share ratings (in the 90 percent range for both) and detailed commentary (both exceeded 70 percent) about their experiences. A good number (30%) are also willing to hand over personal data (name, age, location, etc.), and 41% are up for sharing their purchase data (how much, what, where) with trusted brands.
While these numbers aren’t astronomical, they’re an important place to start. Establish trust first, and then deliver consistent value over time. It’s a long and complex road, but one brands must travel if they expect savvy customers to had over something they realize is precious.
Employers know that hiring individuals who are a good fit is important to the company’s ultimate success, but not everyone recognizes that hiring is just the beginning. In the healthcare industry in particular, where burnout rates have been increasing at alarming rates, monitoring employee sentiment and getting feedback to improve their engagement is crucial to retaining staff and delivering superior patient experience.
Understanding employee sentiment is a critical responsibility of HR, especially in healthcare
Engaged employees feel internal motivation to go above and beyond the call of duty for patients. For example, an engaged food service worker in a hospital will feel motivated to make sure food is delivered hot. When employees feel more connected to their jobs, they will go the extra mile to provide great quality care and research backs that up.
Keeping health professionals engaged has been shown to have positive impact on:
Patient satisfaction
Employee Turnover and Absenteeism
Patient Loyalty and Advocacy
Revenue
Monitoring employee sentiment and making use of feedback
Employee engagement is a challenge no matter what size an organization is, but it is especially difficult and important when you’re a large healthcare company. With most large enterprise organizations, human resources has systems for gathering and monitoring employee feedback channels. But you miss out on an opportunity to improve their employee happiness and engagement if you sit on all the open-ended feedback you receive from employee surveys.
Qualitative feedback can be organized into themes using machine learning
A Fortune 100 healthcare company approached Wootric for help making their voice of employee survey program actionable. This company’s employees already respond to engagement surveys on a regular basis. This provides a score to track over time and rich open-ended feedback, ripe for analysis.
But with thousands of feedback comments waiting to be analyzed, understanding the “why” behind their employee engagement scores was difficult. In addition to that feedback, the company was seeing relevant feedback on review websites like Glassdoor and Indeed. They were interested in this data because it offered a perspective that might not be shared on their internal pulse surveys.
This is a lot of feedback to process.
The good news is, employee feedback typically clusters into topic areas. Wootric text analytics algorithms are trained to recognize, including these themes:
Benefits & Compensation
Training
Systems
Workload
Management (direct management and overall leadership)
Health/wellness
Sentiment & text analytics provide insight into survey comments
The healthcare company now receives themes and uncovered valuable insight in their Wootric dashboard. Each comment is tagging with relevant themes and each tag is assigned a sentiment (positive, negative, neutral).
In this fictional example dashboard, the human resources team can dig into the bucket of comments associated with “systems”, which covers new technology and hardware.
The algorithms do all the tedious, normally time-consuming, work of reading qualitative feedback and organizing each comment into different buckets with tags. Our data scientists and customer success team then conduct a review of the newly structured data to ensure our client received quality, actionable insights out of the gate.
Benefits of real-time sentiment analysis of employee feedback
We work with human resource professionals to accomplish these goals:
Understand what impacts employee morale
For example, sentiment analysis can help you understand the impact of a roll-out of a new software system or benefit plan. When you have the data, you can move beyond anecdotes and hunches and measure the overall impact.
Understand engagement issue by employee role, e.g. doctors, staff
Nurses and surgeons both care for patients, but their responsibilities and goals will be very different from a pharmacist or receptionist. Different roles all have different concerns and enabling employees is much easier when you know who needs what. Segmenting your data by roles helps human resources teams to identify role-specific problems and address different concerns.
Use data to guide strategic plans to improve employee satisfaction
You may be hearing feedback from people all the time about how you can improve processes, the working environment, etc, but until you’ve quantified all of that feedback, it’s just anecdotal. Human resources teams are able to prioritize projects to most effectively improve employee satisfaction. There are impactful, strategic wins that you can make hidden in the comments you receive. Be sure not to miss them!
Risk management & incident detection
One benefit of analyzing online reviews is that you’ll understand what influences your company’s reputation as an employer. You’ll know how you’re perceived as well as why you’re perceived that way. In addition, anonymity on these kinds of forums means that current employees may be more honest about something serious–including sexual harassment or discrimination.
For our customer, it’s not enough to be on the cutting edge of technology when it comes to medical equipment and methodology. To provide quality care, they have made employee engagement a priority. Taking a modern approach to employee feedback with text and sentiment analytics makes improving employee happiness less about sorting through a flood of data, and all about taking action.
Unlock insight about employee engagement.
Book an InMoment demo.
10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program
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88 percent of respondents agree that trust is “extremely important” when deciding where to shop (with 40 percent say they strongly agree). It’s not surprising that customers want to shop with brands they trust. What is surprising is that brands might have some misconceptions about what earns and breaks customer trust.
Today’s empowered customer has brands asking themselves a major question: Do ideals like trust and loyalty still exist between individuals and institutions?
It’s a fair question. Customers in 2018 have endless options when it comes to retailers, so brands need to differentiate themselves in order to get and keep their customers loyal—or risk losing out to a competitor. Additionally, in the fallout of recent customer data scandals, it’s understandable that customers may not have the same level of trust when it comes to brands.
It’s the blurry lines around these two topics that inspired InMoment’s most recent study of retail customer experience (CX) trends.. We surveyed 1,300 U.S. consumers to understand the state of trust and loyalty, as well as customer perception about retailers’ attempts to offer more experiences versus simple transactions. What we found was a veritable goldmine of good news and informative insights that we’ve compiled into the “2018 Retail CX Trends Report.”
We found that trust and loyalty definitely exist (and definitely matter to customers), but there are three major themes our research uncovered that are vital to understanding the nature of these two sentiments between brands and customers in 2018. In this post, I’d like to share the first theme we uncovered in our research: Trust and mistrust are EARNED.
Consider this statistic from our research: 88 percent of respondents agree that trust is “extremely important” when deciding where to shop (with 40 percent say they strongly agree). It’s not surprising that customers want to shop with brands they trust. What is surprising is that brands might have some misconceptions about what earns and breaks customer trust.
When brands talk about gaining and keeping their customers’ trust, most discussions and assumptions center on data security and privacy. Major events like the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal, the launch of GDPR in Europe, and discussions over more stringent national legislation continue to push this issue to the top of newsfeeds. However when we asked consumers about the most important actions retailers can take to build trust, the top pick by far (55 percent) was “deliver what they promised.” Keeping data safe came in at just 13 percent, and other factors like personalization and supporting shared values registered only in the single digits.
The inverse is also true, and to an even greater degree. The failure to live up to a brand’s promise was the “biggest deal breaker” for consumers, with 67 percent choosing this as the chief reason for losing faith with brands they previously loved. Failing to keep data safe and sharing it without permission registered at just 17 percent.
To recap, trust definitely matters to customers, isn’t solely determined by data privacy, and can be broken if brands don’t follow up on their promise. But what does it mean for the bottom line?
Well, data indicates there’s a real payoff for earning and keeping consumers’ trust. Approximately two-thirds of consumers will buy more, shop more often, and recommend trusted retailers to friends and family. Nearly 50 percent of consumers say they are willing to spend 11-50 percent more with brands they trust a lot, versus those they trust very little. And nearly 10 percent say they’d spend more than 70 percent with trusted retailers.
When it comes down to it, a customer’s trust in your brand really does pay, but it is not simply given. It must be earned.
TELUS is Canada’s largest healthcare and IT provider. They are also the fastest growing national telecom. However, in 2016, TELUS’ CX program was fragmented. They set to work and less than 18 months later, they turned their CX program around and saved $1 million year-over-year which resulted in a 100 percent volume increase in feedback and 45 percent SMS response rate across 3,000 VoC users. By focusing their efforts on reaching more customers with proactive recovery, they have seen a $5 million-dollar opportunity in churn reduction.Their concentration on the user experience and a comprehensive customer follow-up strategy benefited their bottom line. In a recent webinar, Stavros Davidovic, CX Manager at TELUS, shared the details of their program and the numbers behind their CX efforts.
You Need the Right Team
In order to achieve the type of growth experienced by TELUS, having the right team is critical. This needs to be a dedicated internal CX team. Team members need to be empowered to remove barriers, improve timelines, and develop themselves and others as subject matter experts.
Furthermore, as a part of the internal CX team, there needs to be a passionate executive sponsor that challenges the CX team daily. Those that support the CX team in the organization also need to have fair access to resources. Cross-functional alignment is key. Having the right team is not enough, if a customer centric mindset is not ingrained in the organization.
Establish a Customer-Centric Identity
Having a customer-centric identity at an organization means that customer experience is considered at every interaction. At TELUS, the goal is to not only collect feedback and act on feedback, but to do it at every step of the customer journey. This allows for an always up to date pulse on how the customers are feeling, which enables to TELUS to act accordingly. Part of having a customer-centric identity is having a hub for all things feedback related. This allowed for TELUS to be more transparent internally, as well as provide a place for reference material and support. One important part of keeping a customer-centric mindset is to ask the right questions.
Ask the Right Questions
Customers may not give out the detailed feedback you are looking to find. That is why it is critical to ask the right questions. Not just asking the right questions but asking them at the proper key points in order to maximize the impact of feedback. By asking the right questions at key points, you’ll be able to keep your brand consistent, invitations timely and personalized, emphasize the value of feedback to the customer, and properly act on the feedback.
“Customers aren’t interacting with you because they want to, but because they have to. You have to be mindful of that.”
From Fragmented to First-Class
In just 18 short months, TELUS saw a $1 million dollar increase in annual savings, 100 percent increase in volume of feedback, an increased SMS response rate, and a churn reduction of $5 million by reaching 15% more customers. These results were due to establishing the right team that was cross-functional with an executive sponsor, establishing a customer-centric identify that put the customer first in every situation, and asking the right questions at the right point in the customer journey. These things allowed TELUS to slingshot their fragmented CX program to being world-class. For more information and If you’d like to watch the full webinar, you can do so here.
CX metrics help us understand our company’s relative position, reinforce expectations and key behaviors in our teams, and quantify our level of impact and achievement. Because of this, many program owners and stakeholders spend their time agonizing over what questions to ask of their customers. Though this is important, I would like to suggest that CX experts begin with a different approach, asking: What business outcome do we want to influence and why?
When it comes to metrics, the human race is a little obsessed. We measure our weight, height, IQ, wealth, and now our followers on social media. Those of us in customer experience (CX) take metrics even more seriously, and for good reason.
CX metrics help us understand our company’s relative position, reinforce expectations and key behaviors in our teams, and quantify our level of impact and achievement. Because of this, many program owners and stakeholders spend their time agonizing over what questions to ask of their customers. Though this is important, I would like to suggest that CX experts begin with a different approach, asking: What business outcome do we want to influence and why?
It’s easy to get stuck on what your measuring. After all, it makes your CX program tangible, but when it comes down to it, you want your program to create real impact. That impact can only be shown with the right metrics.
You may be creating the first ever metric framework for your company or you may have historically tracked certain metrics, but have a feeling they just aren’t working for you any more. Either way, if you want to elevate your programs and practices, you’ve got to be deliberate about your metrics. How? Here are four guiding principles for choosing and implementing metrics with meaning:
Principle #1: Design with the End in Mind
It used to be that program owners would start their programs off by turning to each other and asking, “what have we always wanted to know about our customers?” The result was surveys populated with “best guess” questions that provided some information, but not much direction. This method causes a disconnect in the relationship between customer listening, CX improvement, and ROI understanding.
To avoid this confusion, it’s important to start at the end by defining what you want to achieve before you even start. What meaningful financial and intrinsic value can this program drive for your organization? The answer to this question should point you towards more specific metrics; choose the ones that are closely tied to your value proposition, customer promise, and are aligned with your strategy. If you start with your goals in mind, you’ll be able to make sure your metric framework will provide real meaning by helping further your greater goals as a company.
Principle #2: Give the People What They Want
This point may seem obvious for any industry, but it’s meaning requires a little more explanation when it comes to metrics. By this point, I mean that you need to be hypersensitive as to who your stakeholders are when you select metrics for your program. The three most common stakeholder groups I’ve seen in my experience are the company as a whole, it’s employees, and, of course, your customers.
Each of these groups will have specific sets of needs. When selecting metrics, you need to tailor your choices—and the messaging with which you deliver them— to align with the assets of the business and experience those groups most care about. For example: the metrics you choose for your company will align more with business results, whereas for your customers it will concern more of overall satisfaction or ease.
Principle #3: Quit Living in the Past
I like to follow up this third principle, “quit living in the past,” with “unless your boss says you have to.” When I say the past, I am referencing past data and practices. Most often people don’t want to mess with their historical data, so they’re afraid to ask questions in new ways or start new initiatives for fear that the data won’t match up. To them I say that if you allow yourself to be paralyzed by the politics of historical data, your program will never evolve and therefore will never improve.
The way forward is to have an honest conversation about metrics with meaning. In this conversation, you and your other stakeholders will find that your metrics haveto change as your business changes. Otherwise, your metric framework will be out of context, therefore limiting the value of any insight gained from that framework. Living in the past is then the common culprit of flat metrics; whereas adapting, insightful metrics evolve with your business so they can inform and inspire real change.
Principle #4: There’s Value in a Good Story
Although metrics are vital for you program, it’s important to remember this Albert Einstein quote: “Not everything that counts can be counted.” Traditional scales, ratings, and numbers may only take you so far. The future of metrics lies in your ability to leverage unstructured feedback to shape what you will measure and why. In other words, we can modernize the approach and use customer’s qualitative story about their experience to create metrics that matter.
In unstructured feedback, customers are already telling you what they care about most. At InMoment, we have developed a sentiment scoring algorithm that interprets the value of the customer experience based on what they write (or tell you via voice or video feedback) instead of just what they score. In a very compelling case study with an InMoment client, we found that our sentiment score trends exactly as NPS and OSAT scoring; and can even be used to predict scores, forward and back. How’s that for a game changing approach to metrics?!
When it comes to deciding on your metric framework, you have two choices: are you curious about your customer experience, or are you serious about using the right metrics to get the right intelligence for real business impact? I don’t know about you, but the decision seems pretty obvious to me. When you choose your metrics based on the value and meaning they present, you set yourself up for a CX program that will propel your organization into a future of success.
If you want to learn more about crafting metrics with meaning—including specific case studies and practical approaches—watch the full webinar, “CX Metrics: Choosing and Implementing the Right Ones for Your Business!” Click here to access!
What’s your biggest problem as a Product Dev professional? Too many demands and not enough time? Limited resources? Oddly enough, none of those topped the list for Hiten Shah’s crowd.
Hiten Shah (of KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, and Quick Sprout fame) recently wrote in his newsletter that “the problems people have on Product teams fall into two main categories: Customer Feedback and Alignment.” This conclusion came after Hiten asked his readers to share their biggest product problems, and in more than 100 replies, those two themes emerged as the leaders.
Wootric helps customers gather, organize, categorize and analyze customer feedback – at volume – every day. And we’ve got a few insights into how Product teams can solve the issues that come with customer-centricity – while improving alignment at the same time.
Let’s go through the problems real Product professionals sent Hiten Shah point by point.
“Fast/Effective ways to quickly recap and synthesize qualitative research”
Qualitative data – ie. freeform responses versus ratings or multiple choice answers – are notoriously difficult to sift through and analyze. It’s only recently that, with advanced technology and machine learning, it’s become much easier to tag, sort, and assign sentiment to qualitative feedback at scale.
Source: CXInsight™ Dashboard
Tagging, in particular, is a huge time-saver when you switch from just manual tagging to auto-tagging. Tagging comments with their major themes is the first step towards conducting frequency analysis to identify trending topics – or find relevant feedback with a click.
Using an NPS survey with an open-ended comments section, for example, you might find that your ‘detractors’ (low scorers) comments tend to be tagged with “slow loading time” or you may see a specific feature request recurring.
Yep, modern customer feedback software should be able to deliver every comment with a feature request, for example, tagged and prioritized by frequency, from the highest-value customers, in about a second.
You can even use tags to route specifically tagged feedback straight to the appropriate department for follow-up. No need to hunt for bugs – the bugs will come to you! (Don’t they always?)
“It’s [customer feedback] very subjective and sometimes doesn’t have context, therefore I take it with a grain of salt, but engineers may not see it that way and want to address the feedback immediately.”
When your customer feedback comes primarily through surveys that *don’t* include open-ended responses (to gather all of that golden qualitative data), it’s impossible to get the context you need to evaluate the issue and possibly solve it.
But understanding the why behind NPS, CES and CSAT scores (to name a few) isn’t all the context you need to decide where to allot your time and resources.
You literally have to consider the source.
Is the feedback coming from a high-value, ideal client? Is your existing survey solution capable of identifying those markers?
And for even more context – you can target customer surveys based on product milestones. For example, you can set a CES survey to deploy after new feature use to find out how easy (or difficult) new customers think it is to use.
“Feedback overwhelm – how to prioritize what users want/need the most.”
An overwhelming number of customer comments can leave you feeling like you are trying to drink from a fire hydrant. It’s time to talk about the wonders of machine learning.
Historically, extracting insights from piles of unstructured feedback has been difficult, expensive and time-consuming. That is not the case today. When you need insight from feedback at scale, it is time to invest in text and sentiment analysis using software with natural language processing.
Machine learning has come a loooong way. Yes, algorithms must be trained to understand your company and customers, so chose a software vendor that will keep their team in the loop and ensure you’re getting good insights right off the bat. Then the software just gets better and better at telling you what is most important to your customers.
Source: Wootric CXInsight™ Dashboard
Wootric CXInsight™ combines natural language processing with sentiment analysis to categorize feedback based on what matters most for your customers. When you know why your customers love you — or don’t — prioritization becomes a much easier task.
“Having a regular cadence of customer interaction to develop insights and product intuition.”
Okay, there’s no excuse – this is so easily doable. You can set any CX survey you want to deploy on a regular basis, or, deploy after customers complete specific milestones. Having to go get customer feedback shouldn’t be something you have to think about. It should be automatic! Part of your daily, weekly, or monthly routine.
But, it’s only that easy if you’ve got software that makes it that easy – let’s be honest here. Modern customer feedback software can integrate with Slack, Intercom, or whatever you use, as well as deliver surveys to customers while they’re in your app, and deliver it to you tagged, sorted, and prioritized.
Regularly!
You can have your finger on the pulse of customer satisfaction and will know immediately if there’s any fluctuation. As an added bonus, give a pat on the back to whoever built an update or solution for customers so they can see the results in action!
“My main problem is to get to know our audience and talk directly to them.”
Surveys are great – we love them. But you know what? Even with a qualitative feedback field, a survey can’t take the place of a real, person-to-person conversation. And usually, the biggest barrier to having those conversations is making the time.
We can’t pick up the phone for you, but we can save you time. Enough time to schedule interviews with your customers and get even deeper insights that they may never tell you in writing.
“In Product we’re expected to be customer-centric. We’re supposed to get feedback and talk to customers all the time. It’s literally our day job. But that’s on top of making sure we’re focused on building the right things and helping our teams ship too.”
Here’s the thing, Product friends. You aren’t the only department that has to be “customer-centric” and talk to customers all the time and review steady streams of feedback. So to make this part of your job easier, you might have to reach out to other departments and make customer-centricity a multi-team effort.
If you have a Customer Success department, start there – you might find that the Customer Success Manager is your new BFF. They’re also talking to customers every day, and in many ways, they’re closer to the problems customers face than you are. Most CSMs would be delighted to build better relationships with their Product Dev departments, working together to answer the question “What can we do to help our customers achieve success?”
“It’s not easy and it isn’t getting easier. Customer feedback can come from anywhere: Customer support requests, live chats, social media, the sales team, customer reviews, competitor research, and more. Adding to the pile are the endless opinions about what to do with the feedback from people on our teams.”
It’s not easy – true. But it is getting easier to solve qualitative feedback issues with modern customer feedback software!
Sorry, we can’t help with the ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ problem – that’s right up there with finding the cure for the common cold. We find that if you have to pick one source to guide product, NPS feedback is the going to be the most actionable. That said, when it comes to gathering customer feedback from many sources into one, easily searchable place, modern technology comes to the rescue again.
What you want to look for is a customer feedback program that can pull all of customer comment sources together, like NPS or CSAT feedback, user interviews, support tickets, app store reviews, social and analyze those comments in a way that lets you see the big picture and slice & dice by theme, sentiment, survey date, and data source.
10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program
This game-changing guide offers an in-depth exploration of how to build and implement a fully-stacked integrated CX program that stands at the forefront of today’s business evolution.
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Every CX program is different. Each company has a unique set of internal and external circumstances that require a customized action plan. In order to create the right CX strategy, it is important to understand where you are and where you want to take your program. From there, any program can take the right steps toward success.
In the world of customer experience (CX), your efforts can successfully differentiate you from your peers, but in order to achieve this, you need to focus on more than simply listening to customers and acting on that data. A successful CX program requires continuous evolution and advancement to adapt to a company’s ever-changing landscape. When working with brands to optimize their CX programs we refer to this program evolution as CX Maturity.
Every CX program is different. Each company has a unique set of internal and external circumstances that require a customized action plan. In order to create the right CX strategy, it is important to understand where you are and where you want to take your program. From there, any program can take the right steps toward success.
In order to figure out where your program stands in terms of CX strategy, alignment, and engagement, there are four major areas you need to consider for CX Maturity:
Cultural
The cultural aspect of CX Maturity refers to how well your organization is aligned with your CX vision, program, and its goals. An advanced program is well socialized and employees are familiar with the program. They are invested, as the culture of the organization is customer-centric and puts the customer at the center of all decisions. There is also a well-established cross functional team, CX strategy, and employee engagement program.
Technological
A CX program that is technologically mature will have an advanced customer listening program that includes collecting, analyzing, and reporting capabilities. This technology allows companies to transform the way they interact with customers, to start intelligent conversations, and to utilize direct, indirect, and inferred feedback. It will incorporate AI, advanced data science, and cutting-edge features that transform simple metrics into meaning.
Analytical
Mature analytical programs incorporate customer and employee experience data as well as operational, CRM, segmentation, and other data sources to uncover real intelligence that impacts the business. Leveraging these data sources creates a holistic view of the company and enables you to get insights that siloed data cannot provide. These programs also leverage Voice of Employee data to understand internal employee’s perspective on the customer experience. Mature programs are able to get to the bottom of customer issues, discover root cause, and act on customer intelligence.
Business Value
Last, but possibly most important, is the question of whether or not your program provides you with real business value. CustomerThink recently showed that less than one-third of CX professionals are seeing tangible results from their CX program. A program that has reached full CX maturity will have a drawn out ROI framework, complete with a detailed plan for measuring success. CX metrics are tied to overall business objectives and the CX team is able to show ties to business outcomes. The value of the program is well known throughout the company.
When you are able to assess each of these individual areas of your organization, you can piece together a clear picture of the maturity of your CX program. After your assessment, you can then set goals, create a plan, and get on your way to evolving your CX program.
The sale of a product marks the beginning of a business relationship – a relationship that only becomes truly profitable through the service relationship that follows. Ideally, that relationship would last throughout the product and customer lifecycle. Dealer vehicle services, therefore, are not just something that you are obliged to offer customers after you sell them something: It is an essential part of a profitable, long term business model. Predictive maintenance (PdM) – as opposed to routine ex-post or preventive maintenance – offers companies the chance to fundamentally transform their service and business model. For that to happen, they must start seeing PdM not just as a means of collecting data, but as a vital tool for creating additional value in an active partnership with their customers. PdM combines the topics of service and digitization and opens significant new value pockets. But to turn this immense theoretical opportunity into solid reality, dealer service is obliged also to meet certain conditions. Above all, they need to understand that PdM, as a form of “Services 4.0,” is far more than just a question of routine oil change reminders.
Dealer service centers…at the center of the customer loyalty loop
There’s little question that, for the near future, all eyes will be on dealership service departments as the primary source of dealership profit. It’s about time! Service centers have been the primary profit producers for decades. But consistent service customer retention is the unit responsible for bringing those sold customers back for the next showroom sale. Thus the old saying that “sales sells the initial vehicle once, service sells the “all the rest” has never been truer.
The Evolution of the dealer Business Development Center (BDC)
In its day, the launch of the dealership Business Development Center marked a monumental change in the traditional retail auto sales model. Up until then, use of the telephone was left to the discretion of sales agents, who were trained and managed primarily to focus on face to face sales and the “now” transaction. The BDC marked the first formalized effort to improve on the phone skills that sales agents lacked. To be blunt…most dealer sales people are still ineffective on the phone.
When the BDC strategy spread coverage to the service center, that same focus on re-actively answering the phone, in the past was the norm. For far too many service center BDCs, that mindset is still in place today. Retail sales and service leadership speak positively about the importance of retention, but most of their efforts are still stuck in making the appointment for the “now” transaction. While autonomous vehicles and mobility seem to be the hot topic today, those realities are still years, if not decades away from the immediate needs of the day to day retail auto world.
“We are in the midst of seeing more change in the next five years than we’ve seen in the last 50 years.” Mary Barra, General Motors CEO
The connected car and predictive maintenance are the “next big thing”
Autonomous vehicles and mobility are still years off from attaining meaningful scale. Far less coverage is being dedicated to the “connected car”…with the promise of replacing mileage-based maintenance recommendations with predictive certainties. Vehicle telematics have the ability today to alert the owner of a potential breakdown ahead of the occurrence. I spoke to this opportunity in this Cafe post earlier this year. And I followed it up by this post signaling that today’s service center was not near ready to deliver those predictive alert.
So the technology part of predictive data delivery is available, but the delivery of those services at the dealer end is far from being in place. Dealer service BDCs are not equipped, both in the BDC agents’ capabilities and front line culture to deliver the interface to the end user customer.
Service BDC agents, like service center front lines, are still stuck in a reactive, “after” the breakdown culture
It’s hard to change the culture of any department in a dealership! But consider this: if service BDC agents are challenged simply to convince customers to make appointments for preventative, routine maintenance…won’t they be even more challenged to persuade customers to schedule service before a breakdown occurs? There’s a great deal of difference between scheduling inbound appointment calls and that of an outbound call attempting to convince a vehicle owner to schedule a service that will specifically prevent an impending malfunction before a breakdown occurs. Customers are inherently suspicious of dealer service preventative mileage recommendations…convincing them of predictive maintenance will be a new challenge altogether.
A new script and higher skill set for BDC agents
While service customers are familiar with mileage-based oil changes, they don’t always act in a timely manner to take action and bring the vehicle to the service center. Presently, BDC agents use repetitive calling to nudge customers to act. In other words, they focus more on reminder calls and less on persuasion skills to motivate the customer to act now. But relying on a repetitive call model won’t be effective for the future of “predictive maintenance.” Service centers will have to either train or recruit to a higher agent skill level in the future. Repetitive “reminder calls” won’t convince customers to act on a maintenance service they don’t understand. Agents must be believably persuasive to a level not practiced today.
And scripting will undergo dramatic changes as well. Repetitive “friendly reminder” calls will not be effective for owners who cannot visualize the benefit of a service that will specifically eliminate breakdowns before they occur. That call messaging will center on the agent’s ability to connecting with the “feelings” of the vehicle owner.
Service BDCs evolve from “cost/expense” to the “revenue/profit”
Most dealers are still using an antiquated P & L strategy, where sales receive all of the credit (and marketing budget) for the first sale, but for repeat sales as well. However, a high percentage of those repeat sales are the result of the positive customer experience delivered by the service center. Past customers usually don’t return for the next vehicle purchase if their service experience was unacceptable.
As customer experience manager for a large GM dealer, I was included in the weekly marketing meeting where tens of thousands of dollars were spent every month for attaining new customers. However, in all of those meetings, I never heard one mention of allocating any of those ad dollars to the service department for “retaining” repeat vehicle purchases.
Hopefully, the successes achieved with predictive maintenance will clarify even more that sales sells the first vehicle…and the positive experience delivered by the service center sells the rest.
I think in almost every industry, there is a sense of nostalgia for how things “used to be done.” I say “almost” because I know that for the customer experience (CX) industry, the way things used to be done brings one thing to mind: simple, single point customer surveys.
It’s an ugly truth, but surveys used to be the go-to method—or even the only method—for anyone looking to gather customer data. It may have worked at the time, but thankfully, we know better today.
The fact is that the modern customer doesn’t want to answer questions about what they bought and where they bought it. (After all, with all the technology available today, we should already have that information from transactional data.) Customers also don’t want to spend large amounts of their valuable time going through pages and pages of questions when they only wanted to comment on their experience.
So if the old methods aren’t creating a great feedback experience for your customers, what will work? Today, the key to creating a survey that will actually improve the customer experience is a simple shift in mindset:
Stop interrogating. Start conversations.
Whenever I think of interrogation, I think of the cliche police scene where a suspect is sitting at a table beneath a harsh spotlight while a serious looking detective drills them about what they already suspect the person has done.
There are a couple of things wrong with this interrogation picture when you apply it to customer experience. Firstly, you should never make your customer feel like they’re in the hot seat by firing question after question at them. Second, you should never ask a question that you already have the answer to. Third, interrogating the customer is not focusing on their experience, it’s focusing on what you want to know. Essentially, when your surveys feel like interrogations, they aren’t improving the customer experience. They’re taking away from it.
When you focus on starting a conversational survey, the picture completely changes because of one major fact: conversations are customer-focused. They are mindful of the customer’s time and don’t ask too many questions (they definitely don’t ask unnecessary questions.) Most importantly, they focus on what the customer wants, not what they want to get out of the customer.
So before you set out to create your next survey, think to yourself: Am I interrogating or am I starting a conversation?
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If you follow the InMoment blog, you know that we believe loyalty is the end all be all of customer experience efforts. If customers are loyal to your brand, it means they spend money with you, interact with you, and give you feedback—even better, they do so consistently. This means plenty of benefits for your organization, but it also requires quite a bit of consistency on your part.
A consistent experience is widely recognized as one of the major contributors to overall customer loyalty. Take it from Footlocker’s Director of Customer Experience Tyler Saxey, who had this to say on the subject: “That’s how you drive loyalty the most in my perspective: value and consistency. Think about Amazon. You are almost shocked if your product doesn’t arrive in 2 days, and you are willing to give them a break if it happens. If you consistently succeed, you will drive revenue. If you consistently fail, people will find other places to spend their money.”
To break it down even more, memorable experiences that happen consistently lead to loyalty, which increases a customer’s lifetime value, which increases revenue. Sounds pretty straightforward, right?
In order to get to the benefits, however, it’s vital to understand why a uniform brand experience means so much to your customers. Here are three reasons why consistency drives loyalty:
Consistency makes you reliable.
This might sound a little weird, but stick with me here. Think about your favorite comfort food. There’s a reason why that mac and cheese, fried chicken, or pizza is more than just a dish you like. The difference between it and any old salad is that your comfort food elicits an emotional response. No matter where you are in life, you can rely on that simple meal to give you a sense of comfort.
In the same way, a customer should be able to rely on you to create a certain feeling for them. Maybe they’re excited because they know you will always ship their purchases quickly or that when they call you, they’ll be met with a happy and helpful representative. No matter what, that dependability gives your customer a sense of confidence and trust because they know you can be relied upon. If they can rely upon you to deliver every time, they’ll keep coming back for more.
Consistency makes you recognizable.
In today’s crowded market, everyone is looking for a way to stand out. Everywhere you look there are new, more interesting ways that brands are marketing or re-branding themselves to differentiate from the competition.
I would like to suggest that one of the best ways to stand out is consistency. By keeping your color schemes, messaging, product presentation, and any other detail uniform across your organization, your brand will be instantly recognizable to customers. Whenever they have a need for a product or service in your industry, they will automatically think of you if you keep it consistent.
Consistency makes you a part of their lifestyle.
Because you are a consistency rockstar, customers now think of you whenever they think of the industry you’re in. Because of that simple association, whenever they need a new pair of shoes, a new car, or a vacation, they will automatically google your brand first. If they’ve bought from you before and had a great experience, they are likely to come back the next time they’re in the market for your services.
Take Starbucks as an example. I bet you can think of at least one person in your life that is a “Starbucks person.” Whenever they’re out and about and in need of coffee, they pop right over to the nearest drive thru. This is because their experience with the coffee giant has been so consistent that they don’t even need to think of where to go when they need caffeine. The brand has become so embedded in their lifestyle that the customer is guaranteed to be a regular.
If you look at it from this perspective, consistency really is key to driving customer loyalty. It helps customers form emotional attachments and automatic associations with your brand, as well as making brand a part of their routine as a consumer. In short, consistency helps you create a solid relationship with customers, and that’s a pretty big win for your customer experience and your bottom line.
Looking to become a consistency rockstar? InMoment’s CX Intelligence Cloud empowers you to identify customer pain points both on a larger scale and at a location level. To learn how this solution can be tailored to your brand, schedule a demo with one of our CX strategists today!
You’ll never see a dealership Google image that isn’t like the one above—a smiling couple, seemingly happy with their experience of buying a vehicle. But are car buyers really that happy with the sales experience they receive, or happy to have it behind them?
Are they still smiling with the dealership experience after the initial sell? Did the sales staff properly introduce them to the next phase of their dealership customer journey, the service center? Was their “service experience” with free maintenance and warranty work after, well delivered? Did the follow-up experience after the sale consist of the typical, but dated, dealership follow up email of “congratulations” and maybe even a birthday card before they were receiving “pitches” for their next vehicle purchase?
Ask most any dealer principal or general manager and they’ll tell you that customer retention is front and center on their list of priorities. But with many dealers, when you measure the dollars formally allocated towards customer retention, those numbers are usually nowhere to be found.
Where are the Customer Experience Dollars?
As Customer Experience Manager for a large automotive dealer, I was fortunate enough to be invited to weekly advertising meetings between our leadership and ad agency. The purpose was to discuss what worked, what didn’t work and what was ahead.
But never, in all those weekly meetings, over almost three years of attending, did I ever witness one discussion about retaining past customers. There was time spent discussing community events, but no time spent on a formalized strategy for retention.
What was discussed? Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Pandora, Instagram, television, radio, on-site remotes, and even newspaper to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars spent each month on “getting them” and not one formal dollar designated for “keeping them”.
It is assumed in far too many dealerships that a respectable majority of past buyers will return because of the warranty or the free first maintenance offered by the manufacture. But after that, at roughly three years for leases and five to seven years for vehicle purchases, research reveals they begin to go elsewhere for service, mainly to an independent repair shop or franchise.
The Typical Dealership Sales Model
The sales funnel has been used in retail auto for decades, but where is the “retention” part of the model? Many dealers would answer that they have their have their own rewards program for retention, but is it a rewards program that provides surprise and delight on a continual basis? Or like most dealer rewards programs that only apply discounts on products and services? What’s surprising and delightful about that?! Will that be enough reason for the client to return if the previous sales or service was poor?
Candidly, most dealer “experiences” are transactional. And when the showroom sale is completed, and the vehicle is delivered to the customer, most of the focus is on the next prospect (new prospect generated by ad dollars). Dealership retention efforts are mainly focused on the experience of buying and servicing the car, but will that top-of-mind awareness remain in the vehicle owner’s mind three years later when the lease is up? Will it trigger an initial contact with that car buyer to return to that same store five to seven years later when the vehicle owner starts a new car search?
The Loyalty Loop: an inclusive model for sales and retention
Where is “the funnel” for client retention? Where is a formalized model for dealer retention of past customers? The Loyalty Loop was developed by Mckinsey and Company, a top consulting company used by many of the country’s top companies. But look how it focuses on a loyalty loop inside the traditional sales model. That inside loop consists of what the customer experiences with the dealer between car purchases.
While rewards programs are better than nothing, those rewards are not what I would call surprise and delight. They also offer discounts that involve coming to the dealership. Even though we know that vehicle owners are usually not surprised and delighted to return to the dealer for most anything.
Here’s an example of surprise and delight. Some dealers give FREE car washes as a retention tool. All the owner needs to do is come to the service lane to redeem it. But most customers don’t want to come to the dealer for anything. How about this, give them a free “mobile” car wash. Now that’s surprise and delight!
The Ownership Retention Gap
Consider these NADA statistics with respect to the retention of previously sold customers:
Dealers spent an average of $7.00 on retaining their already sold customers (2017)
Luxury dealers spent an average of $762.00 on each vehicle sold, non-luxury spent $670.00 (2017)
Average gross on referral vehicle sales was $1,200.00 vs $817.00 for fresh “ups”
Referrals have a 51% service usage vs 29% for fresh ups
Referrals have a 96% CSI score vs 73% for fresh ups
What’s is wrong with this picture? Far too many dealerships are ignoring their past customers who would be more loyal, produce more gross per vehicle, send referrals, deliver higher CSI scores and use their dealer service center more often than “newsuspects” who consume most all of the monthly ad budget for dealers.
