What do you want a customer experience (CX) survey invitation to do? Besides literally inviting someone, you want your invitation to tell the recipient that they’re valued and will also receive something of value if they accept it. Obviously, not every invitation accomplishes that.
Email survey invitations especially have a hard time convincing the customer to even open the invitation. In fact, it’s common to think that shortening the survey will increase survey response rates, but most non-response is actually due to people never entering the survey at all.
So how do you send the perfect email survey invitation? Making an invitation as compelling as possible is not so simple. It takes a well-thought out process—and we have one to share with you in today’s post!
How to Send the Perfect Email Survey Invitation:
Get the Survey Invitation to the Customer
Get the Customer to Notice and Open the Email Invitation
Get the Customer to Open the Survey
Tip #1: Get the Survey Invitation to the Customer
The biggest obstacle in getting your survey invitation to the customer is avoiding spam or phishing filters. If your invitation ends up in there, there’s little to no chance for a response. Here are a couple best practices to avoid this issue:
Make sure to send from a reputable IP address
Remove any words in the subject line that may trigger those filters
Whitelist your domain if possible.
Of course, with email surveying, there are highly technical strategies that can be done to help. At that top level, hiring a professional would be the most effective route.
Tip #2: Get the Customer to Notice and Open the Email Invitation
This is the step where most non-response occurs in CX measurement programs. Email invitations can get buried in other emails, respondents can mistake them for spam and just delete them, or customers can simply ignore them.
One way to increase the likelihood of a customer noticing and opening an email invitation is to send it at the right time. But the right time always depends on who you’re trying to reach so it’s important to think about when your customer would most likely check their email.
Tip #3: Get the Customer to Open the Survey
Getting the customer to open the survey is often most influenced by the ease and simplicity of accessing and understanding the survey invitation. Your surveys must be optimized to various devices, especially smartphones, because no one will want to open a survey if the invitation is already difficult to read or display.
Another useful tactic is to be straightforward in the invitation, telling customers exactly how their feedback will help them improve the company. This way, the customer knows that they are playing an active role in improving their own experience (and also that you’re listening and have a plan in place for how to make change happen).
We hope this introduction to the art and science of email survey invitations was helpful to you, but keep in mind that crafting the perfect invitation is both a nontechnical and technical challenge that goes beyond these three tips.
To learn more, read this white paper that takes a deep dive into the strategies and methods you can utilize to perfect your email survey invitations.
Every company executive will agree that having loyal customers is a key to business success. But what are executives really doing to encourage customer loyalty? Most businesses will point to their customer care training or customer relationship management (CRM) system and count on these tools to build loyalty. Some will point to their monthly newsletter or discount program to demonstrate their efforts. All of these are good attempts.
However, they are not enough. They might make an impact, but creating customer loyalty is something that must be the center of the company. Fostering true loyalty and engagement with customers starts with the basics—and we’re laying those out for you in our top tips, listed below!
Aim Toward Ideal Business Outcomes, but Stay Agile
Have the Right Data Collection Tools in Place
Act on the Data You Receive
Continuously Improve Your Processes Based on Market Changes
Customer Loyalty Tip #1: Aim Toward Ideal Business Outcomes, but Stay Agile
Ideally, you’ll know where your business is heading in 12 months, three years, and five years. But, since the onset of the pandemic, we have learned the hard way that everything can change in a heartbeat. For these reasons, an agile customer listening strategy is critical to survive and thrive.
Providing your customers with an open channel for communication and feedback engages your customers and strengthens your relationship with them. Engaged customers are more satisfied, more loyal, and more likely to promote your company than unengaged customers. They go out of their way to show their association with your company. An engaged customer also supports you during both good and bad times, because they believe that what you have to offer is superior to what your competitors have to offer.
Engagement takes your customers beyond passive loyalty to become active participants and promoters of your product. Engaged customers will want to give you more feedback—and you should be ready to handle it! All this translates into more engaged customers who will spend more money with you over time.
Loyalty Tip #2: Have the Right Data Collection Tools in Place
Enterprise feedback management (EFM) is more than just collecting data. EFM adopts a strategic approach to building dialogues with your customers. By wrapping customer dialogues with technology, your company creates a structured, searchable, and quantifiable body of information that can be used to drive critical business decisions.
By having the right feedback collection tools in place, you:
Empower customers to give feedback through common advertised channels
Centralise reporting for proactive surveys and complaint management solutions
Structure quantitative feedback into a drill-down or rollup report
Make open-ended feedback intuitively searchable
Loyalty Tip #3 Act on the Data You Receive
Collecting data is a great start—but taking action on customer feedback is the next and most important step for creating loyal customers. Once you’ve validated the data against your program goals and established trends and patterns, it’s time to make a plan.
Businesses use a variety of statistical techniques to make predictions about the potential for future events. Furthermore, predictive analytics may be used to ascertain the degree to which answers from a survey relate to particular goals (such as loyalty and engagement). Tactical knowledge of action items that impact an outcome preserves resources wasted on ineffective programs, and competent statistical modeling reveals which tactical options have the most impact.
Analyse data using a statistical technique to reveal the most important areas of focus. Then, ask your analyst about common statistical methods including correlation, multiple regression, factor analysis, and logit models. Finally, recognise that the important areas of focus may change over time to respond with changes in the economic, competitive, and demographic environment of your business.
Loyalty Tip #4: Continuously Improve Your Processes Based on Market Changes
Whether you are applying lean principles, 6Sigma, Kaizen, or a combination, a continually improving experience program is what we are all striving for when it comes to best practice. Every time you seek to optimise your program, you have the opportunity to eliminate non value adds and other waste components which get in the way of operational processes. Every improvement should have a “customer first” approach, which will help customers feel valuable and more loyal with every action.
Want to learn more about what it means to continuously improve your customer experience, customer loyalty, and your bottomline? Check out this paper which outlines the Continuous Improvement Framework, InMoment’s unique approach to truly value drive experience programs.
Every business can agree that a sterling brand reputation does wonders for both the customer base and the bottom line—but how can companies build a better rep by leveraging customer experience (CX) tools? Additionally, why are CX programs (especially those that drive Experience Improvement (XI)) ideal for building a reputation that your existing customers will love and that new customers will find enticing? Today we’re covering three quick ways a CX-driven brand reputation helps your business:
Preserving the Base
Creating Shared Identity
Quickly Attracting New Business
Key #1: Preserving the Base
There’s no better way to retain your customers than through customer experience programs. Full stop. Advertising can be useful for keeping up a steady messaging drumbeat, but only a strong CX toolkit enables brands to continuously listen to customer preferences, identify broken touchpoints, and anticipate what those individuals will want from you next. Consistently applying these tools to gather intel, sharing that information across the organization, and taking united action on that intelligence will raise your profile among customers both new and old, effectively future-proofing your brand’s reputation.
Key #2: Creating Shared Identity
Tapping into customer preferences to create great products and services is essential, but it’s also important to understand who your customers are as human beings and not just as customers. Customers transact with the brands they feel share their values—an organization that can express desired values in its messaging, product offerings, and overall relationships will achieve sustainable success. Being known for serving customers well is one thing; being known for tuning into who customers are as people is another entirely.
Key #3: Quickly Attracting New Business
When a brand becomes known for delivering consistent experiences and values that customers connect to, new prospects will notice. CX programs’ unparalleled ability to deliver specific, actionable intelligence gives brands the chance to know, at a granular level, what will bring new customers to their doors. Again, advertising is important, but customer word-of-mouth following great experiences can be an even more effective way to acquire new business. That’s the power of CX-driven brand reputation in action.
What Comes Next?
We’ve briefly touched on how CX programs (especially Experience Improvement initiatives) are useful for capturing intelligence that improve your brand’s reputation. But which tools specifically should your brand utilize, and how? Click here to read my full-length Point of View article on the subject. I take a deep dive into the importance of a stellar CX reputation and how your business can achieve that same prestige efficiently. Thanks for reading!
There’s a problem with how many businesses view customer experience (CX) data: human beings cannot (and should not) be distilled down to numbers. For many years, experience programs have hailed numbers as a sort of holy grail, but the reality is that numbers are no substitute for genuine human connection.
None of this is to say that metrics aren’t important, but companies should remember that they can only reveal so much about why customers may be experiencing an issue or even why they remain loyal to the brand. With that in mind, we’re going to dive into a few things to bear in mind while creating more human and more connective customer relationships!
Numbers Alone Can’t Tell a Story
Before we get into how to humanize and improve customer experiences, we first need to understand why structured data can’t give us all the answers. For instance, it’s common to send out Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT/OSAT), or Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys after a customer interacts with a brand, but what do these scores actually tell us? A higher ease-of-use score, for example, doesn’t necessarily mean you made the customer happier or that you improved that customer relationship. You can speculate about numbers, but they don’t reveal the exact, organic reason why customers feel one way or another.
So, how can companies compensate for this lack of context? The answer lies in unstructured data and the Experience Improvement (XI) solutions that can turn it into actionable intelligence. That actionable intelligence, in turn, gives brands the chance to create a more organic, more connective, and more human customer experience.
How to Humanize and Improve Customer Experiences
Only when a business listens to human feedback can it respond with a more human customer experience. This means tapping into the voice of the customer by allowing customers to express feedback in their own words.
Consider platforms like Instagram, Yelp, and YouTube. People can use these platforms to freely (and frankly) express themselves in a way that numbers cannot allow. The result is a form of unstructured feedback that your brand can not only use to trace the root causes of experience breakages, but also to empathize with your customers.
After accumulating enough unstructured data, the next step is to analyze and act on what you’ve learned. However, that’s easier said than done, especially if your CX resources are limited. That’s why it’s important to desilo data and share customer intelligence with your entire company. Then, you can get multiple departments to collaborate and act on their role in humanizing the customer experience (this approach also creates a single, holistic view of the customer for your organization).
If your brand can offer experiences that are far more human, that’s far more valuable than achieving any high metric score. And it goes hand in hand with customer loyalty. When a customer feels empathized with and known as a person, that customer will return to your brand—even if there’s a lot of competition—because their relationship with you has transcended mere transactions. This is the heart of Experience Improvement—answering customers’ search for meaning while strengthening both your bottom line and your marketplace leadership! To learn more about what makes doing business so dehumanizing and why brands need to challenge themselves to humanize and improve customer experiences, watch this video!
Delivering customer service during COVID-19 was a challenge across the board-— but perhaps no industry was hit harder than travel and hospitality.
Hemant Chawla, Sofitel Wellington’s Guest Customer Experience Manager, saw this effect up close. When the pandemic settled in and everyone was adjusting to the ‘new normal’, customers were happy to give hotel staff a grace period as they tried to figure out new policies and ways of working. Yet, as the months went on and New Zealand hotels began booking out again, customer expectations seemed to slowly shift back to normal. Even as customer expectations began to normalize, there were many external factors (like lack of staff members) that meant it was going to be tricky to meet customer needs.
So, how do you balance customers’ sky-high expectations and these ongoing business challenges? Here are three tips for helping you navigate post-COVID consumer feedback:
Be Honest and Up Front With Your Brand’s Shortcomings
Carefully Listen to What Your Customers Are Telling You
Make Sure Your Customers See Your Business Acting on Feedback and Owning Mistakes
Tip #1: Be Honest and Up Front With Your Brand’s Shortcomings
Many of your customers would have had strong, positive perceptions of your brand based on earlier experiences. So, when you know that you’ll be falling short of their expectations, it’s best to get in front of it before customers become disappointed.
In the case of luxury hotels, COVID-19 meant that some services were intentionally modified to meet AccorHotels ALL Safe standards. When hotels started to go back to maximum capacity, guests started to expect 5 star service again, yet businesses were still struggling to recover from the impact of the pandemic.
Hemant’s team learned that it’s best to be open and honest with guests through transparent communication. Sofitel made an effort to communicate which services were scaled back, and more importantly, why they were scaled back. This type of up-front communication helped to frame guest expectations before they were let down by paired back services.
Guests responded positively to the transparent communication. Almost all customers were appreciative and responsive to the brand’s honesty and detailed explanation as to the sacrifices that were made to adjust to the post-pandemic environment. It’s important that hotels and service providers are not perceived to hide behind the “excuse” of COVID-19 when managing customer service; but instead, educate the customer about the reality and challenges that the business is facing.
Tip #2: Carefully Listen to What Your Customers Are Telling You
Hotel brands found a shift in guest demographics as a result of COVID-19. For example, Sofitel was used to seeing a high volume of business travelers. Then, as the pandemic hit, a larger volume of leisure guests visited the hotel, and these guests required a different type of experience.
Be sure to gauge your new customers’ experiences and listen to what they are telling you. If needed, work with your CX partner when making changes to your survey. They can provide best practice advice around the revised survey structure, suggest new question wording and ensure any potential changes to historic survey data (due to survey changes) is well managed.
After analysing customer feedback, focus on gathering insights into the current situation and taking appropriate action. These themes may provide new closed loop feedback alerts (customers that need to be contacted) or provide insights into new, post-pandemic opportunities.
Tip #3: Make Sure Your Customers See Your Business Acting on Feedback and Owning Mistakes
If there is a mistake, a shortfall in service or a failed deliverable, it’s important to take ownership and try and correct it through a tailored solution for each guest. After all, guests made an effort to support your brand through a difficult time, and their loyalty should be recognised and celebrated.
While guests were initially sympathetic of the pandemic impact to businesses, we know from customer feedback that their expectations have slowly edged closer to normality. From the data, it seems like guests are happy to accommodate changing amenities and services, yet they want to be sure their voices are heard and their feedback is actioned.
Customer feedback is valuable, no matter if it’s positive or negative. By embracing the negative feedback, or customer pain points, businesses like Sofitel have been able to adapt services to ensure it met the true needs of guests, whilst still managing the business in a sustainable manner.
To read more about how COVID-19 continues to impact the customer experience, check out this report!
Frontline employees are constantly tasked with metrics—handle time, occupancy, attendance, and, of course, customer experience (CX). However, all of this focus on metrics can prevent our frontline teams from realizing the wealth of value they can bring to a CX program.
So How Can You Engage Your Frontline Employees in CX Programs?
There are a myriad of ways that I have operationalized during my time as a practitioner. And, additionally, I have also been able to see how many of our InMoment clients engage their employees in their CX programs.
For my post today, I’ve compiled a list of my top five methods for gaining CX buy-in from frontline employees. So without further ado, let’s get going!
Top Five Methods for Frontline Employee CX Buy-In
Broadcast the Value of Customer Experience
Create Recognition Opportunities
Show Employees How They Make a Difference
Include Customer Experience in Frontline Training
Use Customer Experience to Solve Specific Issues
Method #1: Broadcast the Value of Customer Experience
It is vitally important that the frontline teams (really the entire company) understand the importance of customer experience and, if practical, the primary CX metric that everyone is measuring. Having a theme or tagline that is shared everywhere is recommended. One of the health care companies I work with has a “Members First ” tagline that is used all around the company but especially in the contact center. All the representatives have been trained as to what their target metric, Net Promoter Score (NPS), is and why it is important.
Method #2: Create Recognition Opportunities
Create frequent opportunities to appreciate the frontline effort. “WOW” alerts, reader board messages (if we are ever in offices again), notes from site leaders when a positive comment is received from a customer …. It all goes a long way to instill a culture where excellent customer experience is celebrated.
Method #3: Show Employees How They Make a Difference
Leverage the frontline employees for continuous improvement initiatives. When I was a practitioner, I did employee roundtables and I Y-Jacked with frontline employees. I used those opportunities to validate what I was seeing in survey data. I actively solicited feedback and ideas on how to reduce customer friction directly from the source—the agents. I found that even if I could show just a small change as a result of my own or my team’s face-to-face interactions, the frontline teams became more bought into our CX program.
Method #4: Include Customer Experience in Frontline Training
Make customer experience a module in frontline training. Even if it is only a few minutes, show the trainees the survey text, share the “beacon” metric, and tell them why we emphasize customer experience. Explain how we learn from our customers what works well and what we can improve and truly stress how important they are to the process. Doing this in training introduces customer experience before they ever take a call or interact with customers.
Method #5: Use Customer Experience to Solve Specific Issues
Leverage very specific interactions for employee feedback with regard to customer experience. Many of our clients use our Resolve tool for case management. Part of our Resolve process is to capture employee feedback about the escalation interaction as part of the case closure process. We specifically ask them to help identify the root cause of the case and their suggestions to eliminate similar cases in the future. This creates a defined opportunity for the frontline reps to have a voice in how customers are served.
At the End of the Day…
Our frontline employees are the face of the company. If we get them bought into the program, they are the best advocates and ambassadors for customer experience. Celebrating them and asking for their opinions and insights are the best ways to get them—and keep them—engaged.
Want to learn more about how to engage your employees in the customer experience? Check out this eBook, “Better CX Begins with Employees”
Creating a customer journey map is the first step toward designing a superior customer experience (CX) that drives end-user growth. Rather than rushing in and narrowly focusing on a single touchpoint to measure success, a customer journey map helps you evaluate the journey as a whole—providing a bird’s-eye view of the experience your brand delivers.
So You’ve Already Mapped Out the Customer Journey! What’s Next?
The urgent question then becomes, how do you take that big picture view and start asking your customers about their experience?
To move forward, you need to figure out which specific touchpoints you want to study, which metrics you want to gather, what questions you want to ask, and which channels are the most effective to collect that data.
Your customers are more than willing to tell you about the bottlenecks in their journey, but you’ll want to be thoughtful in your approach. So, before you start sending out surveys, think through your voice of customer (VoC) strategy using your journey map as a guide.
That’s what this post is all about. It will help you develop a strategy for gathering feedback at key points within your customer journey so you can take actionable steps toward optimizing your customer experience. Now let’s get started!
When in the Customer Journey Should You Ask for Feedback?
Before you begin asking away, it’s important to determine which pivotal touchpoints (otherwise known as make-or-break moments) within the B2B customer journey are ideal times to gather feedback.
Just to clarify, we are giving you a general idea of when to ask these questions, but this is not a turnkey solution. Every company’s customer journey map looks different, and your approach to asking the right questions at the right time will differ.
In fact, in all likelihood, you already have some sense of where the bottlenecks are in your customer journey and what needs improvement, so trust your intuition there.
And if you’ve got any doubt? The following touchpoints represent good places to start.
1. Onboarding Completion
Why is onboarding a make-or-break moment? Signing up for a new service always takes effort because you’re asking new customers to open their minds, learn about your product, and make a change by integrating your product into their lives. The more seamless you can make this stage, the more likely you are to gain a loyal customer.
2. Support Interaction
Why are support interactions make-or-break moments? We often think of customer support as its own thing, but it’s a vital part of the customer journey. The bane of product-led growth is friction, and by definition, a support interaction is a point of friction. No matter how usable your product is, some people will struggle with it.
Asking for feedback after a support case is closed will give you feedback on how your support team is doing. This will help determine resources support may need to speed customers through this touchpoint, identify bugs and usability issues, and draw attention to possible feature improvements.
3. Product Experience (Usually In-App)
Why is product use a make-or-break moment? This feedback will tell you what’s working as anticipated and what needs to be reconsidered. Customer feedback can and should influence your roadmap and guide the prioritization of development resources. Plus, SaaS companies are always trying out new features, and there’s no better time to survey your customers about those features than at the very moment they’re using them.
4. First Experience of Value and/or Pre-Renewal (Loyalty Check)
Why is the incomplete and/or pre-renewal experience a make-or-break moment? After a user has been up and running for a bit, they should be experiencing the benefits of using your product and services. It’s time to make sure they are. Asking for feedback at this touchpoint is meant to surface all kinds of things about their relationship with you (that you won’t hear after a support interaction, for example). Product, service, pricing, you name it. A survey response might give you the opportunity to fix an issue you didn’t know about and retain their business. And make sure to ask again pre-renewal to make sure your relationship is still on the right track.
How Might Your Approach Vary Depending on Your Business Model?
Let’s say you’ve got a self-serve product where customers get started quickly and they can see your product’s value upfront. In that case, it makes sense to ask the loyalty question (Net Promoter Score) early on in the customer journey because they’ve reached a point where they understand your value proposition.
On the other hand, if you send in consultants who spend weeks or more helping your enterprise users get up to speed with your product, you’ll probably want to wait a while to send that first NPS survey.
Just make sure that, whenever you ask the question, it makes sense to do so at that time. For example, asking someone how they feel about a new feature (PSAT) when they’re not currently using that feature makes no sense. Instead, ask them about the feature using an in-app survey, while they’re engaging the product. And of course, you wouldn’t want to ask someone about a support experience they had weeks earlier. Use common sense and put yourself in the customers’ shoes to deliver surveys that flow with their experience.
Remember: Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day, and Neither Is a Mature CX Program
Companies don’t generally implement voice of customer surveys at multiple journey points all at once—they roll out gradually, sometimes over 2-3 years. They might do one, then add another 6+ months later. A helpful tip is to start with the touchpoint that will give you the biggest bang for your buck in terms of learning, retention, and driving Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
So What Questions Do You Ask?
When gathering voice of customer data, the most common feedback questions revolve around the things that drive product-led growth—like ease of use, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty. With this in mind, the following metrics can help you assess these elements at key touchpoints: Customer Effort Score, Customer or Product Satisfaction, and Net Promoter Score. You’ll typically want to follow the rating question with an open-ended one asking the customer to explain the reasoning behind their score.
Now, you may be wondering: why not simply make up your own customer feedback questions tailored to your business, products, and customer experience? It may be tempting, but these metrics will give you a benchmark and scores that you can monitor over time to track whether you’re improving.
Need a Few More Reasons to Use Standard Metrics?
It’s much easier to get internal buy-in when using tried-and-true metrics employed by companies around the world. People can waste countless hours arguing over what questions to ask, but using established metrics can instantly end that debate.
These metrics are also extendable and extensible. In other words, you can extend the same questions to different products and features without reinventing the wheel. This makes it easier to roll out a CX program across a portfolio of products and brands.
And finally, these established metrics will stand the test of time, surviving personnel changes. Simply put, it’s an evergreen survey strategy.
What are the Metrics You Ought to Consider Tracking?
Choose your metric based on what you want to learn, and whether it will make sense to your customer in context. Remember, a survey is part of your customer’s experience.
What Is the Customer Effort Score (CES)?
Customer Effort Score (CES) lets you know how much work it takes for customers to accomplish something (e.g., onboarding, solving a problem).
CES surveys ask the customer “How easy was it to ________?” and is scored on a numeric scale. It’s a metric that is used to improve systems that may otherwise frustrate customers.
As a CX metric, CES helps with that “ease of use” component that increases Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). And while there’s no standard format for CES surveys, they usually look like a 5- or 7-point scale asking how easy it was for a customer to achieve whatever goal they were trying to accomplish. Take a look at our post abouthow to use CES to evaluate your onboarding experience for more details.
What Is Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)?
SaaS companies typically use CSAT surveys to get a read on specific interactions, such as a recently closed support ticket or a fresh purchase. You can format your CSAT survey as a numeric scale (e.g., 5- or 7-point). You’ll typically want to follow the rating question with an open-ended one asking the customer to explain their score.
What Is Product Satisfaction (PSAT)?
A Product Satisfaction (PSAT) survey measures customer satisfaction with your product or a specific feature, and you’ll often ask it with an in-app survey. Like CSAT, it’s flexible and you can ask the question in a variety of formats (binary +/- or on a 5- or 7-point scale).
What Is the Net Promoter Score (NPS)
There’s an excellent chance you’re already conducting NPS surveys at regular intervals, and that’s great! By combining NPS data with other key metrics listed here, you can get a good sense of the customer experience you offer across the entire journey. If you aren’t already using NPS, ask it after your customer has had a chance to experience value from your product or ask it prior to renewal. Both are good times to assess user loyalty.
Net Promoter Score measures brand loyalty, and unlike the other three metrics listed, it follows a standard format, which allows you to compare your results against industry leaders in your field. The standard NPS question asks: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”
That NPS question should always be followed by an open-ended question asking respondents why they gave you the score they did. You will then use their answers to (1) have a customer service agent or a success manager follow up with the detractors to try to fix the problem and (2) use the response to improve your customer experience.
Remember: Less Is More
Have you ever taken a “brief” survey that stretched on far longer than promised? Most customers don’t want to take 3-4 minute surveys, and you can reduce friction and improve your survey response rate by using microsurveys.
Let people write a novel in response to your open-ended questions, that’s great—you’ll learn a lot from them! But put yourself in your customers’ shoes and keep your surveys short and sweet, gathering a relevant metric upfront.
Which Distribution Channels Should You Use to Gather Feedback?
Emails, SMS, and in-app surveys are the three main survey channels typically used to gather customer feedback on a post-acquisition journey. Once again, use common sense and think about the channel that makes the most sense for the user. Product experience, as mentioned above, is almost always best asked through in-app surveys at the moment they’re in your platform or app. Support experience is often assessed with an email survey. SMS can be a great channel for gathering feedback if you’re already communicating with customers via phone—for example, following up on a cable technician’s visit.
Just like the question of “when” to collect data, the question about how to distribute surveys will sometimes produce different answers based on your business model. For instance, if you’ve got a more complicated onboarding process where end-users interact with customer success a fair bit, they won’t be surprised to receive a survey via email. On the other hand, if you have a largely self-serve product where onboarding is straightforward, it makes sense to conduct the CES survey in-app.
As you gather data and begin to analyze it, it’s important to remember that none of these metrics or the touchpoints they evaluate exist in isolation. The real secret to a successful CX strategy is to take a step back and look at the entire journey—understanding how it’s all interconnected.
This is where it helps to have a cross-functional team, often led by someone with responsibility for CX operations, that can step back and look at an implementation plan. They can then unify all the data and connect information across the tech stack (e.g., Zendesk, Salesforce, Gainsight, InMoment.
Without this holistic approach, it’s easy to develop departmental silos (where everyone focuses exclusively on their own touchpoints) and technological silos (e.g., the Sales team sees what’s in Salesforce, and the Customer Support team sees what’s in Zendesk, but nobody sees the big picture).
Tasking a team with developing a big picture approach to evaluating the entire customer journey is an essential ingredient in creating a consistent customer experience. And a consistent, seamless, enjoyable experience will build loyalty and boost customer value in the months and years to come.
Sometimes all we need is a shift in perspective. You can sit all day racking your brains for the answer to how to improve your CX program, but more often than not, creative answers require asking the right questions first. If this is you, our very own Ashley Goode (SVP) recently gave the keynote presentation at our August Experience Forum, a monthly event for our InMoment community members across all industries to help them rethink their approaches and gain new inspiration.
And here are the three vital questions to start that brainstorming session:
Who do Your Customers Want to be?
What are Customers Really Buying?
How do Customers Want to buy?
Who Do Your Customers Want to Be?
Instead of asking who your customers are, start by asking who they want to be. What this question points out is the aspirational mindset of the modern consumer: how will this purchase measure up to who your customer wants to be? Due to changes in values and culture, customers today are more interested in buying things to fulfill a specific lifestyle rather than a need.
For instance, a customer who is keen on helping the environment would likely not want to buy clothes made through unethical practices. But they would want clothes from companies that abide by sustainable business models. So when understanding your customers, it’s important to think about your products and services as changes that shape their life.
What Are Customers Really Buying?
Let’s take a step back. In a time where corporate movements mirror societal ones, not only are customers buying a product itself, but they’re also buying into an experience that fits into a larger social context. Your product satisfies a practical function—like restaurants serving food because people are hungry—as well as a cultural one, because the food isn’t just food. It’s Mediterranean, Mexican, or Malaysian food.
For example, if you think about McDonald’s recent branding collaborations with celebrities such as Korean Pop band BTS, the food itself didn’t change much, but the logos and theme of the bags, sauces, and containers did. And that sent fans of BTS flying to McDonald’s—even though the food offering was nothing new. As you can see, your products are intertwined with our evolving culture, making them cultural products—that’s what customers are really buying.
How Do Customers Want to Buy?
Our culture today is heavily influenced by technology, and that can teach you how customers want to buy your products. With a growing population that would much rather text than call to contact businesses, it’s a no-brainer that customers now want more digital experiences—whether that’s a virtual store, online ordering, etc.
With the aid of digital experiences, your business can help customers find and define their lifestyles. Incorporating digital elements into each part of your customer journey map will show customers that your brand cares about how they want to purchase products. After all, how customers buy is just as important as what they’re buying.
Find these questions interesting? Our InMoment clients attend exclusive events like these monthly, featuring internal thought leaders, industry experts, and other experience rock stars. Want to learn more about the brands in the InMoment community? Check out our Customer Stories page!!
Whether your customers are visiting your storefront, browsing your website, unboxing your product on TikTok, or reading a review site, consumers interact with your brand in countless ways and places. But how do customer experience (CX) programs keep up with a customer journey that is constantly changing? A good place to start is going beyond traditional survey solutions to include more modern methods, listening posts, channels, and feedback types—solicited, unsolicited, and inferred.
Not all valuable feedback gathered is solicited in the form of surveys, focus groups, or interviews (also known as direct feedback in the CX world). There is a wealth of unsolicited—or indirect feedback—in call centre recordings, social media feedback, and web chat transcripts. A company can also use inferred feedback by tracking customers’ behaviours, contact frequency or purchasing habits.
This post is all about going beyond direct and indirect survey options and questionnaires, and expanding your program to include inferred feedback. When you meet customers where they are, however and whenever they’re interacting with your brand, you are opening the door to big picture understanding, big picture improvements, and, most importantly, big picture results.
So, What’s Inferred Customer Feedback All About?
According to Gartner analysts, inferred feedback is operational and behavioural data associated with a customers experience or customer journey, like a website’s clickstream data, mobile app location data, contact centre operational data, or ecommerce purchase history.
Bringing Inferred Feedback to Life
As an example of all three feedback sources working together, let’s imagine a shoe retailer’s CX team launching a new release sneaker in store—and they’re on the hunt for actionable intelligence. There are multiple touchpoints along the journey to analyse in order to launch this product successfully.
When customers buy shoes (or anything else) at the store, they are given scannable QR codes on each receipt for direct feedback. They might take the survey, rate their in-store experience, and say they buy shoes there every 12 months, on average.
For indirect feedback, the CX team would also look at reviews on their mobile app, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to see what customers are saying about the latest and greatest sneakers. We can use text analytics tools to find common data themes as well as positive, negative, and neutral sentiment in a customer’s verbatim feedback. The CX team can also look into web chat notes, which might show how many people have contacted you asking for more details, stock levels or sneaker quality in the past.
The last step is to look at inferred feedback. When it comes to sneakers, it will be useful to look at purchase history through a CRM, a loyalty program, or a customer’s store account, which will show an important operational and segmentation piece of the puzzle. From your analysis, you might learn a few things:
the average repurchase cycle is 18 months
those customers purchasing more frequently are your fanatics, more likely to be singing your praises and spreading the word
your neutral customers are being nice and predictable
the skeptical, non-loyalists come and go as they please
When you combine this behavioural insight with the direct and indirect feedback that corresponds to each segment, you are painting a better picture of what is driving customers to act in certain ways.
Are the fanatics more forgiving of experiences, more excited, or even demanding more of you? What does this intelligence tell you to do? Increase stock levels, super-charge loyalty bonuses, or pivot?
When you put all of these pieces into your data lake, you now have all the information you need to form a rich, single view of the customer. From there, you can start making sense of the data and creating a world-class action plan.
How Do I Take Action on Inferred Customer Data?
A problem many businesses are facing is how to link all sources of collected feedback together, turn it into something they can act on, and truly transform their business. Luckily, we have a few tips for going beyond insights to take action:
Action Step #1: Get the Right Reports to the Right People
When it comes to bringing inferred data to life, optimised reports are a superpower. Spend the time up front to figure out which insights deliver relevant, actionable, and effective intelligence, then to get that intelligence to the right people. We recommend creating reports that are customised, metric-specific, and delivered in real-time, and then looking for those CX advocates in your business who have the power to do something with them.
Action Step #2: Put Your CRM Data to Work
Integrating CRM data with your traditional feedback data can be a game changer. It helps you understand more about the customer to create more informed, personalised interactions that can boost average basket size, increase purchase frequency and drive brand advocacy to new levels.
Action Step #3: Resolve Issues Quickly
Your inferred data will show when customers are at risk of churning. This is a great opportunity to intervene quickly, and turn an unhappy customer into a lifelong advocate. One of the most important actions your CX program should take is responding to customer issues quickly and efficiently, be it negative feedback, a bad social review, or knowing a customer had a difficult time processing a refund.
Your brand might be asking, “why does our customer experience program need a case management system?” Well, to answer your question, statistics show that 43% of people spend more money on brands they’re loyal to and a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 25% increase in profit or more, according to statistics about customer loyalty. Implementing a case management system can develop customer loyalty by addressing systemic issues within your organization.
Of course, there are more specific reasons as to why a case management system satisfies customer needs so well—but before we dive in, let’s take a look at some case management basics!
What Is a Case Management Program?
A case management program is a closed-loop system that incorporates intelligent alerts, text analytics, and prescriptive recommended actions to address high-risk to high-potential customers. These programs allow brands to reach back out to such customers and “make it right,” which not only remedies any disgruntled feelings, but has been proven to increase customer loyalty. In fact, 70% of the time, a person will become a repeat customer when a complaint is resolved in the customer’s favor.
Why Do You Need a Case Management Program?
Streamlines the Communication of Customer Experience Survey Results
Facilitates a Follow-Up Procedure When a Customer Has a Problem
Organizes Data for Updating Your Customer Experience Program
Reason #1: Case Management Programs Streamline the Communication of Customer Experience Survey Results
A common issue brands have after writing a viable survey (NPS, CSAT, or CES) and figuring out the most effective ways to deploy it is, “how do we collect the responses and get them to the right people?” After all, with so many surveys being sent out, it can be intimidating to think about how to act on all the results.
We recommend having an alert feature in your case management system that notifies you when, for example, a low score is given on a survey. And when that happens, then you can assign the case to the right team. This way, customer complaints or low scores are identified first in your survey results and the information will bypass unnecessary obstacles so that the appropriate employee receives it.
Case management systems can ease a lot of the inconveniences that come with managing so much information. By streamlining communication, your brand can avoid a big headache.
Reason #2: Case Management Programs Facilitate a Follow-Up Procedure When a Customer Has a Problem
Now that you know a customer has a problem, you need to respond with a solution. Because when building customer loyalty, you never want to leave a problem unresolved. Which brings us to our second reason: case management systems allow responders to facilitate the follow-up process and effectively close the loop.
After assigning cases to frontline personnel, it’s helpful to have the system automatically send it to an inbox where those employees can check it every business day. It is also important to employ a status hierarchy for each case—like new, in progress, closed, or overdue. With this simple strategy to divide up cases, your organization has a clear process to address customer problems.
Negative survey results can be an overwhelming beast to tackle, but with a case management system it can get that much easier.
Reason #3: Case Management Programs Organize Data for Updating Your Customer Experience Program
Guess what? Now that you have all those customer cases in one place, your business can use that data to improve your CX program.
The best way to do this is by incorporating information from the case management system into reporting dashboards as a new data set. Through this, you can understand how well your case management system is performing and have the opportunity to learn about the larger issues in your CX program—and across your business. Each problem a customer encounters is a hint at a possible systemic inadequacy.
As your company grows bigger and bigger, it becomes more difficult to interact with customers and build the loyalty you need to push your business forward. But with a case management system, communication is strengthened so employees can work smoothly together while sorting out customer feedback—and improving experiences all the while.
Interested in learning more about how case management programs can give your business an extra edge? Download this white paper to read about our six best practices to set up a top-notch case management program.
One of the questions I am often asked by organizations is, “how do other companies use customer feedback?” Fortunately, the answer to that question is simple: most organizations use customer feedback to create PowerPoint reports or Excel spreadsheets to track performance. Then, they might tie results to compensation or be used to coach front-line employees. These are all good uses of customer feedback, but in many cases, they lead to chasing a score versus driving organizational change. The real question, then, should be, “how do other companies take action on CX feedback?”
The difference between “use” and “act” is subtle, but important. Taking action on customer feedback is not necessarily a more complex question to answer, but because there are many factors at play that need to be aligned to sustain action, it is more difficult to bring action to life. In my twenty-plus years in the CX consulting industry, I’ve found the organizations that are best at taking action with customer feedback have five things in common.
5 Keys You Need to Take Action on CX Feedback
Key #1: Senior Level Support
One of the challenges many organizations face is gaining the support and influence to allocate both human and capital resources toward being customer-focused and action-oriented. Thus, the critical foundation for all successful CX programs is a senior-level sponsor who embraces customer feedback and drives a customer-focused culture throughout their team.
The role of a senior-level sponsor is most successful when they do more than just kick off the initiative and serve as a figurehead, but instead are an active participant in the process and ensure resources are allocated accordingly. When there are conflicts of interest, it is the senior level sponsor that should redirect focus toward the solutions that best align to the customer-focused strategies and, subsequently, provide sufficient firepower to allow people to maintain that focus.
Key #2: Cross-Functional Engagement
Some organizations, I find, build teams to drive action, but those teams are entirely composed of people from a single area—like marketing or corporate strategy. Truly successful organizations will build their teams to include individuals from customer channels, product lines, leadership, technology, and the front-line.
This cross-functional view will provide insights into how each group operates and, thus, how they can work together to push the organization’s customer-focused initiatives. Additionally, a cross-functional team reduces the perception that any initiative is “corporate driven” and instead helps build advocates and spokespeople for the initiative across the organization.
Key #3: Design with the End in Mind
Consider the projects you may be currently involved with. Do you have a clear line of sight to who uses the information, how, and why? How many times have you delivered a report or feedback to a mass email list, not knowing if people are actually looking at what you’ve produced?
The fact of the matter is that anyone can collect customer feedback, but collecting the right customer feedback is what best-in-class organizations do. Organizations who do not know their end goal, what hypotheses they are trying to test, who is going to use the information, or how they intend to measure the success or failure will have a difficult time gathering the input to drive action within an organization.
“Designing with the end in mind” is about more than just determining how best to capture customer feedback. You also need to consider how you are going to get the feedback out to the organization. As part of the initial program design, organizations also need to think through how to get employees the right information in a timely manner. This is where customer feedback dashboards—customized for each type of employee—can create transparency for how they are personally performing, as well as how the organization is doing against key metrics. If people do not know where they and the organization stand against goals, they do not know if what they are doing is driving the right outcomes or if they need to course correct.
Key #4: Hold People Accountable
In a recent InMoment poll, we learned that 72 percent of CX professionals do not feel their programs are very successful at driving business outcomes. I am not surprised by this finding based on the several Action Planning sessions I have facilitated with organizations to help drill down into specific problem areas and identify strategies to address those problems.
Often during these sessions, the energy level and intentions to take action are very high amongst cross-functional team members. However, once people go back to their day jobs, the action steps and strategies identified frequently fall to the wayside.
Successful organizations will not only encourage Action Planning sessions, but also hold people accountable for following through. Typically, this is in the form of weekly check-ins with committee members and monthly and/or quarterly updates with senior leadership to keep the momentum moving forward and to change direction as needed.
Key #5: An ROI Story
Identifying what drives the customer experience most will help point an organization in the right direction. Action Planning can help identify the potential next steps, but management will want to know the ROI of focusing on a particular action item. This is not new, but the challenge is often the quality and accuracy of the customer information available within an organization’s database. Unfortunately, this is usually where the process breaks down because organizations will find themselves paralyzed in discussions about the accuracy of the available information.
In my experience, it is virtually impossible to develop an ROI prediction that is 100 percent accurate. Let’s imagine for a moment your database is 100 percent accurate (even though you and I know it’s not). Your ROI model might have the right inputs, but how are you going to control for what your competitors do, fluctuations in the stock market, the latest news, etc.? Creating an ROI story will require you to make some concessions and accept that your ROI calculation will never be perfect.
I recommend organizations identify which internal metrics they feel most confident in and use those to create an ROI story. This can be done in a simple manner such as taking the average customer value and multiplying it by the number of customers who are at-risk to determine the potential loss should they actually leave. Or a more complex statistical linkage analysis can be developed that factors in multiple variables and data sources to provide more confidence in the ROI calculation. The former may take an hour or so of time, while the latter a few weeks. Either approach will give you and management some indication of the potential impact of a particular action—and all things considered, it is the relative magnitude of this impact that is most important.
Not as Easy as You Might Think
To sum it up, taking action on customer feedback is something all organizations should strive for, but it’s not as easy to do as some may think. While the factors above may seem intuitive, only the best-in-class organizations actually put these factors into practice. If you are not one of these organizations, I encourage you to revisit your CX program so that you can help your organization move closer to actually take action on your CX feedback.
Want to learn more about how you can take action today to improve your customer experience (and your bottom line)? Check out this eBook, detailing six specific steps you can take now to gain some CX wins!
Like many superannuation funds, legalsuper has had to quickly adapt to increased customer demands in response to legislation change and economic and global events like COVID-19. Like many businesses, legalsuper did its best to adapt to the increase in demand, but knew there was a better way to provide outcomes to its customers.
The answer? Customer Experience! The business used real-time intelligence to react quickly to COVID-19 demands, which enhanced customer experiences through the pandemic and beyond.
Elizabeth Swartz, legalsuper’s Manager of Insights and Service Design, shares how her team built a business case for a customer experience platform, and how this helped their brand adapt and evolve to a changing industry.
Pro-Tip #1: Establish Financial Linkage
The most compelling part of the business case was financial linkage. Swartz focused on the value of a customer feedback loop and drew a line back to ROI. She knew if the business could reach detractor customers and recover them from churning, it would help impact legalsuper’s bottom line and make sure members are happy with the service they receive.
Pro-Tip #2: Show the Impact Your Program Can Have by Explaining Top-Line Growth
Top line growth and increased revenue from an experience management perspective looks like retaining existing customers, finding new customers, discovering opportunities to cut the costs involved with serving customers and establishing sustainable, recurring revenue.
Pro-Tip #3: Describe the Coaching and Performance Impact to Your Call Centre
A CX program can involve real-time insights that help your front-line staff become more efficient. In legalsuper’s case, the business was able to save the contact centre from pulling lists and analysing insights, as this was now done automatically in the platform.
The Results? Direct and Immediate Business Value
Whilst the program is still new, Elizabeth says that it’s easy to see the value. Every time a new part of the program is implemented, the value is clear right away. Some of the immediate improvements to the business have been:
