For a brief moment, it looked as though the Coronavirus pandemic might finally be under control, but recent viral surges throughout the country indicate that, unfortunately, this disease and the new way of life accompanying it will be with us for the foreseeable future.
While this is certainly unwelcome news, especially for the thousands of businesses that are struggling right now, there is a way that these brands can both stay ahead of the competition and create a better experience for customers: empathy.
Empathy enables brands to understand what their customers want, how to reach them, and how to react quickly to any big changes. Empathy is an essential component of a winning customer experience (CX) strategy.
Today’s discussion focuses on how brands can wield empathy to thrive, not just survive, during this pandemic, especially as it pertains to four key areas:
External Communications
Employee Policies
Employee Behavior
Taking Action
Key #1: External Communications
How can companies use empathy to meaningfully consider and improve external communications?
Well, it should surprise no one that most customers are experiencing some kind of COVID-related stress, whether that’s staying put at home all day or coming into any sort of contact with the virus. Brands can build trust with new and existing customers by being empathetic to their concerns and putting that empathy front-and-center in their messaging.
Many brands have found great success by expressing empathy for customers’ uncertainty, then offering relief in the form of concrete action plans. Starbucks, for example, wasted no time reassuring its customers that the chains was taking the pandemic seriously and demonstrated that by instituting stringent cleanliness and social distancing measures. Crucially, the chain also told customers that it cared about employee well-being.
As a result of this messaging, many customers felt that Starbucks earnestly understood their concerns and felt empathized with by the coffee chain, which encouraged them to continue buying their cup of joe there. Companies which employ that one-two punch of empathizing with customers and taking steps to address their concerns will see success in the age of COVID.
Key #2: Employee Policies
As we touched on in the previous section, customers are paying attention now more than ever to how companies treat their employees during this pandemic. Most customers won’t give a brand the time of day if they get the impression that it doesn’t care about its employees’ safety.
Though it hopefully goes without saying, brands need to include empathy as a centerpiece of their employee policies. This means making accommodations wherever possible for employee concerns about COVID, especially when it comes to workplace safety. Brands that invest time and resources into this endeavor will retain more employees, increase those individuals’ passion for their workplace, and signal to customers that these organizations care for the folks who sustain it.
Key #3: Employee Behavior
Expressing empathy toward employees can do more than make them better brand advocates—it can also encourage them to make positive behavior changes in the workplace.
For example, employees who feel that their companies care about them and are invested in their well-being are much more likely to infuse that attitude of care and consideration into their own work, being more proactive about, say, wiping down self-checkout kiosks and even helping customers who have questions. Suffice it to say that empathy can spread quickly.
Key #4: Taking Action
We’ve touched on this a bit already, but the importance of backing up empathetic sentiments with real action really can’t be understated. Think about all of the emails you’ve received these last few months from companies who say that they’re passionately in the fight against COVID… but don’t actually back that up with anything more concrete.
That train of thought has occurred to countless customers, and it’s why taking action is so important. Actions like wider aisle spacing, better storefront cleanliness, social distancing enforcement, and other measures let customers know that a brand wants to fight COVID with more than just a polite message.
Taking action is also the ultimate act of empathy. Verbally expressing that emotion is one thing—turning it into action is quite another. Likewise, brands that take action to craft external communications around empathy, pour it into employee policies, and implement measures that reflect customer concerns are the ones that can thrive even as this pandemic continues to rage.
Want to learn more about how to survive and thrive in the age of COVID-19? Be sure to read our Special Edition CX Trends Report “Your Post-Pandemic Playbook” for additional tips and insights.
In this guest post, Nathan Lippi, Head of User Research at PandaDoc, shares a Pareto principle approach to getting the most from a B2B Net Promoter Score program.
NPS. It’s debated, loved, and hated, but in the world of B2B SaaS it’s rarely used to its full potential.
At PandaDoc, we’ve become increasingly customer-obsessed since the introduction of our NPS program two years ago, but we feel as if we still have meaningful room for improvement.
We’ve found there isn’t much written about NPS, specifically for B2B companies, so in order to level up, we’ve gone straight to the experts. With their permission, we’re sharing some key findings here.
We hope this guide helps you to get the most out of your CX program.
Let’s get to it!
The main purpose of NPS is to drive action
NPS is an easy, trusted, and benchmark-able way to start driving customer-focused action at your company.
Many companies obsess too much about the number when they’re starting out.
However, the most successful companies never lose sight of the fact that the primary purpose of CX metrics is to drive customer-focused action.
Once you’re driving customer-focused action, you’ll start to actually reap the benefits of increased retention, expansion, and word of mouth.
One Oracle VP’s Three-Step Recipe for NPS Survey Success
Joshua Rossman is an NPS OG, having run NPS at eBay and McAfee, among other companies. He’s now Vice President, Customer Experience Strategy at Oracle.
Through his years of experience, Rossman has created a three-step system he uses to get the most out of customer experience surveys, including NPS. He’s been kind enough to give us permission to share it publicly.
Step 1: Ask an easy-to-answer anchor question first to improve response rates
This principle is standard for NPS, but powerful enough to use across other CX surveys.
Ask your broad question first, and get a quantitative rating. Making your first question easy to answer will improve your overall survey response rates.
Step 2: Get S-P-E-C-I-F-I-C with your open-ended ask
Rossman has found that the standard open-ended question, “Care to tell us why?” often leads to vague, inactionable responses (e.g. “It’s hard to use”).
He’s found that asking promoters for specific reasons they recommend — and non-promoters for specific ways to improve — leads to much more actionable feedback.
Here are the specific questions he recommends for brand-level NPS:
Promoters: “What is it that makes you most likely to recommend {{company}}?”
Non-promoters: “What is it we could do that would make you more likely to recommend us in the future?”
These questions ask more specific questions — and tend to get more specific answers.
Various platforms such as InMoment can help you automatically categorize your now-more-specific NPS verbatims!
Each company will want to tag their work in a way that makes the most sense to them, but Shaun Clowes, former Head of Growth at Atlassian, says that they used machine learning to tag their feedback into three categories: Reliability, Usability, and Functionality. They used the ratio of different complaints to understand, at a high level, where their product needed work.
Step 3: NPS’ Secret Third Question
Even with the more specific responses you’ll hopefully get from the tweaks recommended in Step 2, not all B2B companies get such a high volume of responses that they can glean mathematically reliable responses from text alone.
One way to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that lead to an excellent (or poor) user experience is to follow questions about satisfaction with questions about various attributes of your brand. Ask a few extra questions with NPS and you can capture the overall sentiment for each area:
Wireframe example | Rating satisfaction of multiple attributes
After you’ve captured these details you can then run a simple linear regression, which will tell you which factors most influence if a person is a promoter or a detractor. Various versions of the linear regression technique were also mentioned by Allison Dickin, VP of User Research at UserLeap, and other experts. Hearing them reinforce the power of this third question helps us get really excited about what we might do with it.
“Extra questions should be used judiciously,” counters Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer at Wootric. “Think about it: When was the last time you responded thoughtfully to a multi-question survey?” If you’re worried that such a long third step may lead to a negative user experience or lower response rates, a lighter option may be to ask the respondent to tell you what drove their score by selecting from a pick list of reasons.
If your follow-up question to detractors is, “What is the main thing we need to improve?,” you could offer a picklist that includes product, support, training, and value.
Not only are you learning what’s driving your score overall, but you’re also generating groups of users to follow up based on their interest. For example, your customer support team can learn more by reaching out to detractors who cite “support” as an issue.
Example 2-step in-app NPS survey with a pick list
Drive Strategic Action with a Cross-Functional Cadence
You may have noticed that our first heading was about driving action on behalf of the customer.
We’re touching on it again because, ultimately, driving action on behalf of your customers should be the primary concern of an NPS program.
Driving tactical action on behalf of customers was something we were already doing well at PandaDoc, before talking to the experts. Getting NPS data into Slack and other systems has been a pillar of our NPS program — this helps us take immediate action on issues that surface in feedback. One example: reaching out to an unhappy detractor and quickly fixing the issue that her NPS feedback brought to our attention.
However, learning how many companies drive strategic action on behalf of the customer in the following way, was eye-opening:
Collect customer feedback in a central repository (NPS, sales feedback, CS feedback, etc. — all combined together, somewhere like InMoment, UserVoice or ProductBoard.
Perform a 360° analysis of this data on a quarterly basis
Set up a monthly cross-functional cadence to decide which action to drive, and to track progress and accountability on ongoing courses of action
Fictional Examples of Driving Strategic Action:
Product Team
Diagnosis: Self-serve onboarding is our most common NPS complaint. People often come away without understanding our platform’s core concepts.
Initiative: Improve self-serve onboarding to teach core concepts of the platform.
Success Team
Diagnosis: Feedback about CS indicates all roles except admins are quite happy. Admins specifically have trouble understanding how to set user permissions, and they’d rather avoid going through training to learn something so small.
Initiative: Create micro-videos that explain to admins on how to manage user permissions.
Support Team Diagnosis: NPS feedback indicates enterprise customers are unhappy with the time it takes to resolve support interactions involving custom features.
Initiative: Route tickets from enterprise customers directly to senior agents who have the expertise and product knowledge to resolve their issues.
Marketing
Diagnosis: Many of the leads we’re attracting cannot benefit from our core value proposition.
Initiative: Better align their SEM campaigns and landing pages with promises that the product can fulfill.
Your metrics should flow from your unique business strategy
NPS has been sold by some as the be-all / end-all metric of a customer-centricity program. But this approach can be harmful.
While NPS is often a great way to understand brand-level sentiment, it makes sense to layer on additional metrics as your CX program progresses.
Jessica Pfeifer at Wootric and Allison Dickin at UserLeap agree on the idea that your CX metrics should flow from what’s most critical to your business’ success.
“You’ll be able to benchmark and track trends over time when you complement NPS with established metrics like CSAT, PSAT, or Customer Effort Score at critical touchpoints in the customer journey,” says Pfeifer.
“For example, you might trigger a Customer Effort Score survey to gauge how easy it is for a user to achieve ‘first value.’ What is that critical milestone in your product? In PandaDoc’s case, it might be sending a document. Here at Wootric, it’s when a customer has live survey feedback flowing into their dashboard.” Both took time to talk to us about questions that can be used in addition to (or as an alternative to) NPS. Here are some examples:
Example Non-NPS Questions
Business question
How to ask it
Examples from Allison Dickin @ UserLeap
What are the factors that affect churn, and what can we do differently to reduce it?
First question:
How likely are you to use {{company}} for the next 3 months?
Follow-up question:
What would make you more likely to continue using {{company}}?
How well are we delivering on our core value proposition?
First question:
How well does {{company}} meet your needs for {{value prop}}?
Second question:
How could {{company}} better meet your needs?
How is our first session going for users, and how can we improve it? One option here is to pop up a question in-app, before the median session time. Another option is to email users after their first session.
First question:
How would you rate your experience getting started with {{company}}?
Second question:
How could {{company}} better meet your needs?
Examples from Jessica Pfiefer @ Wootric
How satisfied are users with our product, a feature, or service and how can we improve them? E.g. support interactions. Survey in product for feedback on features, survey via email or Intercom Messenger for support interactions.
CSAT
First question: “How satisfied are you with your recent support interaction?
Second question (customize based on score): “What could we do to improve?
We have a key but difficult task that we need to make easier for users. How difficult is the task, and how can we make it easier to do?
CES
First question: “How easy was it for you to {{key but difficult task}}?
Second question: “What could we do to improve?”
Takeaways
NPS is a great way to get started with driving customer-centric action
Use Josh Rossman’s three-part system to get the most out of your CX surveys, including NPS
Use analysis and a cross-functional cadence to drive org-wide, customer-focused action
As your business grows, layer on metrics that fit your specific business needs
This is just the tip of the iceberg for NPS, but we hope it will help your company squeeze the most out of your CX research program.
Hit me up on Twitter (@nathanlippi), and to let me know what’s worked well for you and your company!
Retain more customers with InMoment, the #1 Net Promoter Score platform for SaaS
Customer experience (CX) programs can usher in meaningful transformation, a more robust bottom line, and a better experience for customers, yet proving all of this ROI can be challenging for the CX teams and practitioners helming such efforts.
Today, we’re going to take a brief look at how to prove that ROI by telling the story of CX—a story of metrics, connections, aspirations, and, yes, hard numbers. The factors that comprise good CX storytelling are as follows:
Operational Metrics
Key Drivers
Key Metrics
Business Metrics
Operational Metrics
One of the best ways to prove customer experience programs’ worth is pointing to their impact on operational metrics. Of course, it’s equally important to include specific metric improvement as a goal at the outset of any CX initiative. That way, it becomes easier for practitioners to link the two when presenting to the higher-ups.
There are many operational metrics that CX programs can be used to improve. For example, if a given brand wants to decrease customer CPA (cost-per-acquisition), CX initiatives are a great way to lower cost to serve. CX practitioners can tell that story by establishing lowering cost to serve by a specific percentage as a program goal, then keep the mechanics of that program firmly tethered to that goal as they report to stakeholders and the C-suite.
Key Drivers
There are several drivers of customer satisfaction that CX programs can be particularly helpful for boosting—so, it’s also particularly helpful for CX practitioners to bear these drivers in mind as they link their initiatives to business success.
First, practitioners need to be mindful of their initiatives’ impact on trusted brand reputation. Are these CX efforts having a noticeable effect on the organization’s impact with customers? Other important drivers that brands can power with CX programs are better and more innovative advice to customers, as well as more promptness in returning to customers and closing the inner loop. Practitioners who can link customer experience to improvement in these areas will have told the CX story.
Key Metrics
Key metrics are useful tools for assessing and managing CX programs’ impact on an organization as a whole. There are several such metrics that brands can use to help measure CX efforts, including the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Overall Satisfaction (OSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES).
The Net Promoter Score is particularly useful for distilling an organization’s CX efforts down to a single number. CX practitioners can use the Net Promoter Score to gauge how well single and multiple departments are doing in this regard. They can then utilize the Net Promoter System, the philosophy of continuous improvement that underpins the Net Promoter Score, to discern the meaning behind that number.
Metrics like NPS also make it easy to translate CX improvement into hard, specific numbers, which in turn makes practitioners’ job of pitching CX ROI to the boardroom significantly easier. Thus, relying on a key metric to tell the story of customer experience is a must.
Business Metrics
This is a big one. Improving a brand’s provided customer experience is an admirable goal, but CX program stakeholders and the C-suite are also interested in how these programs affect the bottom line.
Similarly to operational metrics, it’s important for CX practitioners to define how their initiative can positively impact several business metrics. A few of these metrics are particularly pertinent here—successfully telling the CX story means spelling out how customer experience increases brand revenue, lowers cost to serve, leads to better profitability, and finally, how it widens a company’s market share.
CX practitioners who can incorporate all four of these elements into their CX storytelling will have successfully made the case for experience initiatives’ positive impact on both a business’s standing and its interactions with customers. They can then be given additional leeway to keep improving those and other business elements through the power of customer experience.
Want to learn more about CX ROI, governance for success and more? Listen in to this latest webinar that includes brand new research from CX Network here!
The Coronavirus pandemic has left no aspect of customer experience (CX) programs unchanged, especially compensation practices tied to CX results. COVID-19 has brought about uncertainty, but it also presents a unique opportunity to reevaluate—and redesign—CX-based compensation practices that companies have long held sacred. Let’s discuss how these practices are doing in the current age and how they might fare better during and after this pandemic.
Should We Eliminate CX-Based Compensation?
Many practitioners struggle with how companies tie compensation to CX metrics across their organization. Does this mean I am advocating that CX-based compensation should be eliminated altogether? The answer is absolutely not. Having CX front and center as a beacon metric is critical for any business that claims it cares about the customer experience. So, CX-based compensation can still be very useful. However, brands should double-check whether they’re compensating employees based on CX metrics that those individuals can actually affect.
For example, would it really be ideal if a B2B company compensated customer loyalty for its B2B partner when it’s really just an agent for a third party? What if this hypothetical brand instead compensated its frontline employees on a metric more within their control, such as level of effort? Those employees would be incentivized to create a great experience, then be rewarded for their specific contribution.
The point here is that brands should always reevaluate the metrics they compensate upon regardless of events like this pandemic. However, the current global situation is an additional reason to hit pause and conduct these evaluations in great detail. Companies and their CX leaders can both double check that their CX-based compensation is sound and make any adjustments not only to suit this new, pandemic-driven reality, but also for when this crisis is in our rearview mirror.
Should Everyone Be Equally Compensated?
This is a question that comes up frequently within organizations that offer CX-based compensation. Additionally, this question has been magnified by the pandemic because the customer expectations and service delivery have both changed drastically these past months.
Many brands offer compensation based on one or two beacon CX metrics—CX measures that everyone within an organization can get behind and strive to impact no matter their job or department. However, while organizations should certainly have these beacon metrics in place, there’s once again something to be said for the idea of levelling compensation to suit different employees’ ability to impact a specific metric.
This idea is important because it enables organizations to create a CX-centric culture, one in which every employee has a chance to make a difference while also giving employees who are especially close to a given process the chance to truly step up. This way, the latter group of employees who can make a larger impact will also feel incentivized to actually do so. Equally important is the notion of aligning compensation to impact or creating an organizational hierarchy that employees feel is fair, not arbitrary.
Aspirational but Attainable Goals
Another element for businesses to consider as they evaluate their CX-based compensation and incentives is whether to make goals aspirational but potentially unreachable, or attainable but not a “slam dunk.”
At several points in my career as a CX practitioner, I was responsible for setting corporate CX goals on an annual basis. My job was to balance the executive demand to move ever upward with an operational desire to ensure that we weren’t setting ourselves up for failure. Adding CX-based compensation to this balancing act can make it a bit more precarious—whether I signed up for it or not, our goal-setting had a direct impact on my coworkers’ paychecks!
The trick with this dynamic, as with almost everything customer experience, is to meet everyone in the middle. That means being unafraid to challenge operations leaders to aspire for more while also having the courage to present facts to the C-suite and help them understand this aspirational vs attainable dynamic.
CX practitioners who can pull this balancing act off will be able to create realistic CX-based compensation goals that drive everyone to strive for more, not just be satisfied with hitting a goal. Reaching a consensus between all stakeholders results in goals that employees across the business will chomp at the bit to attain, and there’s no better time to reassess that balance than right now. Finally, since having a compensation impact is a great motivator, everybody wins—especially our customers!
Want to learn more about how to create mindful, meaningful CX management in the age of COVID? Learn more about COVID’s impact on CX data.
The Coronavirus pandemic has left no industry unscathed, especially retail banking. As banking brands reel from everything from a reduction of in-branch business to the economic crunch at large, it’s imperative that they adapt to these and other challenges if they hope to emerge from this crisis in a strong position.
As we outline in our recent white paper on this subject, Five Predictions About The Future of Retail Banking, retail banking brands can achieve this goal by asking the right questions. What follows is a quick rundown of four topics and how addressing them today can help retail banks succeed tomorrow.
The questions we’ll focus on today concern:
Inactivity
Overactivity
Surprises
Customers
Topic #1: Inactivity
The first customer experience (CX) question that banks need to ask themselves is not what banking activity COVID-19 spurred, but rather, what activity didn’t occur as a result of the pandemic. Specifically, retail banks must discover which transactions could have taken place and what accounts might have opened were it not for the Coronavirus.
There are several ways that banks can obtain a glimpse at how inactivity has hurt their bottom line. The first and most obvious step is to compare operational and financial data from the past few months against the same time period in preceding years. This tip may seem gratuitous, but it’s a simple and effective way to get an idea of how much activity COVID-19 has robbed away.
Next, banks need to understand who their customers are. This means identifying customers by their usage loyalty (i.e. identifying customers who regularly bank with a brand versus newcomers or more casual users) and compare that data to a CRM or database to gain a deeper view of what customers are and aren’t doing. Financial and operational metrics are also useful here because using them helps retail banks achieve a total, holistic understanding of their customers.
Topic #2: Overactivity
Gauging inactivity is a good way for retail banks to learn how COVID-19 has changed their customers’ behavior—so too is taking a look at any overactivity. In keeping with the customer understanding we established in the preceding section, it’s important for banks to better know their customers by learning which activities have taken place more often during this pandemic.
For example, are banking customers opening a certain type of account more often? Retail banks can keep an eye out for account overactivity in addition to, say, whether certain services or consultations were solicited more often. Overactivity is a good indicator of how banking customers are feeling during this crisis and, as with measuring inactivity, comparing it to previous customer activity and gaining a 360-degree view of who these people are is vital.
Topic #3: Surprises
Retail banks that work to understand both inactivity and overactivity will be well-equipped to spot anomalies in how their customers act.
It’s helpful for these banks to ask themselves what about recent customer interactions has been the most surprising. Have customers present unusual questions, comments, or concerns to their local branch? Are they making requests that your bank is unprepared to accommodate? Asking questions like these and looking for behavioral anomalies go a long way toward ensuring that retail banks are prepared to continue serving customers best they can during this pandemic. Besides, it doesn’t appear that COVID-19 is departing us anytime soon.
Topic #4: Customers
This is a big one. Banks can better understand their customers by asking the questions mentioned above, but these queries are also a useful way to learn if their audience has shifted entirely. Has your target customer-base shifted? Do some customers seem harder-hit than others? Ascertaining this information can help banks keep a lock on their audience and adapt to their changing needs and expectations.
As we said up top, banks that ask the hard questions and incorporate any findings into their digital strategies will emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic in an ideal position. They can then continue providing an optimal banking experience for customers, resulting in both happier audiences and a stronger bottom line.
Want to learn more about our predictions for the retail banking world during and beyond COVID-19? Check out our new white paper “Five Predictions About The Future of Retail Banking” by retail banking CX expert Jennifer Passini.
The journey to effective customer experience (CX) includes many steps. We’ve already talked about three of those steps—listening to customers, understanding who they are and the context of their experiences, and taking action to improve those experiences—in great detail. This journey should be as rewarding for your company as it is for your customers when you successfully monetize improvements to create a positive impact on the bottom line.
The Strongest Link
The best way for companies to effectively monetize the changes they make to customer experience(s) is to link both actions and outcomes to business metrics. CX practitioners can point to any changes that have occurred in those metrics since implementing any experience fixes and easily connect the two. Practitioners can also use these links to prove ROI to decision makers, which helps determine both which projects to prioritize and how to build a case for (more) funding.
To make the most of these initiatives and to measure just how effective brands’ experience improvement efforts truly are, companies should always view improvement monetization through the paradigm of four economic pillars: customer acquisition, customer retention, cross-sell/upsell opportunities, and lowering cost to serve.
Customer Acquisition
Experience improvement initiatives can enhance customer acquisition. Customer feedback is obviously important for fixing existing experiences, but the ideas captured by analyzing this information can also lead to new products and services, and thus to new customers.
Remember that customers are a company’s best source of marketing. Using a CX program to create promoters and then have them advocate for your brand will grow your customer base considerably.
CX practitioners can prove experience improvement’s impact on new customer acquisition by keeping a few key metrics in mind, including net new customers, new customers acquired over a certain time period, and growth of market share.
Customer Retention
Customer retention is typically one of CX programs’ primary purposes, driven mostly by closing the loop and resolving individual complaints from customers.Typically, it’s also one of the easier elements to measure from a financial standpoint.
There are several key ways to think about and measure customer retention. Brands can draw a link between experience improvement and customer retention by paying attention not only to traditional retention or churn metrics, but also increases in average customer tenure or lifetime value (LTV or CLV).
Upsell/Cross-Sell Opportunities
Voice of the Customer (VOC) and improvement programs are useful for uncovering customer acquisition opportunities, but they also reveal new opportunities to cross-sell or upsell customers. Experience improvement initiatives can help brands uncover new needs and thus market products or services of which existing customers were previously unaware.
Brands need to keep a few metrics in mind as they consider experience improvement’s impact on cross-selling to or upselling customers. Companies should pay attention to how many customers upgrade within a given time period, the amount of customers buying additional products and/or services, and any increases in average customer value. New product and service purchases will also lead to increases in customer lifetime value.
Lowering Cost to Serve
Lowering the cost to serve customers is another primary focus of CX efforts, whether it’s fixing broken processes or reducing service calls. Brands can wield experience improvement in a number of cost-lowering ways. For example, channel shift is a common means of both improving an experience and lowering cost to serve. This can be achieved by, say, moving customers to more digital or self-service options. These changes can fit well within the paradigm of experience improvement and can be measured (and proven) via lowered process costs, labor costs, and cost per call or transaction.
Another way to think about lowering cost to serve is viewing it as lowering the cost to sell. Selling to a current customer, for instance, is much cheaper than trying to acquire a new customer. Activating promoters or brand advocates can also be used in lieu of marketing expenditures. So too is making certain sales processes automated or digitized.
Continuous Improvement
This concludes our four-part conversation on how companies can listen, understand, improve, and monetize their way toward transformational success, a stronger bottom line, and a better experience for their customers. As we have hopefully demonstrated, the journey to effective customer experience and the corresponding benefits for a company’s success and growth is continuous one, requiring constant attention, care, adaptation, and innovation. However, if you deal effectively with the bumps and obstacles you encounter and even pave new paths when necessary, you and your customers will enjoy the journey.
Want to learn more about creating an effective success framework for your CX program? Check out our article on the subject, written by CX expert Eric Smuda, here.
One of the greatest threats that the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic poses to business owners is, well, the uncertainty of it all. We live in unprecedented times—COVID-19 has thrown a lot of the old world’s rules out and left brands wondering how to best serve customers as a viral disease rages the world over.
Though COVID-19 has changed all the rules, businesses needn’t necessarily change how they approach customer service and customer experience (CX) in these challenging times. Rather, the Coronavirus presents an opportunity to get back to the basics of providing a quality experience, and that’s addressing fundamental customer needs.
Identify, Prioritize, Address
As we discovered and outlined in our recent trends report on this subject, one of the ways that brands can stay afloat and even find continued success amid this pandemic is by identifying customers’ most fundamental needs, prioritizing such needs in business and CX plans, and then addressing them directly.
Though this strategy is nothing new to any company that wants to keep its doors open, much less take its vertical by storm, the pandemic has shined a light on one of customers’ most cherished experience needs: health and safety. If that desire wasn’t pertinent before the pandemic, it’s all the more so now.
According to our research, it’s vital that brands not only institute stringent health and safety measures, but also let customers know that those steps have been taken. This one-two strategy both ensures customer safety and reassures them that brands are taking the COVID-19 threat, and their own health, seriously.
A Serving of Success
As we discussed in our previous article on this topic, the restaurant industry is among the most favorably viewed verticals when it comes to Coronavirus responses. When the pandemic began to ramp up, restaurants made it clear that they took customer health seriously by closing dine-in services to help prevent the disease from spreading.
This action let customers know loud and clear that brands they cared about were reciprocating that emotional investment. Restaurants took things a step further by including social distancing measures in their other strategies, adapting curbside and third-party delivery services into their experiences to let customers keep coming without making them feel at risk.
As a result of taking these steps and emphasizing customer safety, restaurants rapidly became one of the most favorably viewed verticals in the country. Our research indicates that there’s a sizable divide between how favorably restaurants are viewed versus other industries that did not take similar safety measures as quickly, such as certain online-only retailers. Clearly, addressing fundamental customer needs makes all the difference, especially at a time like this.
Back to Basics
The strategy that we laid out at the beginning of this article still holds true even in the age of COVID-19. Brands can still find success in the middle of a pandemic by identifying their customers’ needs and desires, making those a priority in its grander strategy, and continually addressing and re-evaluating them. This strategy can prove successful for a brand come rain or shine, pandemic or none. Additionally, as we established with our restaurant example, can also mean the difference between meaningful success and rapid decline.
Want to learn more about how to survive and thrive in the age of COVID-19? Be sure to read our Special Edition CX Trends Report “Your Post-Pandemic Playbook” for additional tips and insights.
In our previous blog posts, we discussed what it means to listen effectively to customers in order to truly understand their feedback and its implications for a brand. What business leaders do with that feedback is crucial to driving significant, holistic customer experience improvement and a better financial outcome.
Data Democratization
After listening to and understanding customers by contextualizing feedback in relation to customer profiles, as well as operational and financial data, it is imperative to share that information with as many relevant stakeholders as possible. These individuals vary from company to company but may generally include marketing and operational leadership, frontline managers, and, of course, any experience teams. Every perspective and area of expertise brought to the table increases the chance of finding a better solution (and of avoiding pitfalls).
This process of sharing customer feedback, capturing ideas from across the company, and sharing with the appropriate parties is known as data democratization, and it’s critical to meaningfully improving brand experience(s).
Governance and Prioritization
Data democratization enables breaking down organizational silos, coordinating company-wide actions, and ensuring smooth hand-offs, all of which are essential for effective customer experience governance and prioritization. There are many benefits to coordinating CX improvement efforts across a company, including creating legitimacy and sponsorship for projects, establishing the depth and breadth of support necessary for concrete improvements, and ensuring that all projects are working toward the same objectives.
Concrete CX improvement has two components: fixing poor or broken experiences as they exist right now, and designing or redesigning new experiences. Once appropriate stakeholders have received and responded to contextualized customer data, they can contribute to a strategy to realize and implement changes. As changes are introduced, tested and measured, cohesive and effective CX governance will ensure that brands can identify, prioritize, and complete the action items that offer the biggest impact.
Closing the Loop
It’s vital that brands be especially vigilant about closing the loop(s) to achieve CX improvement. Closing the inner loop involves addressing and resolving individually submitted feedback, boosting customer retention and affinity. This process may also highlight issues that companies don’t know are occurring.
Closing the outer loop requires analyzing, testing, and fixing the root causes of any broken experiences that have broader implications beyond a unique customer. This process better enables companies to A/B test solutions and iterate the best improvements before rolling them out to customers. Brands can then collect more feedback to gauge satisfaction with changes and make adjustments as needed. Closing the outer loop ensures that a brand follows through on the changes it institutes by making the broader customer base aware of a new or redesigned experience.
Taking Improvement Further
Any improvement that results in a better experience for customers should be encouraged, but companies that seek truly transformational success also need to evaluate how changes can positively affect the bottom line.
Join us next week for the fourth and final discussion in our series to learn how to effectively monetize improvements by using a powerful paradigm that will enable your company to achieve its goals.
Want to learn more about creating an effective success framework for your CX program? Check out our article on the subject, written by CX expert Eric Smuda, here.
Though brands are contending with a lot of customer uncertainty at the current time, there’s another, equally important group with whom all organizations need to engage during this pandemic: furloughed employees.
Just like customers, employees are facing tremendous stress and anxiety in the era of COVID-19. Nearly 20 million of them will likely be furloughed by July. Whether it’s the prospect of becoming unemployed or the reality of being furloughed, employees have found themselves surrounded by very existential threats as the Coronavirus pandemic continues to rage worldwide. Meanwhile, many firms are facing considerable resource challenges and may be wondering how to engage furloughed employees despite those challenges. Though concerns like these are formidable, there are still effective and cost-free ways for brands to stay engaged with their employees during any large-scale crisis. True engagement requires trust, authenticity, and are based on building relationships, all of which these strategies are aimed at helping brands achieve.
What follows is a discussion of five powerful methods that companies can use to stay connected to their furloughed employees.
Today’s conversation will cover:
Employee Outreach
HR Lifelines
Internal Resources
Social Media
Charity Involvement
Employee Outreach
Whether it’s via video messages or company-wide emails, it is critical for brand executives and leaders to remain as connected with their furloughed employees as possible right now. For many companies, particularly large ones, this task is easier said than done, but receiving outreach from upper management can do wonders for employee morale. Of course, these messages need to be genuine—employees will feel that management is attempting to placate them if this outreach consists of, say, generic feel-good messages, which can end up stoking resentment instead of relief.
Companies can take that outreach a step further than just sending a general, company-wide video message. For example, a leading casino was forced to furlough 95% of its employees after various quarantine guidelines were enacted. Knowing that employee morale was essential to retention and brand advocacy, the casino’s executive team reached out to each and every furloughed employee via email, phone or text to check in one-on-one and let them know that they hadn’t been forgotten.
This strategy is essential for successful employee engagement for several reasons. First and foremost, it reminds furloughed employees that the brand they’re dedicating their careers to cares about their well-being. Similarly, it lets employees know that management cares about keeping them in the loop, which in turn keeps them invested in the company. Finally, this strategy helps employees stay passionate about their work. Multiple brands are utilizing this tactic to help ensure that their workforces will return to the office as brand advocates… not detractors.
HR Lifelines
Reaching out to furloughed employees is a great way to engage with them during the pandemic, but it’s also important to give them a means of starting a conversation on their own terms.
To that end, brands should open an email inbox that employees can access and that forwards messages directly to Human Resources, an internal crisis response team, or both. With a direct line like this in place, employees no longer have to wait for management outreach if they feel the need to approach them with a concern.
This tool is an effective means of employee engagement because, as we just mentioned, it allows employees to reach out to brands about any problems on their minds, which may not always be the same as the problems on management’s minds. Thus, a direct-to-HR inbox is both a useful communication tool and a great way for companies to build trust and a sense of authenticity with their employees.
Internal Resources
Though furloughed employees may reach out with novel concerns, it’s likely that the answers to many of their questions can be found within existing resources. Companies should always dispense HR handbooks and related media as a matter of course, but it’s also a good idea to highlight those resources during this pandemic.
To do this, brands should set up a centralized communication channel if they haven’t already done so, and disperse media like newsletters and announcements to keep everyone informed. This strategy is especially useful for businesses that may temporarily suspend login privileges for internal resources during a furlough. Companies can also use these media as a go-to for additional employee outreach, but they’re also useful means of linking back to resources just like HR handbooks.
This strategy has several advantages. First, it gives furloughed employees even more means of getting their questions answered and concerns addressed on their own terms, which goes a long way toward helping them feel invested in a brand. Additionally, by opening the floor to multiple online resources, companies can help ensure that their aforementioned HR inbox doesn’t get overwhelmed, especially with concerns that HR materials may already address.
Social Media
Social media can be an excellent platform for staying in touch with furloughed employees, especially if an organization doesn’t yet have an internal, centralized communication platform. Businesses can stabilize employee morale by building a central social media channel with which to post announcements and updates. They can also create hubs that employees can use to stay in touch, post positive stories, and ask questions. Facebook and its groups tool suit these purposes particularly well.
One business put social media to more uses than just creating company updates. In fact, the company went the extra mile by leadership posting their own positive Covid-19 stories and encouraging their Team Members to post their own positive stories for all to view. This strategy helped stabilize employee morale and ensured a positive impression of the brand. Some brands may find a combination of internal communication platforms and social media to be effective as well.
Charity Involvement
As the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified, more brands have ramped up their contributions to and advocacy for charitable causes. Businesses should take any opportunities they can to get furloughed employees involved with causes like these.
Furloughed employees don’t have to be expected to contribute money, either. Whether it’s volunteering time or contributing any other available resources, donating to a common charitable cause can strengthen furloughed employees’ connection to their brand and each other, helping them retain their sense of connection, in a world that may feel isolated at times.
Plus, let it not be forgotten that assisting charitable and common causes whenever possible is more important than ever right now.
Keeping The Flame Alive
As we mention above, employees are facing uncertainty, anxiety and stress in these challenging times. But both these emotions and employees’ sense of connection to their organization can be managed by the tactics that we’ve talked about. Leadership can conquer uncertainty in their employees by reaching out directly. An HR inbox gives employees a place to express their own concerns and thus reduce anxiety. Constantly pointing these individuals toward resources and social media communication can further reduce stress.
All of these strategies can help organizations build healthy long-term relationships with their employees at little to no cost, and, as we discussed, help ensure that employees eventually return to the workplace with a positive impression of the brand they work for and greater passion for their work. These factors can help organizations regain their footing and beyond once this pandemic is behind us.
Delivering an effective customer experience is a journey, not a destination. If brands want to achieve transformational success, positively affect the bottom line, and create a difference for their customers, they need to not only listen to those individuals, but also understand who they are, what they’re seeking, and the experiences they’re having.
Whereas the previous conversation in this series focused on how to effectively listen to customers, today’s discussion tackles the next step in the process—understanding them. So, let’s touch on the benefits of taking time to understand who your customers are, what they’re looking for, the operational and financial realities associated with their experiences,and how that intelligence can produce meaningful success.
Solving for X
Listening to customers is obviously crucial to CX success, but the journey toward building a better experience doesn’t stop there. Once companies collect customer feedback via a variety of methods and sources, the next step in this process is to combine customer feedback with a database or CRM so that they can better understand who is providing feedback. Companies can also segment this feedback by loyalty or non-loyalty club members, tiers within a loyalty program, or CLV tiers.
Put simply, the brands that take time to truly dive into understanding who their customers are and what they want makes it much easier to prioritize gathered intelligence. Understanding customers also simplifies identifying actionable intel, which in turn enables companies to give customers more personalized experiences.
Tools of The Trade
Similarly to listening for customer stories, there are three key tools that companies should use concurrently in their journey toward better customer understanding. The first is key driver analysis. Brands can better understand customer acquisition, retention, and churn by analyzing the key drivers affecting those movements.
Predictive analytics, meanwhile, are an effective means of discerning what customers are looking for. This tool can also be leveraged to identify what those same individuals may seek from a brand in the future or what actions they may take later on.
The final and most important tool of note here, though, is sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis can detect how strongly customers feel about an experience (be that positive or negative sentiment). This heightened awareness of customer sentiment is vital to actually understanding them.
The Final Blend
Customer profile information, behavioral or purchase history, and sentiment are all valuable information for companies to have close at hand, but they don’t provide a full understanding of the customer experience on their own. For that, companies need to contextualize customer feedback with financial metrics, operational metrics, and employee perspectives.
Adding these metrics and insights to a blend of customer information is vital for getting the full context underlying those individuals’ journeys. Brands that can see who their customers are and how that likeness plays out against financial and operational information will attain a full understanding of the customers’ perceptions of their experiences and why they happened that way. Adding internal context and ideas from employees also helps brands know how an experience can be improved.
Once organizations have profiles of their customers’ desires, experiences, and future intentions, they can go about applying that information to the experiences that they provide and create transformative success for both themselves and the frontline employees who sustain the brand. This allows companies to both personalize the individual experience as much as possible and to design new experiences based on their customer knowledge and segmentation.
Be sure to check out the next installment in our series to learn more about experience improvement.
If you’re a business owner, you’ve probably heard at least one musing or another about how the strongest brands are the ones that can best adapt to change. That quote is especially true in times as unprecedented as the COVID-19 pandemic.
As we acknowledge in our trends report on this issue, it’s difficult (if not impossible) for brands to prepare for every eventuality, especially one as heartstopping as a worldwide pandemic. However, that doesn’t mean that companies shouldn’t try, and it certainly doesn’t mean that brands that try don’t stand a good chance of finding a way forward. Here’s how brands can do precisely that.
Speed: The Name of The Game
It’s never too late to create the processes and teams that brands need to adapt to a crisis like this. Our research indicates that the faster an organization acts to put these changes in place, the easier it will be for brands to maintain positive customer sentiment even in conditions as adverse as these.
Consider, for example, the gulf that lies between customer perceptions of the restaurant industry and those of online retailers. When the pandemic began truly ramping up, many restaurants responded by quickly changing teams and processes so that they could keep providing excellent experiences.
These establishments were able to maintain positive customer sentiment in a number of ways. First, they made it clear that they took customer health seriously by encouraging social distancing and even closing dine-in services. Then, they quickly adapted new strategies like curbside and third-party delivery to keep the meals going and to encourage customers to keep returning.
Finally, many restaurants were able to accomplish all of this without overburdening customers. Indeed, our research shows that the only difference many customers noticed was that they didn’t need to venture outside to grab their favorite grub!
All told, restaurants were able to keep customer sentiment positive by recognizing an encroaching threat and working quickly to adapt to it. As a result, many of these establishments continue to enjoy business even in an age of closed dining rooms and stringent social distancing guidelines.
Left Behind
Restaurants are a great COVID-era brand success story, but the same cannot be said of every industry. As we mentioned earlier, there’s a stark difference between customer perceptions of restaurants versus online retailers, and the X factor here, again, is adaptation.
When the pandemic arrived to American shores in earnest, many online retailers were slow to react. They failed to adjust incoming shipments and were slow to follow up on how that logistical change affected their stock, leading to, well, much less of it.
Additionally, a lot of online retailers also failed to take order pace and workplace safety measures into account. They did not attempt to anticipate how the pandemic would affect certain items’ stock, and they also left many of their fulfillment centers bereft of the workplace safety measures that other industries adopted in the face of the pandemic.
All of this inability to adapt did not stay confined in-house. Before long, customers became adversely affected by these retailers’ surprising slowness to adapt, resulting in overwhelmed call centers, negative comments, and unimpressed customers. Many customers were also outraged at these retailers’ seeming indifference toward employee safety, a fact that many of these individuals are paying attention to and will remember when choosing a brand to shop with in the future.
Going With the Flow
There’s an old Greek proverb about reeds surviving storms because they can bend with the current, while the oak tree is destroyed because it’s too stiff to adapt to the tempest. The same holds true for organizations and COVID—the brands that adapt will come out the other side of this pandemic in much better shape than the ones that don’t.
As we’ve illustrated with the examples above and as our research demonstrates, brand survival and brand adaptation are one in the same. Companies that can change teams and processes—that can bend with the proverbial current—will still provide quality experiences for customers. They will thus survive and thrive during and after COVID-19.
Want to learn more about how to survive and thrive in the age of COVID-19? Be sure to read our Special Edition CX Trends Report “Your Post-Pandemic Playbook” for additional tips and insights.
Customer needs, wants, and expectations are changing rapidly, and brands that want to keep up need to aggressively monitor customer commentary if they hope to continue providing the experiences that those individuals seek. Though listening to customers is merely the first step in a wider, effective framework for customer experience (CX) program success, doing so enables brands to better understand what customers are looking for and to deliver real business outcomes, not just keep track of metrics.
With those in mind, let’s take a closer look at how to effectively listen to customersand how doing so enables wider CX achievement.
I Hear You
The first step companies can take toward better customer listening is to carry that function out in as many forms as possible. Surveys, for example, remain a useful means of gathering customer feedback, particularly when questions are written in an open-ended manner and encourage customers to submit information about the topics they care about, not just what the brand dispersing those surveys might.
Though surveys remain relevant in the modern experience landscape, there are other tools that brands should also use to gather the richest feedback they can. Multimedia feedback options are a must in this day and age, especially as many customers find image and video the most ideal forms of self-expression. Options like these can be included in both surveys and in-app digital intercepts.
It’s important for brands seeking richer customer stories to insert feedback opportunities into numerous touchpoints, which is one reason why website feedback options are also handy. Customers appreciate being able to submit feedback even as they’re taking a journey with a brand, and website feedback can be an invaluable means of enabling that.
Finally, companies need to pay close attention to what customers are saying on social media and other customer service channels. Though it should come as a surprise to no one, these forms of communication can provide invaluable feedback that brands can put toward a better experience.
The Point of Better Data
It’s not enough for organizations to pick one of those aforementioned listening methods and run with it—rather, as we mentioned at the beginning of this discussion, brands need to use as many feedback methods as possible concurrently. By listening for customer stories in as many places and with as many methods as possible, companies can drastically improve the odds they’ll receive quality, actionable feedback.
It’s also important for brands to gather information like this from an oft-overlooked data source: employees. Employees are integral to providing a quality experience and are brands’ customer-facing front line, so it’s safe to assume that they also have valuable intelligence for companies to reap and make use of. Thus, brands should pay close attention to soliciting feedback from both customers and employees.
Organizations that gather all of this feedback will be best positioned to understand who their customers are, what sorts of experiences they’re seeking, and how to meet customer needs and expectations even as they evolve in real-time. Now that we’ve discussed how to better listen to customers, be sure to check out the next chat in our series, understanding the customer, to learn more about building a better experience.
Want to learn more about creating an effective success framework for your CX program? Check out our POV on the subject, written by inveterate CX expert Eric Smuda, here.
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