How to Craft Deliverable Brand Promises

Delivering promises is one of the most important things a brand must do for its customers. Keeping commitments is much easier said than done, but customer loyalty lives and dies by companies’ ability to follow through. Succeed, and the brand generates loyalty and retention. Fail, and the organization ends up burning bridges—potentially permanently.

So, how can brands avoid breaking promises? Well, as I outline in my recent POV on this subject, one of the ways that companies can ensure that they consistently fulfill customer obligations is to create realistic brand promises in the first place. Here’s how brands can do that.

Know Your Customer

Brands should always evaluate the promises they make through a customer’s lens. That means knowing who their customers are, what they consider to be important, what they’re looking for in an experience, and why they come to you for it. This notion is sometimes referred to as the customer’s “moment of truth” and a brand has fulfilled a promise in their eyes when it delivers that moment consistently.

To many customers, the difference between failing to keep a promise and failing to deliver on a moment of truth is miniscule. In my aforementioned POV, I talk about how a colleague of mine experienced an especially brutal broken promise: an airline flight that didn’t uphold its promised anti-COVID safety measures. Not understanding the moments of truth is one thing; understanding and then failing to deliver can be a deal breaker. Additionally, depending on the severity of the problem, some customers will not give brands a second chance.

Delivering The Goods

Companies need to clearly understand what their customers want so they can both rise to the challenge and ensure that they deliver flawlessly on that desire. Brands can increase their likelihood to succeed by building a customer experience (CX) program as part of their business operation. A decent CX program can make brands aware of customers’ wants and needs—a great CX program unites customer, employee, and marketplace perspectives to give companies a continuous, 360-degree view of the experience(s) they provide.

This approach gives brands the opportunity to know what their customers value, so they can create grounded, realistic promises that can be delivered every time. If nothing else, it’s always better to underpromise and overdeliver than to overpromise and underdeliver.

Brands that take this tack will be positioned to create not just good promises for their customers, but the right promises. Companies that pick the right brand promises and deliver at the moments of truth create customer loyalty and a  stronger bottom line for themselves.

Want to learn more about the importance of creating and keeping effective brand promises? Take a look at my article on the subject here.

Three Factors That Help Experience Programs Avoid Unanticipated Costs

Unanticipated costs can quickly become the bane of any business project, customer experience (CX) or otherwise, if they’re not carefully considered before pens have been put to paper. It’s thus imperative for CX practitioners who want to pitch their programs to anticipate and prepare for unexpected costs as much as possible.

We’ve listed the three most effective considerations that practitioners can use to anticipate and avoid unexpected experience program costs:

  • Vendor Scalability
  • Vendor Flexibility
  • Nonparticipation Costs

Factor #1: Vendor Scalability

This tip may seem gratuitous, but program scalability actually isn’t considered as often as it should be, and brands can end up paying extra for that mistake. Practitioners can avoid a lot of headaches with their own teams, the C-suite, and the accounting department by selecting an experience partner that can scale programs from the very beginning.

This approach enables brands to select and begin a program that grows alongside both their CX accomplishments and aspirations. It also allows organizations to reduce operating costs from the very beginning, which can result in both a much healthier program and a CX budget that always stays in the black. CX practitioners can use this method to strive for an ambitious program while still avoiding unanticipated costs.

Factor #2: Vendor Flexibility

Though picking an experience partner and implementing its capabilities is no small task, the days of rigid, prepackaged experience programs are drawing to a close. This is great news for businesses because they can now work with vendors to create a versatile experience solution instead of attempting to wrap themselves around an unflinching list of features (many of which a given company may not actually need).

Solution flexibility enables CX practitioners to avoid unanticipated costs by paying only for what they need from a vendor. For example, would your brand benefit from an analytics team or does that capability already exist within your organization? What about a self-service approach versus full management from the vendor? Once practitioners consider these questions, they should select a partner that’s flexible enough to meet their needs without showering them in unneeded extras and—you guessed it—unnecessary costs.

Factor #3: Nonparticipation Costs

There’s another element to cost consideration that often goes, well, unconsidered when brands talk about implementing an experience program, and that’s what happens when companies don’t have such an initiative in place.

Feedback collection, experience improvement, and customer centricity are all more important now than ever before. These ideas are the means by which brands can both create a better experience for customers and use that capability to plant a flag at the top of their vertical. Therefore, brands should consider the very real opportunity cost of not collecting, analyzing, and implementing feedback. An experience program isn’t a luxury anymore—it’s non-negotiable for any company that wants to succeed.

Taken together, these three methods can empower brands and the experience practitioners who work for them to avoid unanticipated costs and keep their programs viable. They can then use their programs to achieve what we just talked about: a meaningfully improved experience for customers and thus a more commanding presence in their marketplace.

For more information on how to effectively pitch and prove the worth of CX programs to anyone and everyone, check out our new eBook on how you can make a business case to your CFO (or anyone else) here.

Three Ways to Convince The C-Suite Your CX Program is Essential

It’s not uncommon for organizations to consider customer experience (CX) programs a nicety—something powerful, no doubt, but also just a luxury instead of an essential component of business success. This attitude prevails even as today’s marketplaces become more competitive and the COVID-19 pandemic changes customer wants and needs faster than many brands can keep pace with.

As we outline in our recent paper on this subject, proving experience programs’ worth isn’t easy, but it needn’t be the bane of CX practitioners’ existence. In fact, we’ve discovered three ways to convince the C-suite that experience programs are much more than just a garnish. These three methods are:

  • Aligning Capabilities With Strategic Objectives
  • Pitching Customer Centricity
  • Demonstrating The Power of Real-Time Feedback

Method #1: Aligning Capabilities With Strategic Objectives

As we just mentioned, marketplaces and industries are all becoming more competitive, which means that brands must strive to provide the best customer experience possible if they hope to stand out. The specific goals that businesses put forth to accomplish that vary wildly from industry to industry, but there’s one common denominator here: CX capabilities that enable these goals can take a company all the way to the top.

With that in mind, CX practitioners who want to prove the necessity of their programs need to select software that can enable business objectives. A lot of organizations take this to mean that CX software is useful only for measurement. Measurement is important, of course, but the best technology empowers brands to execute something much more important than measurement: action. A brand’s ability and willingness to take action on CX learnings determines whether that organization is a transformative leader, or a follower that’s content with management.

Method #2: Pitching Customer Centricity

This tip may sound too general, maybe even like it’s a Herculean task, but consider that the organizations that do best within their verticals are the ones that effectively disseminate CX learnings throughout the business rather than leave statistics siloed up with an experience team. CX practitioners can pitch their programs by pointing to this example and encouraging their organizations to follow suit. All it takes to create a culture of customer centricity is desiloing CX intelligence and handing it out to the right departments and stakeholders.

This approach has another advantage in that it can help CX practitioners create grassroots support for their initiatives. Creating customer centricity can help employees become more invested in their work and more strongly feel that it matters. Their own insights and feedback is also an invaluable component of any CX initiative, and collecting it can make them feel heard. With this approach, practitioners can ride a groundswell of bottom-to-top support all the way to the boardroom.

Method #3: Demonstrating The Power of Real-Time Feedback

This tip overlaps somewhat with the first method we talked about, but the power of real-time feedback truly deserves its own special mention. Real-time feedback is the only truly effective way for brands to know which customers are promoters and which are detractors, enabling them to both save at-risk customers and identify the themes common to both groups’ view of the business.

Real-time feedback also empowers brands to achieve four business goals that practitioners can use to further assert their programs’ value. These goals include acquiring customers, retaining existing ones, cross-selling or upselling to established customers, and lowering cost to serve. Practitioners who pitch real-time feedback through this paradigm can both better tie it to financial goals and give the C-suite something more specific to chew on than, say, “becoming more customer-centric.”

These three strategies are effective means of introducing or ensuring the longevity of CX programs at any brand, and can help CX teams make the case that experience initiatives are no mere flight of fancy but rather the key to transformational success in today’s business world.

For more information on how to effectively pitch and prove the worth of CX programs to anyone and everyone, check out our new eBook on how you can make a business case to your CFO (or anyone else) here.

How to Maximise Efficiency With a Small CX Team

Limited resourcing continues to be a challenge for customer experience (CX) teams across Australia and New Zealand. Whilst customer experience teams are becoming smaller, the remit of these teams are becoming broader and more complex. Most CX professionals in this region are expected to do more with less.

Our experts have weighed in on the best ways to foster efficiency within your organisation and free up your time so that you can be left to focus on creating positive change and lasting impacts across the business.

Here’s how you can maximise efficiency with a small customer experience team:

  • Democratise Data
  • Leverage available resources
  • Create CX champions
  • Level-up Your Dashboards

Democratise Data

Democratising data is an important step for protecting your teams’ time and resources, and it can be performed at any stage of CX maturity! 

Invest the time needed with key stakeholders to explain the importance of customer experience, co-create dashboards, and reduce any ambiguity about CX programs. By spreading the responsibility between team members throughout your business, you will save time both now and down the line with fewer emails, more empowered colleagues, and more visibility to your hard work. 

Leverage Available Resources 

Technology alone won’t help with demonstrating return on investment. The most effective programs have a strategic partner to help map the initial CX framework, discover those actionable insights and point out the cost savings along the way. In a recent interview, Keira Hazell, Voice of Customer Manager for Kayo Sports and Binge, said, 

“Get a CX partner to be an extension of your team. Relying on our partners at InMoment (previously MaritzCX) has extended my impact and strengthened our business outputs. ”

You need a motivated team behind yours to design the roadmap of experience management success. Best practices show that the financial impact of the CX capability is outlined in the onboarding process, tested and controlled along the way, and measured and reported against quarterly.

Create CX Champions

Take time upfront to educate teammates on the importance of customer experience and ask for volunteers to champion such initiatives across various departments. The more stakeholders invested in a CX program, the more time practitioners will have to delegate responsibilities across a business.

See which people in your business are organically gravitating toward your CX program and formalise their role as a CX champion. Empower these individuals to access the CX data anytime, anyplace to drive action. Along these lines, Voice of Customer Programme Lead of the New Zealand Post Trish Roberts described that, 

“Your CX champions will start talking about the program and make your work visible across the organisation. The more people I train up to talk about this, the more time I have to focus on the program rollout.” 

Level-Up Your Dashboards

When your dashboards are intuitive and easy to understand, stakeholders can easily circulate them within their organisations. Roberts also described her best practice tip for top-of-the-line dashboards: 

“Include a bit of information around each module in the platform so when users log in to their dashboard, they will be reminded and feel empowered to talk to the scores and represent the data accurately.”

In other words, an effective dashboard is designed to guide the user, not overload the user with data. 

We recommend you follow this design structure where possible:

  • Main KPI: Where are we? How has our performance changed over time?
  • Main KPI & Main Segment: Who/what should we focus on?
  • Sub KPIs: What is contributing to our core metric?
  • High Level Text Analytics: What overall are our customers telling us?
  • Verbatim: What are our customers actually saying about their experience?
  • Deep Analysis: Splitting KPIs up by pre-pop data.

Wrapping Up

It’s not easy doing big work with a small team, but by implementing these tips we hope it makes your job a whole lot easier. Thank you to our CX Leaders from Kayo and New Zealand Post for sharing their program optimisation insights and best practices.

For more CX best practices just like this, be sure to read our new eBook “Evolving Your CX Program” for additional tips and insights.

4 Ways to Measure (and Prove) B2B CX Program Results

If you’re a practitioner who won support for your B2B experience program and have since implemented it across your organization, congratulations! Garnering sponsorship for experience programs is not easy, but doing so means that you’ve built trust at and received investment from both the frontline and executive levels.

Now comes the hard part: proving results and justifying ROI.

Tying experience program results to improved outcomes often proves to be the most challenging aspect of running an experience program, especially since stakeholders usually express at least a little skepticism alongside all the buy-in. Luckily, there are several tried-and-true metrics that practitioners can track to justify ROI, and we’re going to hit them all right now:

  • Customer Acquisition Growth
  • Customer Retention & Recovery
  • Upselling Established Customers
  • Profitability From Lowered Costs

Metric #1: Customer Acquisition Growth

This is one of the biggest goals that most brands set for their experience programs, which makes it a vital metric for practitioners to keep track of as their initiatives take off. Acquiring new customers is neither simple nor cheap, and if there’s one group of stakeholders who constantly bears this fact in mind, it’s the C-suite.

Tracking customer acquisition is thus a must for any B2B experience program. Doing so demonstrates an experience program’s merit to all stakeholders involved, especially since, as we just mentioned, acquiring new customers is no small task. Experience platforms that can track changes and monitor new growth are especially useful here since they make proving acquisition relatively straightforward.

Metric #2: Customer Retention & Recovery

There are two big reasons why customer retention is a powerful and pertinent B2B experience metric: first, retaining customers is far cheaper than acquiring new ones, and second, most brands begin experience programs to, well, improve experiences for their existing customer base. Experience practitioners can prove their programs’ effectiveness at hitting both goals by tracking customer retention and recovery.

There’s a myriad of ways to demonstrate experience initiatives’ value when it comes to customer recovery. For example, these programs often make it simple for practitioners to survey customers who reach out to contact centers, garner feedback, and turn it into actionable intelligence. That intelligence can then be used to meaningfully improve both call center processes and customer retention along with it. All of those metrics can be tied directly to experience programs.

Method #3: Upselling Established Customers

Retaining existing business is great, but many B2B brands set their sights on a more ambitious goal: increasing their share of wallet with their established customer pool. The tools, improvements, and processes afforded by experience programs make this goal possible, and practitioners can and should tether the improvements brought about by their efforts to any increase in share of wallet.

Practitioners commonly use experience programs to upsell existing customers by honing in on those individuals’ needs and wants. They can also use these programs to call upon a backdrop of operational and financial data, which grants B2B organizations a 360-degree view of who these individuals are. Practitioners and customer experience (CX) teams can then identify and act upon upsell opportunities.

Method #4: Profitability from Lowered Costs

This ROI metric can be less flashy than sporting new customers or increased share of wallet from existing ones, but the C-suite loves it no less.

In addition to providing meaningful experience improvement opportunities, a well-run experience program can help brands identify ways to eliminate waste and save costs. Experience practitioners can establish their programs’ value by showing stakeholders such opportunities as their initiatives reveal them, giving B2B organizations the chance to save money while also being empowered to improve experiences. To put it candidly, nothing screams “value” to an organization quite like increased profitability.

Acquiring sponsorship for an experience program isn’t easy. Harder still is proving that program’s worth. However, practitioners who focus on proving their programs’ worth through these four lenses will have a markedly easier time actually doing so. They can then secure additional resources to expand their programs’ scope and reap additional success for themselves, the B2B brands they serve, and the customers who sustain those organizations.

Learn more about B2B experience programs, proving ROI, and creating continued success here.

Three Ways B2B Brands Can Promote Experience Programs Internally

At face value, pitching an experience program internally may sound like a no-brainer. Experience programs enable B2B brands to listen to clients, gather intelligence from employees, and attain a holistic understanding of where they fit in the marketplace. Who doesn’t want that?

Well, as any customer experience (CX) practitioner knows, it’s not that simple. Organizations are hemmed in by the very real restraints of time, budget, and resource allocation, which usually determines whether experience programs get greenlit at all.

Fortunately, there are effective ways to sell experience and listening programs to everyone from the boardroom to the front line, and we’re going to show you three of them:

  • Memorable Branding
  • Success Stories
  • Educational Tools

Memorable Branding

This is a great technique to generate awareness of and affinity for a CX program. Practitioners can begin building the case for an experience initiative simply by giving it a catchy or memorable name, which helps the idea stick with potential stakeholders. More importantly, it will foster connections between employees, create grassroots support for the initiative, and help drive a customer-centric culture.

Additionally, practitioners can put tools like newsletters, training videos, and even employee competitions to great effect marketing their B2B program. This strategy incentivizes employees to remain engaged with the initiative no matter where they’re located, which also helps build the same sense of unity we mentioned in the preceding paragraph.

Success Stories

Catchy names and team exercises can help CX practitioners win employees over—executives, though, are usually a whole ‘nother kettle of fish. Make no mistake, executives love clever branding ideas, but the only way to truly sell this group on B2B experience programs is success stories. It’s even better when these stories are quantifiable; nothing garners executive sponsorship quite like provable numbers.

While on the subject of numbers, practitioners should try to integrate their experience initiative into as many corporate KPIs as possible. The reasons for that are to ensure executive involvement in all sectors of the company, foster interconnectivity between offices in different countries and cultures, and to create program champions in multiple departments who can help you sell your program again in the future.

Educational Tools

Educational opportunities are an oft-overlooked benefit of experience programs, and pitching them is a great way to build the case for these initiatives. Indeed, practitioners should strive to build experience programs on education, which only makes sense when you consider that continuous improvement is these programs’ chief purpose!

With that in mind, practitioners should strive to fold white papers, training guides, videos, and other useful tools into the branding process. These resources should be complemented by in-house survey tools, customer templates and any other support mechanisms that employees find helpful.

Once all of these resources have been consolidated, it’s essential for practitioners to not only make them accessible, but also push employees to use and become reliant on them. Giving frontline employees access to real-time dashboards, for example, can help experience programs feel more familiar and even second-nature. This technique will cement an experience program’s integration into any organization.

Making the case for a B2B experience program can be a challenge at the best of times, but these techniques will enable those programs’ advocates to build organic support, gain the executive stamp of approval, and place continuous improvement at the very heart of the brands for whom they work.

Learn more about championing experience programs, acquiring B2B customers, and retaining their business by clicking here.

Customer Lifetime Value: A Guide to the Northstar Revenue Metric

What Is Customer Lifetime Value?

The technical definition of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the revenue earned from a single customer over time. It’s an equation that subtracts the cost to acquire a new customer (CAC) from the total revenue from that customer. The goal is to make the revenue-over-time from each individual customer as high as possible.

But the technical definition doesn’t cover the magic that’s actually in customer lifetime value – as a metric and as a mission for a digital marketplace,  an e-commerce site, and SaaS businesses. Because when you go after customer lifetime value with intention, making it one of your “North Star” metrics, you’ll find that the cost-to-acquire actually shrinks. It becomes less expensive to acquire new customers, and the revenue pours in exponentially. 

We are also at an inflection point with SaaS. While many SaaS companies are still largely concentrated on acquisition-based growth through demos and trials, we’re seeing a shift to focus on the end-user and the metrics that capture how happy they are, because those end-users lead growth. And that’s where customer lifetime value comes in as a business case. It is the ideal way to tie customer loyalty to revenue.

Those end users who are sticking with you are buying more from you (cross-sells and upsells) and they’re telling their friends and colleagues how great you are (referrals). In a sense, they become your virtual sales army. They’re out there warming up leads and sending them to you, so you don’t have to pay to find them

This is the magic we’re going to unlock for you in this comprehensive article. If you want to know how to maximize your bottomline, then improving Customer Lifetime Value is key. And we’re going to explain how it all works, and how you can start using it to get better ROI for your business right now.

Part 1: Making the case for Customer Lifetime Value as the key metric for your customer experience strategy

I don’t know a single company that hasn’t pondered these questions:

  • What resource investment will have the most impact on customer health and revenue growth? 
  • What can (or should) I automate?
  • Should I invest more money into customer experience (CX), customer support, or customer success right now?
  • Should we focus on building this new feature or should we focus on infrastructure improvements that might make our platform more secure or faster, etc.?
  • Should we invest in self-service onboarding to improve the journey for the end user?

The answers to all of these questions lie in Customer Lifetime Value. 

If your business thrives on high-volume sales and high turnover, then you’re probably not a subscription-based business – but you also don’t need to worry so much about customer lifetime value. 

But, if your business would benefit from high-volume sales AND returning customers AND lower acquisition costs, then customer lifetime value is your metric, and you’ve probably got your answers to the above questions. The more you invest in both user experience and customer experience, the less you have to invest in customer support, leading to organic growth and a higher customer lifetime value.

Customer lifetime value isn’t a passive metric – a numerical pat on the back for when you’ve done a “good job.” It’s an active, actionable metric that can be used in a few different ways.

Let’s look at a few different ways to use the Customer Lifetime Value metric:

CLV as Profit Metric

Traditionally, customer lifetime value has been used as a benchmark for whether your business is going well or going under. You look at your CLV/CAC ratio, and if it works out to at least 3 or higher (for every $1 dollar you spend acquiring a customer, you earn at least $3 dollars) you’re in the clear. You could then calculate the CLV/CAC ratio across your marketing channels to determine which are creating the most lifetime value (invest in those more) and which aren’t.

CLV as Customer Persona Builder

Once you start parsing out which clients have the highest customer lifetime value, you can look for what they have in common in terms of demographics, psychographics, user behavior, how they found you, and other characteristics. You can then use those commonalities to create better customer personas so you can go after higher CLV clients with intention.

Predictive CLV

Customer lifetime value can be used to predict the lifetime value of new customers when you examine current behavior and purchase patterns, and then base projected behavior and patterns based on those early indicators. You might already know how to predict churn based on “red flag” customer actions, and this concept is the same but in the opposite direction. You look for retention and upsell-predictive behaviors by reverse engineering what your best customers did at the beginning, middle, and ends of their journeys with you (if they’ve ended!). 

CLV as Key Performance Indicator

Customer lifetime value is a broad KPI of how well you’re serving clients, how valuable your product or service is to them, and how well you’re delivering your solution with the appropriate customer experience. It’s a great North Star metric. You know you’re headed in the right direction as CLV rises. But, you’ll also need metrics that tell you, more granularly, what’s going on and why at each stage of the customer journey. So we also use Customer Journey Metrics like Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score, Customer Satisfaction, etc.

Once you start tracking customer lifetime value, you can a lot with it to improve your business – which we’ll get to in Part 3. But for now, let’s look at customer lifetime value as an equation – or really, several equations.

Part 2: Customer Lifetime Value as Equation – how to crack the code of calculating this complicated metric

If you are not mathematically-inclined, I’ll make this as straightforward as possible. 

Customer lifetime value is revenue you expect to receive from a customer over time, less the cost of acquiring and keeping that customer. 

Here it is in equation form:
CLV = (ARPU X average # of months or years retained) – (CAC + CRC) 

People have been refining ways to calculate more accurate CLV ratios for years. What’s so hard? So. many. variables. Here are the basic numbers you’ll need for the CLV calculation for a SaaS business:

Average Monthly Revenue Per Customer (ARPU)

Here are all the different ways customers bring in value in a subscription software business model.

  • Original revenue
  • Renewal revenue
  • Upsell revenue
  • Cross-Sell revenue
  • Referral Revenue

Most calculations only deal with original revenue and renewal revenue, but that doesn’t cover the whole picture. When calculating Average Monthly Revenue Per Customer (ARPU) for our customer lifetime value equation, just remember to account for upsells and cross-sells, not just original revenue and renewal revenue. Referrals take care of themselves — they’ll show up in the customer acquisition cost (CAC) calculation because you’ll see that you’re getting more new customers without spending more on sales & marketing.

You’ll also want to know your CAC because the two are intertwined. Your CLV will increase if you are able to increase revenue from customers while maintaining or lowering your acquisition cost. 

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

How much you spent on sales & marketing in a given time period (learn more about this here)

Divided by…

How many new customers you gained in the same given time period

Customer Retention Cost (CRC)

The cost of serving the customer is often overlooked in CLV calculation. And if your onboarding customer success and/or customer service programs are significant, you definitely want to factor in Customer Retention Cost. Totango, a Wootric integration partner, wrote a whole book on calculating CRC, but a quick estimate looks like this: 

How much you spend to onboard, train and support customers in a given period

Divided by…

How many new customers you gained in the same given time period

Customer lifetime value calculation in non-subscription models

One more way to calculate CLV is through a predictive model that can be highly accurate. This method is common in consumer businesses such as e-commerce. That equation looks like this:

CLV = (Average monthly transactions X Average order value) X Average gross margin X Average Customer Lifespan*

*The average customer lifespan is calculated in months.

Segment Customer Lifetime Value to make it more actionable

Calculating customer lifetime value for your company can be revealing and is a great start to working with this metric.  Like measuring NPS though, it really isn’t actionable until you start segmenting the metric. To make customer lifetime value more actionable and predictive, you’ll want to separate these numbers by customer segment and acquisition channels. That’s when you’ll be able to optimize your acquisition strategies to raise your CLV rates even higher.

Start by looking at customer lifetime value by pricing tier or persona. For example, you may discover that the CLV for enterprise customers is no higher than self-service customers once you factor in the high cost of acquiring and supporting “the big fish.” 

Part 3: The 4 Most Powerful Ways to use Customer Lifetime Value to grow your business

To use CLV as an actionable, predictive, productive metric, you have to segment your users and rank them by their CLV. Then you can look at the data you’ve collected on them – which acquisition channels they came from, what their first interaction was on your website, what their customer journey looked like through onboarding and beyond – to optimize each stage of the customer journey.

And then you can return to customer lifetime value as a ‘big picture’ measurement of your optimization progress. 

Here are three primary ways to use customer lifetime value to optimize acquisition and retention.

1. Optimize your acquisition strategies for CLV – and use CLV to optimize your acquisition strategies.

Your CRM platform should tell you which channels customers came through to find you, and you may notice that your high-CLV customers tend to come from one of those channels over the others. 

One of the most clear-cut stories of how a big company used customer lifetime value to increase profit is IBM. IBM used customer lifetime value to determine the effectiveness of their marketing channels to attract high-spending customers – direct mail, telesales, email, and catalogs per customer (yes, this is an old story – way back in 2008). When they reallocated resources to the best-performing channels, they 10Xed their revenue. 

It’s low-hanging fruit to decide to spend more marketing money on the channels yielding the highest CLV clients. But we can go one step further.

2. You can use your Customer Lifetime Value to create better buyer personas.

Yes, this requires a platform that can gather all of the available information on each customer. But use whatever information you’ve got. You will find that your high CLV customers have a lot in common (though you may need to form segments for the commonalities to clearly emerge). 

Once you have your high CLV buyer personas, you can use them to form marketing, outreach, and retention strategies based on their specific acquisition channels and user behavior through onboarding and retention. 

For example, let’s say that you find that your high CLV clients come to you through G2 or Capterra. And once they reach your site, they don’t just “buy now” – they have at least one interaction with your live chat helpline. Your high CLV customers need a conversation before converting, which means if you tweak your G2 listing or website content answer their questions without having to reach out, you’ll likely see higher conversions from customers who’ll stick around.

3. Use Customer Lifetime Value with Customer Success for higher retention rates & referral revenue

Customer lifetime value and customer success are so intertwined as to be inseparable. Why? Successful customers don’t leave. So, when you want to improve your customer lifetime value, having a customer success program in place is one of the best ways to do it. Customer success asks, at each stage of the customer journey: What is the customer’s ideal outcome, and how can we best move them towards it? Then the customer success team can create strategies around supporting customers at pivotal moments – like places in the onboarding process where customers tend to get frustrated and leave (Customer Effort Score surveys are ideal for flagging these points of friction) or using churn-predictive behaviors to ‘red flag’ certain interactions to receive Customer Support pop-up chats.

4. Use Customer Lifetime Value to obtain more referrals from customers.

Your long-term high CLV customers are your brand ambassadors and influencers, and once you identify them, you can start to leverage that by rewarding and strengthening their connection to your brand. That could be something as simple as inviting them to be part of a free Beta testing group, so they can give you their insights into the next iterations of your product or service, or even just asking them to write an online review. Some businesses host online communities for their best clients, or offer them priority support.

Want an even easier way to identify the customers most likely to refer you to others? Learn how to use NPS surveys to not only find your promoters, but encourage them to promote you more.

5. Use Customer Lifetime Value to guide product design and validate product development decisions at the business level.

Product teams may be removed from revenue goals on the day-to-day, but strategic decisions about where to expend engineering resources should be made with business impact in mind. Product can use CLV to inform what customer segments the product should be designed for.  Building CLV-related goals into user stories or feature specifications can help prioritize the roadmap and provide a success metric for retrospective once the product is out the door. 

Part 4: 10 Ways to Increase & Optimize Your Customer Lifetime Value

  1. Prioritize customer experience above everything else. And don’t just say it; measure it with metrics like Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction, and Customer Effort Score. Calculate and track churn rates and engagement metrics.
  2. Invest in customer success. Customer success drives acquisition, retention, and customer spending (upsells and cross-sells), raising customer lifetime value by helping customers achieve their ideal outcomes.
  3. Invest in UX testing. The data you get from UX testing makes your product easier to use, reducing friction, and making it a must-have tool for your users. 
  4. Pay special attention to onboarding. Churn happens most frequently during or shortly after onboarding, so paying attention to churn-predictive behavior patterns (often identified by a Customer Effort Score survey) in the onboarding process can help you form a strategy to smooth those friction points and find easier ways to move your client towards meaningful success milestones.
  5. Bring product management, customer success, customer support, and marketing together in shared responsibility for metrics. Collaboration between product and customer success is common, but it is a good idea to expand the team because they have so much to gain from working together. For example, with onboarding, product managers need to understand how their tech decisions affect adoption and retention metrics; and customer success teams need to have access to onboarding user data that helps them identify upsell opportunities. Some shared metrics for success include NPS, churn rate, trial conversion rate, adoption rate, and, of course, customer lifetime value.
  6. Use CLV as a segmentation tool.  This allows you to deliver appropriate experiences to customers who are high-value, and who have the potential to become high-value. The appropriate experience might be the level of customer support each segment receives, or the messaging they get throughout their buyer’s journeys. You may also find that each CLV segment has different pain points and needs, which you can target for even higher acquisition and retention rates.
  7. Ask your most loyal customers for support. Following up a positive NPS survey response with an automated request for an online review is simply asking happy customers to follow through on what they just said they’d be willing to do. They’ve already said yes – so make it easy for them to act on promoting you. This won’t directly affect your CLV score, but it will drive down your CAC as the referrals come in.
  8. Keep customers engaged by adding value to your product or service, or through high-value content. If you don’t have substantial updates/improvements/expansions planned for your product, you can keep customers engaged with educational materials–i.e. content that helps them reach their ideal outcomes faster and easier. This has the added benefit of being useful for top-of-funnel marketing as well.
  9. Listen to your customers and act on their feedback.  Voice of customer data is so important for improving products and reducing friction. The only problem is that sentiment analysis at scale can be difficult without the right tools.
  10. Don’t “acquire customers” – build relationships. The customers who stay with you the longest feel like they know you. They feel like you know them. You’ve become an integral part of their daily lives, and they’d miss you if you went away. So consider changing the way you think of acquiring customers. You’re building relationships. And the more personalized and personal you make your customer interactions, the more likely your customers will feel connected to you and committed to your brand.

Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value is really a whole-company effort, requiring a great product, great service, and a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, frustrations, and desires. It’s a ‘big picture’ metric; a North Star number to guide you towards creating better customer experiences. But this one metric can also shed light on valuable segments and strategies that can profitably impact your business. customer lifetime value is a number you can’t afford to ignore.

Three Ways to Deepen Relationships with Your Customers

It’s important for brands to spend time acquiring and then retaining new customers, but it’s just as (if not more) important to find ways to expand relationships with the customers that they already have. Today’s conversation focuses on that very theme: how can brands deepen relationships with existing customers to drive better experiences and create a positive impact on the bottom line?

The following three strategies can help organizations achieve deeper relationships with customers:

  • Creating Support Team Consistency
  • Using Formal Relationship Surveys
  • Leveraging Loyalty Programs

Strategy #1: Creating Support Team Consistency

It can be nerve-wracking when a customer submits a complaint, but such complaints can be opportunities for deeper relationships if they’re handled correctly. Make no mistake, brands should prioritize fixing whatever went wrong, but they should also seize the opportunity to do so in a way that makes the customer feel endeared to.

This strategy can only truly work, though, if every support team across the organization is consistent in eliciting those emotions from customers. That’s why it’s important for brands to invest the time and resources necessary for ensuring that all support teams endeavor to identify customer needs, create customized value and benefits, and leave customers feeling both listened to and that they are of high value to a brand. This strategy helps deepen the bond between company and customer (and turns the latter into brand advocates, a company’s best marketers).

Strategy #2: Using Formal Relationship Surveys

Surveys are no longer companies’ only means of acquiring feedback from customers, but that doesn’t mean that brands should forget about them. In fact, relationship surveys remain an invaluable means of acquiring insights-rich data from long-term customers.

While relationship surveys are great for seeing how customers are doing and what they think of a brand, their length and format makes them ideal for another purpose: spotting warning signs that are unique to your business. If enough long-term customers opine about the same problem or broken process, brands can take advantage of yet another opportunity to provide a better experience, create a stronger bottom line, and, of course, let customers know just how important they are to an organization. This is why, even in an age of multimedia feedback and multichannel listening, surveys are still a crucial component of any customer experience (CX) strategy.

Strategy #3: Leveraging Loyalty Programs

This is a big one. Though it hopefully goes without saying, organizations must constantly be vigilant for new ways to entice and reward long-term customers. Loyalty programs are a great way to drum up additional business while also deepening relationships with customers who have shopped with that brand for a while.

Loyalty programs vary wildly from company to company, let alone industry to industry, but brands should generally try to find ways to reward long-term customers with recurring benefits and discounts. More importantly, and to the point of this discussion, they should find imaginative, organic ways to just let those customers know that their business and brand advocacy is deeply appreciated. Gratitude keeps long-term customers coming back for more.

Strategies like these are effective for keeping long-term customers enticed and finding new ways to deepen relationships with those individuals. Juggling support consistency, survey design, and loyalty programs is no small balancing act, but the brands that invest in doing so can strengthen their bottom line and create an ever-better experience for the customers that sustain them.

Want to learn more about customer retention and effective customer recovery? Our webinar on this subject with experts Jim Katzman and David Van Brocklin is now available for you to view for free! You can find it here.

How to Find and Wield New CX Data Sources

We’ve talked a lot about COVID-19’s effect on customer experience (CX) data and how that intel has been changed by the pandemic. However, while recent events have certainly changed how companies capture and use CX data, the fact that data shifts constantly hasn’t really changed at all.

This is why it’s important for brands to constantly be on the lookout for new data sources. Companies must look beyond  traditional customer listening posts and delve deep for the intelligence that can give them an edge over the competition. So, without further ado, let’s get into how organizations can capture and take action on new sources of CX data.

Listening to Employees

Many brands focus heavily on uncovering new data from current and prospective customers. That’s a good strategy, of course, but companies also need to consider an oft-overlooked source of new data: employees.

Employees can offer businesses a great deal of new data. While the most accessible of these insights may come from customer-facing employees, companies need to talk to their non-customer-facing employees as well. They too experience a brand (albeit from a different perspective), and that directly informs their productivity, brand advocacy, and other factors. Companies can find new and valuable sources of data by listening to all of their employees and getting multiple takes on the organization. Then, CX teams and functional business owners across the enterprise can use that intel to fix processes and make improvements that contribute to an improved experience.

Market Research & Pulse Studies 

The term market research gets thrown around quite a bit, but how can companies separate superficial market research from targeted analysis that can help capture actionable experience data?

There are several questions that brands can use to glean new data from the marketplace (not to mention gain a more holistic perspective of how they fit in a vertical). Brands can gather new data by ascertaining how they stack up against the competition. They can also find new data by asking why customers become or remain non-buyers, as well as for these individuals’ overall impressions of the organization.

Asking targeted and specific questions like these gives companies a good indication of where they sit in the marketplace, but they also yield valuable data that can help brands provide an improved experience. This makes market research a critical new data source that rounds out customer and employee listening. 

Putting It All Together

Brands that want to truly wield the power of new data sources can’t stop at merely uncovering them. They also need to put that new data into one place if they hope to gain actionable intelligence from it.

Organizations should always desilo their data because doing so gives  organizations a holistic view of their entire brand and all their experience efforts. This is where new data is at its most useful—when it’s combined with existing intel and operational and financial metrics, there’s no limit to what companies can learn about their customers, their employees, and themselves. That’s the true power that brands stand to gain when they capture and take action upon new sources of data.

Want to learn more about data and current events’ impact on collecting and understanding it? Click here to learn more.

5 Guidelines for Structuring Your Product Roadmap

Building and maintaining the product roadmap is a central part of your role as a product manager. Yet there is surprisingly little consensus about product roadmaps across the product management community. Opinions vary wildly, for example, about what exactly a product roadmap is, how to structure one, what to include in it, and which tools you should use to develop it.

In this post I will offer a few guidelines for how to structure your product roadmap in ways that can lead to the development of a successful product. But before we dive into these suggestions, I would like to start with two fundamental points about roadmaps — points I hope will make the guidelines that follow much clearer.

The top-down approach to product development works best.

For successful product development, I recommend a top-down product strategy. Product roadmaps fit very strategically into this hierarchy. Here’s how it works.

Start with your product’s vision — which you’ll derive from your company’s larger strategic objectives. Then translate that high-level vision into actionable goals. Next, turn those product goals into your product roadmap. Finally, move from your roadmap to your backlog.

Starting at the highest level, and working your way strategically down into the details, is the best way to stay focused and on track toward your main objectives — and to avoid losing sight of why you’re doing what you’re doing and getting lost in the weeds.

And speaking of getting lost in the weeds…

A product roadmap is not a list of features.

A list of features is just that — a list of features. The product roadmap, on the other hand, is a strategic document that represents your high-level goals for the initiative along with an execution strategy to communicate how you plan to achieve those goals.

A roadmap might include features, of course, but the features themselves are only a part of the execution plan.

Five Guidelines for Structuring Your Product Roadmap

1. Product Roadmaps Should be Flexible

You’ve got to be okay with uncertainty. You’ve got to be willing to embark on your product plan, knowing that you can’t possibly know everything at the outset — that you will hit surprises, challenges, and opportunities along the way. Your roadmap needs to factor in these uncertainties — and needs to be flexible enough to allow you to change course quickly when necessary.

To avoid making promises you can’t keep, make sure your stakeholders understand that the roadmap is not an end-all, be-all document. One way to do so is to show more granularity in the short term while keeping your initiatives high-level and your dates approximate in the long term.

Thinking in themes is another effective way to keep your roadmap flexible. For example, maybe you and your stakeholders have agreed to focus on increasing conversions from a particular target persona in the upcoming quarter. This area of focus becomes your theme, and you retain the ability to reprioritize specific features and fixes within that theme while keeping the overarching goal intact. Likewise, if an opportunity arises that was not originally on your roadmap but furthers your shared goal, you’ll have an easier time making a case to include it.

Finally, a flexible roadmap can be a headache if changes are not communicated promptly and effectively. Ensure your stakeholders always have access to the most up-to-date version of the roadmap, whether that means storing it on a shared wiki or using cloud-based software that automatically updates. Transparency is key to building alignment on product strategy, no matter how frequently you need to reprioritize.

2. Product Roadmaps Should be Deeply Rooted in Well-Thought-Out Goals

This might sound like a contradiction to the previous guideline — but it’s not. You can frequently reprioritize your backlog while still staying true to well-thought-out, agreed-upon goals.

Your specific roadmap priorities might need adjusting in light of new information — in fact, they almost certainly will at one time or another. But you should be prepared to adjust focus in your roadmap, reallocate resources or otherwise change direction only if doing so is in alignment with your product’s high-level strategic goals and vision.

As a product manager, it’s your job to make sure that you’re making decisions about what to do, and what not to do, for the right reasons. Even if a sales executive is loudly demanding the immediate inclusion of a new feature to close a deal, you still need to weigh the request in light of your organization’s strategic goals. Quick wins do not necessarily spell long term success. If the feature isn’t in line with your product vision, it’s okay to say no. Indeed, if you’re doing your job well, you’ll find yourself saying no quite often.

3. Product Roadmaps Should be Developed with Plenty of Input

You don’t need to craft your roadmap yourself. You shouldn’t. Silos rarely work for any business function, and for roadmaps they can lead to ill-advised plans and products developed without critical knowledge.

To successfully bring a product to market, or to update an existing product in such a way that benefits the customer and your company, you’ll need plenty of input from experts across a variety of teams and departments. That includes, for example, engineering, customer support, sales, and marketing.

Sales, for example, will have valuable anecdotes about their most recent wins, or their most important ones. They can also tell you about the features prospects and customers are asking for.

As for your engineers, the more you involve them in the creation process, the more ownership and responsibility they will take for their role, and the more creativity and enthusiasm they’ll bring to the project. Collaborating with your engineers, and soliciting their help, will make them feel more like a part of the process, and less like order takers simply being told what to do by a product manager.

Prabhat Jha, CTO of the Net Promoter Score platform InMoment adds, “Be sure to solicit plenty of user input. Some years ago I learned this the hard way. The software enterprise where I worked did not have a rigorous system in place for listening to customers. We had collaborated internally on our roadmap priorities and thought we knew our customer’s needs. We missed key features, though, and as a result, there was very little adoption of the first version of the product. We ended up having to do a second release very quickly in order to get traction.”

4. Product Roadmaps Should be Visual

Ultimately, a product roadmap is a communication tool — an execution strategy you will use to convey your product plans and goals to a variety of constituencies. And the best way to communicate a complex initiative is visual. If your roadmap is simply a long list of features presented in a spreadsheet, people’s eyes will glaze over.

Visual roadmaps make it easy for everyone in your strategy meetings to quickly understand what you are proposing and hoping to accomplish quickly.

Another valuable reason to make your product roadmap visual is that it forces you to be ruthless about which initiatives to include and which to leave out. Venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki’s “10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint” instructs that PowerPoint presentations should have 10 slides, last no longer than 20 minutes, and contain onscreen text no smaller than 30 points. In addition to making the presentation more digestible for an audience, this exercise forces the presenter to distill both the whole talk and each individual slide down to its most essential elements.

The same is true for product roadmaps. If you use a visual tool for creating your roadmaps — such as PowerPoint or a visual roadmap software application — that exercise will force you to distill your plan down to only those initiatives that serve your product’s strategic goals and vision.

Looking at this from another angle, if your roadmap contains 1,000 initiatives, that probably means you haven’t done a good job of prioritizing and strategizing what needs to be included in your product. Indeed, if you do have a list of 1,000 initiatives, your document could probably be more accurately called a backlog than a roadmap.

5. Tailor Your Roadmap Discussion to Your Audience

You are likely going to show your product roadmap to many different constituencies, in many different meetings, throughout the development cycle of your product. Each constituent group will have a unique focus and set of priorities, and each meeting will call for you to delve into different aspects of the product roadmap.

There are a couple of ways of accomplishing this. You can create separate roadmap documents for each constituency, or you can use a single, general roadmap and zoom in to what’s important for each group. The important thing is that you provide your stakeholders context and show them how your plans will further their unique goals.

For example, for your sales team, you might want to highlight the aspects of your roadmap that are designed to bring them better-qualified leads — for example, a trial version of your software that can help to prequalify interested prospects.

Customer-facing teams also likely had input into the features that made it onto your roadmap in the first place. Be sure to communicate to them where their requests fit into the plan (or didn’t) and why.

However, when presenting the roadmap to your executives, you’ll want to focus on how the choices you’ve made will lead to increased revenue or grow market share.

And when meeting with your engineering team, you’ll want to focus both on the high-level themes and specific feature details and discuss how your engineers can help to make those product goals a reality.

In other words, you want to keep your product roadmap flexible enough that it can help facilitate a productive meeting at any level of detail needed, with any constituency group you are presenting to.  

Conclusion: Whatever structure your product roadmap takes, its main job is to communicate your strategy.

A product roadmap needs to communicate your strategy. It is your job to create your roadmap in such a way that it lays out a high-level execution plan for the product’s successful development and eventual launch into the market. It’s also your job to make sure all relevant constituencies understand the goals of the roadmap — and work with you to achieve them.

New things will always come up — cool ideas for new features, requests from executives for a shift in priority,  urgent demands from sales reps, and so on. The challenge for the product manager is to view each one as an opportunity to evaluate through the lens of strategy and goals and help drive a sound decision-making process.

That’s why you need to start with your product vision, and from there derive specific goals — and only after you’ve developed those goals, build your product roadmap. If you haven’t fully fleshed out your vision and strategic goals for the product, it’s too early to start building your roadmap.

About the author:
Andre TheusAndre Theus is the Vice President of Marketing at ProductPlan. He works closely with customers and prospects to build better product roadmap software. Prior to ProductPlan, he was a member of marketing teams at RightScale, Sonos, and Citrix. Andre received a master’s in computer science from the Cologne University of Applied Science in Germany.

Originally published June 28 2016, updated July 28 2020

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Three Strategies to Quickly and Effectively Recover Customers

Customer retention lies at the heart of everything from customer experience (CX) strategies to contact center tactics. Additionally, retaining and recovering existing customers is far more cost-effective for a brand than focusing solely on acquiring new business. Faced with these and other reasons, most brands see the importance of customer recovery and work hard to turn negative experiences into positive ones.

Today we’re going to touch on three proven strategies that can help organizations quickly and effectively resolve issues and recover at-risk customers. Those tactics are as follows:

  • Closed-Loop Programs
  • Multichannel Listening
  • Empowering Employees

Strategy #1: Closed-Loop Programs

As most CX-minded professionals know, closing the loop is an invaluable component of any customer retention effort.

The term “closing the loop” actually refers to two separate processes. The first, sometimes called closing the inner loop, denotes addressing and resolving individual complaints from customers. It should go without saying that closing the inner loop is vital for not just customer retention in general, but also recovering at-risk customers.

Closing the outer loop, by contrast, refers to engaging the entire organization in a holistic, continuous improvement effort. When every person who works for a brand resolves to do so in a way that creates a better experience for customers, organizations can achieve success that carries them to the top of their respective verticals. This also makes customer recovery simpler and more intuitive.

Strategy #2: Multichannel Listening

There was a time when surveys were considered the apex of customer feedback methods, and while they’re certainly still important, they’re no longer the only means by which customers report insights.

In this day and age, customers expect to be able to give feedback however they’d like, and most of the time, that means via social media or with non-text feedback. That’s why it’s important for brands keen on recovering customers to both enable a platform that combs social media for feedback, and allows feedback submissions via image, video, voice and other multimedia methods. This strategy lets customers know that you’re interested in hearing their feedback on their terms, which makes them more receptive to being recovered when a customer care agent responds.

Strategy #3: Empowering Employees

Many brands risk overlooking employees when considering how best to recover customers. Employees aren’t just invaluable for facilitating the customer recovery process—if they have an excellent experience with a brand, they’ll become much more impassioned advocates for that organization in their own right.

Thus, companies that want to more effectively recover employees must consider employee wants, perspectives, and needs (i.e. the employee experience). Providing an improved experience for employees increases their happiness and the quality of their work. That enthusiasm is infectious, and will come across to the customers that those employees are charged with recovering and caring for. This makes empowering employees a great way to recover at-risk customers.

The Recovery Trifecta

As we mentioned up top, customer recovery is essential to brands’ continued success. Companies that strive to close the inner and outer loops, listen to customers where they are and on their terms, and create an improved employee experience are setting themselves up to not just recover customers, but also to achieve meaningful change.

Want to learn more about customer retention and effective customer recovery? Our webinar on this subject with experts Jim Katzman and David Van Brocklin is now available for you to view for free! You can find it here.

How to Achieve Versatile, Modernized Listening Within CX

Whether your brand is emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic or searching for new groups of customers, it’s become clear that traditional methods of listening don’t quite cut it for learning what customers want anymore. Long-winded surveys, question inundation, and collecting only explicitly solicited feedback have long been norms in the customer experience (CX) world, but today’s brands need something more versatile if they hope to keep up with their customers.

What follows is a brief discussion of four ways to transition to versatile, modernized listening within CX:

  • Long-Form Surveys Versus Multimedia Feedback Options
  • Single-Point Versus Multi-Point Feedback
  • Spray-and-Pray Approach Versus Optimized Surveys
  • Solicited Feedback Versus Unsolicited Feedback

Long-Form Surveys Versus Multimedia Feedback Options

The long-form survey has been the traditional customer experience questionnaire for many years. Multiple brands rely on these surveys to gather feedback from customers and sometimes build their entire CX strategies around them, too. Typically, a long-form survey comes packed with questions aimed at every possible facet of the customer experience.

Ostensibly, these surveys’ goal is to gather detailed, actionable insights from customers, but their format leaves a lot to be desired. For a start, the sheer length of long-form surveys makes them unattractive to many customers, meaning that this questionnaire is often dead at the starting gate. Traditional surveys may also come packed with questions that many customers find irrelevant. Finally, long-form surveys tend to focus on what brands consider to be important, not what customers do.

Instead of throwing long-winded surveys at customers, brands should instead opt for multimedia feedback options. Multimedia feedback options kill several birds with one stone—they enable customers to express their opinions in a format they prefer (be it audio, video or other), allow brands to learn what customers consider important, and take up much less bandwidth than reams of formal questions.

Because of this, brands should do away with long-form surveys in favor of multimedia feedback options. It makes for a more versatile, more engaging solution that can better enable organizations to acquire the feedback they need to achieve meaningful change.

Single-Point Versus Multi-Point Feedback

Another strategy that has traditionally defined customer feedback efforts is restricting insights collection to a single point on the customer journey. Many brands save gathering feedback for the end of a transaction or another singular point.

The drawback with this strategy is that the customer journey doesn’t consist of a single point. It’s a multi-point, multi-channel endeavor that varies endlessly between different organizations. As such, brands can intensify their feedback collection by posting feedback options at every step of the customer journey.

When brands engage in a multi-point, multi-channel feedback strategy, they gain a holistic understanding of the customer journey that cannot be acquired via studying a single point on that journey. Focusing on a single touchpoint can skew a brand’s view of that journey and lead them to indirect conclusions. Multi-point feedback, by contrast, can give brands the full picture and thus a much better idea of what on their customer journey may need improvement.

Spray-and-Pray Approach Versus Optimized Surveys

In addition to making their surveys very lengthy, many organizations aren’t shy about inundating customers with multiple long-form questionnaires. This strategy may be intended to boost brands’ chance of receiving feedback, but all it oftentimes accomplishes is leaving customers overwhelmed and unwilling to complete any surveys, never mind all of them.

Optimized surveys are just as important to gathering accurate, actionable feedback as keeping questionnaires short or posting them at every stage of the customer journey. Optimizing surveys means posting them at whichever touchpoints customers are at, especially if they leave the journey at one given point or another. Rather than drown customers in surveys, organizations can boost the chance that their survey will be completed at all by posting it at the touchpoint most relevant to the customer in that moment

This strategy helps customers feel that brands are truly interested in what those individuals have to say. Optimizing surveys for touchpoints and feedback options also encourages customers to speak up because, as we discussed with those aforementioned options, it provides a great platform for them to speak what’s on their minds.

Solicited Feedback Versus Unsolicited Feedback

We’ve mentioned a few times now that brands traditionally load questionnaires and other feedback methods with the topics that they’re interested in. While important, this interest doesn’t always line up with what customers are interested in, and what customers are interested in can make or break an experience improvement effort.

Along those same lines, brands oftentimes prefer to focus on gathering solicited feedback from preselected groups of customers. The catch with this approach is that, much like gathering insights from a single point on the customer journey, collecting feedback from one predetermined group of people risks giving organizations a skewed view of what their customers actually want.

To gain a better understanding of their experience and what customers seek from them, companies should also strive to gather unsolicited feedback from not just customers but also brand advocates, brand detractors, and non-buyers. These groups’ opinions are just as important to understanding perception of a brand as customer perspectives, and can help companies gain that aforementioned, holistic understanding just like multi-channel feedback options.

In CX, Versatility is King

The common theme with all of these feedback strategies is versatility. Brands that that let customers express themselves in their own terms at whichever point of the experience journey they’re on will gather far more valuable feedback than organizations that don’t allow that versatility for themselves. 

Organizations can further enrich this feedback by gathering insights from any groups that interact with them, not just preferred pools of customers. By succinctly gathering information in a way that espouses context, organizations can gather the actionable insights they need to ascend their marketplace and, ultimately, create a better experience for their customers.

Interested in learning more about achieving modern, versatile feedback? Check out our webinar, “The Future of Feedback: Adapting Customer Listening for Our Changing World” here.

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