Customer Experience

“We believe that in 2018, the use of blended AI will help improve sales outcomes and reduce customer servicing costs. But, there are implications.” – Forrester

When it comes to delivering prompt, effective service to customers, human customer support agents have their limitations. For example, for all but the biggest multinational companies, customer service isn’t available 24/7. And even during regular working hours, the supply of sales people, customer success managers and support agents is finite, causing wait times, call abandonment, and dissatisfaction (in other words: bad customer experience).

Artificial Intelligence-powered technology is even more limited – even though it’s available 24/7, even the swiftest systems can’t handle anything more than simple or common inquiries (yet). And when was the last time you called customer service with a simple problem? Too many situations are unique. Try to have your problem solved by an algorithm, and even worse CX ensues.

But do you see what I see?

I see two puzzle pieces coming together. Two halves of a potential whole. Two wrongs making a right.

What if we blend them together?

Blended AI, but which path to take?

Forrester qualifies their prediction that blended AI is in our near future by also speculating that it will result in dropping customer satisfaction levels, “as companies drive more traffic to chatbots, self-service, and chat that are not fully optimized to engage customers effectively.”

Essentially, if you use AI/chatbots to replace human interaction, your customers won’t appreciate it.

But, if you use AI/chatbots to facilitate human interaction… well, that’s another story altogether.

There tends to be two camps of thought when it comes to AI interactions with customers and it boils down to whether or not you want your customers to know they are interacting with a bot.

Avoiding Smoke & Mirrors in CX

Lisa Abbott, VP of Marketing at Wootric, believes in transparency in CX and particularly in customer interactions.

“I value brands that I can trust. If I find out your sales development rep is really a bot, I feel foolish for having wished “her” a good day. And, I have to wonder what else you are comfortable hiding from me. It is no way to begin an authentic customer relationship.”

It is important to remember that the customer’s priority is achieving their goals efficiently. If AI can help you get them there faster, customers will be delighted. However, passing a email sender or chatbot off as “Amanda” does nothing to meet customer needs and can risk alienating them if the bot gets caught.

The good news is that there is no need for a charade.

Intercom’s Operator bot was designed knowing that consumers are tired of chatbots that “try to answer questions they shouldn’t and pretend to be human which leads to bad customer experiences.”

Another good example of transparency is Drift’s chatbot — their bot’s language is breezy and human, but it is clear that sales leads are interacting with a bot. It’s fun to interact with their bot, rather than falling into the “uncanny valley” of creepy by trying to pass a bot off as human. Think Wall-E rather than Commander Shepard from Mass Effect 3.

For a good example of B2C interactions, take a look at Levi’s Virtual Stylist. It quickly guides customers through a decision tree to narrow down the broad range of style options offered by Levi’s and adds a human element with a “see it styled” option, which shows customers how other folks have styled the suggested jeans.

In each of these cases, a bot does a masterful job of building customer relationships — as a bot!

Passing the Turing Test

Arri Bagah is the head of chatbots at BAMF media, a growth hacking agency for B2B businesses.

He agrees that chatbots can work well as a customer service tool “especially to help people make purchase decisions faster and more conveniently, answering questions on the fly so people don’t have to wait to get their answers.”

But he believes brands can also use these conversations to start building relationships.

He says, “You can use bots at the top of the funnel to teach, build the relationship, and sell.”

“One thing I’m doing on my own website is to ask visitors if I can walk them through a few strategies to help them reduce their Facebook ads cost. ‘Can I teach you about…[whatever it is]?’ You can put people through that sequence and, at the end, recommend a product that would help them move forward to the next steps. And people can ask questions. I’ve set it up to where the bot notifies me to answer specific questions live.”

Bagah works specifically with Facebook Messenger, but his advice can apply to any AI messaging app. When you start to think of messaging as a relationship-building, educational tool, whole new avenues of interaction open up.

But – according to Arri, it has to sound like a human being.

And there’s a trick to that.

“If you look at how people use messaging apps, they use images and gifs, not just text. That’s what you need to use with a chatbot to make it feel personal and engaging.”

He says he designs his clients’ Facebook chatbots to have personalities.

“They’re funny. They send you GIFs that make you smile. When you nail down that personality, you’ll see people asking ‘is this a person?’ I love those questions!”

According to Arri, when customers can’t tell whether a bot is AI or a human being, you’re getting it right – especially when the bot can pass warmed-up leads to a real sales agent.

Customer Expectations Will Make the Choice for You

If you intend to incorporate AI into your customer experience, you will need to make the decision of whether to disclose the robot nature of specific interactions or not. If you are not sure, it may be wise to gauge your customers’ sentiments around bot interactions, or deploy some testing with both methods and determine which is better suited to your company’s need.

Service is a good start, but blended AI can deliver so much more

It’s not just about quality of service – it’s about quality of data (qualitative data, that is). Website designers and optimizers have traditionally used click analytics to determine the performance of a website, landing page, or SaaS product engagement. But one of Forrester’s predictions for 2018 is that 25 percent of enterprises will supplement click analytics with conversational interfaces that deliver voice-of-customer data.

Conversational interfaces, bots, chats – whatever you want to call them – are treasure troves of voice-of-customer data that can tell you why something doesn’t work (click analytics just tell you something is wrong, and it’s up to you to figure out what). But troubleshooting is just the tip of the iceberg, because once you have a customer talking to you, you can ask them to tell you what they want, need, wish they had, and plain don’t like.

Forget about optimizing your CTA button – you can optimize your business for the best possible CX.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple, because you’ll have hundreds and thousands of conversations coming through.

When you’re working at scale, sifting through qualitative data to come up with business-changing insights is another challenge altogether. And this is where AI can really shine.

One example is InMoment’s CXInsight™ , AI-powered text and sentiment analysis tool that can categorize unstructured feedback based on what matters most to you. Millions of Wootric survey responses pre-train the algorithm to look for important themes, which can be further segmented by buyer persona, user group, sentiment, or even individual. Like the best examples of blended AI, the AI does the tedious, time consuming work of categorizing massive quantities of qualitative data, letting the humans spend their time digging into the insights and taking action.

Are you ready to power your CX with AI in 2018?

From customer service to warming up sales leads, from educating consumers to helping derive insights from massive amount of data, AI can do so much to improve customer experience.

But as Forrester predicts, “Having a successful AI-driven customer service or sales program will depend on the processes that support a blended AI approach.”

Our prediction is this: Companies that have the processes in place to support AI and understand what AI tools can accomplish – and their limitations – will be poised to grow exponentially in 2018.

Are you one of them?

A year has gone by, and it’s time for SaaS subscription renewal. Who reaches out to close the renewal, the Account Executive, CSM or Account Manager?

In two words, it depends. In five words, it depends and will change.

In order to ensure your company’s growth and reputation, you need a harmonious ecosystem of teams with proper compensation and incentives to fit the size and nature of your company. Upsells and renewals come as a natural result of successful adoption. Making sure your CSMs can perform optimally results in an easier job for whoever you chose to own the “commercial” aspects of the customer relationship.

During August’s Customer Success Meetup in San Francisco, Dave Blake, founder and CEO of ClientSuccess, Angeline Felix, Customer Success Manager at New Relic, and Sylvia Kuyel, Customer Success Strategic & International Lead at Cloudflare, discussed the different facets of three ownership models at their own organizations and from previous experience. Most SaaS companies will fall under one of three models: the account executive owning the renewal, the CSM owning the renewal, or an account manager owning the renewal, and all three have their perks and problems.

Model 1: The Account Executive/ Sales owns the expansion and renewal

The first model they discussed was the model where the account executive owns the renewal and all the “commercial” parts of the client relationship. Dave Blake, who has seen all three models, says that organizations where the renewal process is complex, or where you’re dealing with large accounts with labor and resource intense negotiations would do best under this model. The key to making this model work is fostering a strong, collaborative relationship between the AE and the CSM. He has seen teams fall into the trap of the AE treating the CSM like a secretary or administrator, which creates resentment and does not add any value for the organization’s customers.

A problem that can happen within this model is that AEs, in their sales mindsets, can start neglecting their current client base in order to pursue the next potential customer. At New Relic, Angeline Felix has a system where if a customer downgrades, a “spot-back” is on their record, meaning AEs “get dinged…it’s in their best interest to stay engaged, continuing the relationship through the entire customer life cycle, and through the adoption phase.”

In Sylvia Kuyel’s experience at Cloudflare, “in our early stages we were one bundled product, which means there’s not a lot of upsell. AEs will naturally be interested in large accounts because they see one business unit and then they want the ins to the additional ones.”

You can also run into the opposite problem, where AEs have an easier job expanding in their existing customer base, focus too much on them, and stop going after new logos, which is what happened at ClientSuccess. They fixed this by changing the comp plan for the AEs to push them to hunt new logos.

Model 2: The Customer Success Manager owns expansion and renewal

Discussion then led to the second model, where the CSM owns all of the relationship, including expansion and renewal. Dave Blake has been seeing this model across the industry more and more and this is the model that Cloudflare follows. Coming from a venture capitalist background, Sylvia knows that when valuing a company, people look at how risky their recurring revenue is and the heavy influence customer success has on this. She emphasized that the main reason this works for Cloudflare is that all their customers are on auto-renew contracts with a 60-day notice period.

“ The key to success here is fairly straightforward renewals that aren’t high maintenance, and the experience and maturity of your CS team. Some teams don’t have the negotiating experience or want that pressure.” Dave Blake, founder and CEO of ClientSuccess

Even though this is the majority of their customers, she says that when dealing with large accounts with long complex initial negotiations, it makes sense to bring in the AE because they have all the contacts, and they negotiate every day. They have a long standing relationship with the AE, even though renewal is truly a customer success number.

“As long as you’ve done a good job of driving the adoption along the way, the renewal itself is not a negotiation process.” Sylvia Kuyel, Customer Success Strategic & International Lead at Cloudflare

All three CSMs in the latest panel for the Customer Success Meetup felt strong ownership over expansion and renewal. According to Erica Pearson from Periscope Data, “ I own it all; it is my relationship with the client. I am their partner.” Their job is to get their clients value, with renewal being part of the CSM’s reward for doing the job right. Cloudflare recognizes the heavy workload that is involved when CSMs own everything. They set a global CS team goal that contributes to their comp but it is not individual. They do not want CSMs getting possessive over their accounts, and this encourages them to help each other out when one CSM has a particularly heavy day or week.

Many are hesitant to have CSMs own expansion and renewal because they fear that CSMs will lose the “trusted adviser” role, but Dave, Angeline and Sylvia all disagree with this based on experience. Customers tend to prefer having the trusted adviser to talk to about the commercial aspects, rather than bringing in a sales rep. They want someone who knows their business and if the commercial interactions are done right, CSMs can actually gain more trust as an adviser.

Model 3: A separate sales team of Account Managers own expansion and renewal

This last model brings in a third party into the organization’s ecosystem, a dedicated team of Account Managers who specialize in expansion and renewal. There is an undeniable benefit of specialization that comes with this model, letting AEs focus on new logos and CSMs focus on adoption. However, none of the experts at August’s Meetup were keen on this model, even having seen other companies successfully use it.  Dave and Angeline found that customers are overwhelmed, having so many introductions and relationships to maintain. Sylvia suggested that if there is noticeable tension between the trusted adviser role and the commercial duties, then this is the model for you. It’s important to clearly delineate the duties among these three roles, with appropriate comp and incentives to drive the individuals in these roles.

Lana Pucket, a CSM at WalkMe gave insight into her experience with this model and relationship during the most recent Customer Success Meetup, saying that she executes the entire lead up to the renewal, but the AM comes in to handle the renewal contract. She noted that 20% of her salary is based on renewals, tying her salary to a number that she does not own according to the roles within her organization.

Having previously managed an AM team, Angeline says this model worked at that unnamed company, but you have to think about the type of person you are hiring for each role. The AM needs a balance between the CSM mindset of customer care and the AE mindset of making the sale. To learn more about the traits you should look for in a CSM, check out this article.

Tailoring it for you

Depending on the product you’re selling, the maturity of your organization, and the size of your customers, you may need to switch from one ownership model to another. Through this transition, remember to define the roles clearly to your customers, aligning to their needs. All of this will result in high expansion and successful renewals.

Effort. We’re taught to praise it, get really good at avoiding it, and really, would rather do without it. Effort is hard and uncomfortable. As human beings, we’ve designed incredible digital tools to reduce effort as much as possible. Today, “user-friendly” isn’t just a selling point anymore, it’s become a basic expectation among customers – to the point that if a task isn’t intuitively easy to complete, consumers will drop the product and go elsewhere.

Effort is a big deal.

So why are most companies not measuring customer effort, or only relegating it to a customer support metric?

What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a newer metric originally developed for Customer Support. In that context, it measures customer service satisfaction by asking customers “How easy was it to get the help you wanted today?” That is valuable information for your Support department. But Customer Success and Product Development departments have been latching onto the idea for so much more.

The core CES question is: “How much effort did this task require to complete?” – typically on a scale of 1-7. And that question, followed by an open-ended “Care to tell us why?” question,  can be used in a number of ways to yield more relevant feedback from customers on numerous fronts.

Customer Success and Product Development teams in particular have been adding CES to their customer journey metrics to get feedback on onboarding and ease of feature use.

[ctt template=”3″ link=”1b54y” via=”no” nofollow=”yes”]”Anytime you have a workflow you want a customer to complete, #CES is a great question to ask.” – Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer, Wootric[/ctt]

How Product teams use CES to improve UX & feature adoption

Customer Effort Score fits in seamlessly with Product goals because user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) depend largely on ease of use. Product teams are starting to use CES to get feedback on how well the UI supports new feature adoption and to identify moments where customers begin to feel frustrated and lost.

Frustration is an emotion that is closely linked not only to churn, but to a decreased rate of customer advocacy.

“The revenue impact from a 10% improvement in a company’s customer experience score can translate into more than $1 billion.” – Forrester

“Frustration metrics” like rage clicks, error clicks and form abandonment are also useful to track, and can alert dev teams to issues they may not have expected, but adding CES to the mix can shed more light into just how hard customers perceive tasks to be. And with an open-ended follow-up question, they can even tell you why. When 40 to 60 percent of software users open an app once – and never log in again – anything that reduces friction during those early critical stages will have major impact.

Canva, a design tool for non-designers with a freemium sales model, has one of the smoothest onboarding sequences, which begins with a 2-minute tutorial that shows users the value they’re about to get while giving hands-on instruction on using the tool. Instructions ask users to complete fun design exercises, like putting a hat on a monkey or selecting different layouts and backgrounds, which builds users’ confidence.

SaaS guru Lincoln Murphy says, “The first in-app experience your customer has with your product sets the tone for your relationship, and if it’s confusing, overwhelming, or otherwise puts up barriers to achieving success (or at least recognizing the value potential of your product, you’re in trouble.”

Canva may hit this out of the park, but for businesses struggling with smoothing out their onboarding flow, CES surveys – especially those that can be deployed while the users are in the app – becomes tremendously valuable.

But it’s not just about reducing friction and frustration – retention really is about ease. A Customer Contact Council survey of more than 75,000 consumers found that the most important factor in customer loyalty was reducing effort – defined as “the work they must do to get their problem solved.”

How Customer Success teams use CES to reduce churn

Customer Success managers know that one of the most important purposes of onboarding is getting the customer to experience value from the product – as soon as possible. This has it’s own metric, called “time to first value,” and the shorter it is, the more likely the customer will be to continue using the product.

CES for onboarding

CES now helps Customer Success keep a pulse on the onboarding experience of each new customer. The customer onboarding experience in Enterprise SaaS can involve training and implementation advice delivered by Customer Success Managers, in addition to the elements like videos, documentation and walk-throughs in the product itself. Unfortunately, “the seeds of churn” are sown if that process is painful.

Sarang Bhatt, Customer Success Manager at Wootric uses Wootric’s own CES survey to assess the onboarding process. “I find it very useful. We may not get a 7 every single time, but when we do miss the mark, we can close the loop with the customer and improve our processes for the next cycle. This is all because we have proactively solicited honest feedback via CES. Customers see a CES survey before NPS, so it gives us a chance to learn whether we are on track and make adjustments.” 

CES for monitoring customer hand off from Sales to Success

Customer Success teams are also using CES even earlier in the customer journey to measure the ease of transition between Sales and CSMs.

One of the most common causes of frustration for customers is answering questions asked by Sales, only to have to repeat their answers once they’re handed to a Customer Success Manager. The interdepartmental communication ball tends to be dropped during the handoff because customer information is siloed by department instead of shared freely. Customer Effort Score serves as an alert when these types of communication failures affect UX

In fact, Customer Success can use CES to monitor many (if not every) success milestone to see how easily customers achieved them – from the customers’ perspectives. Mapping CES onto the customer’s journey by checking in at success milestones effectively transforms CES into part of the overall customer health score every CSM should be tracking.

Not familiar with customer success milestones? These are often a checklist of tasks your customers must complete to use your product successfully and get closer to achieving their ideal outcomes – what they really want from your product. You can chart them out visually in a customer journey map.

CES for Advocacy

Using CES in customer success has another benefit: advocacy. Users are more inclined to become brand advocates – sharing positive reviews publicly – after positive support experiences. So an in-app CES question that follows high ratings with a timely advocacy ask can help spread brand awareness.

How Customer Service & Support use CES

CES surveys are most often deployed via email after customer support interactions. A user has a question, contacts customer support, receives an answer, and is then asked to score the interaction based on ease.

Why ease? Because research shows that the most important attribute of satisfaction is ease, which makes it the most logical metric to use instead of, or in addition to, other satisfaction metrics like length of wait time or even resolution of the problem. The CES question gets straight to the heart of whether the customer service experience increased satisfaction.

Don’t throw CSAT away though – customer satisfaction metrics provide broader feedback that is still extremely useful.

What to do if CES is low

What if the rating isn’t high? Close the loop! Put a process in place, or use a software platform like Wootric, that takes less than ideal customer effort scores and allows you to close the loop with the customer by reaching out to them individually or triggering appropriate automated responses.  Take action — create a cross-functional team to review feedback and prioritize actions you can take that will ease the pain and create a better experience for your customers.

As you track CES over time, you’ll be able to see the results of your efforts in the score and in your customer retention numbers as well!

Why is Customer Experience becoming the primary way companies differentiate themselves in an increasingly crowded market? How does CX pave the way for growth? How do you measure it accurately (and actionably) – and how can you leverage customer feedback for happier customers, more referrals, and more sales?

We asked all of these questions and more of CX experts at the top of their field – and their answers will inspire you.

Customer Experience Experts on Growth

Customer Experience is inextricably linked to growth – when you give the customers not only what they want, but also what they need in a way that leaves a positive impression, you’re making an investment sure to pay dividends.

“Customer experience drives growth. Data supports this fact. Forrester showed that CX leaders, on average, grow more than 5x faster than CX laggards. The companies that have made CX a priority focus on understanding the customer’s needs and wants and spend a lot of time understanding the journey a customer takes. They ensure the customer voice is heard (either through direct interviews or other opportunities to provide feedback) at each touch point of the customer journey, make sure actionable insights from feedback gets back into processes and close the loop with customers to advise them of the actions they took. They do this because they understand the post-purchase phase of the customer lifecycle is where growth occurs.” – Sue Duris, Director of Marketing and Customer Experience, M4 Communications, Inc.

Customer Experience Experts on Tracking CX Metrics

What’s the best way to improve the experiences your customers are having? Opinions differ, even among experts, but everyone agrees that what gets measured gets done.

“An organization should have many tools available to them and not lean on any one of them too heavily. They should look at a combination of CES, NPS, CSAT, loyalty, and emotions metrics. In addition, measurement shouldn’t be taken in a vacuum. Testing and analysis should occur regularly and consistently so you can view trends and then take deep dives to determine the reasons the trends are what they are. This will help you improve your CX performance.” –Sue Duris, Director of Marketing and Customer Experience, M4 Communications, Inc.

“If you want to get started with measuring and improving customer experience, I recommend you begin by tracking Net Promoter Score. You’ll get a metric that everyone in the company can rally around improving, and the rich feedback you get from customers will give you guidance on how to do it.  Over time you can build a sophisticated customer feedback strategy that incorporates a number of CX metrics, but I advise that you get the ball rolling as soon as possible. There are a number of low cost/no-cost SaaS platforms out there, including Wootric, that can get you started quickly.”  –Jessica Pfeifer, Cofounder and Chief Customer Officer, Wootric.

“The Net Promoter System is the most effective way to gauge customer experience at scale. The better your customer experience, the more likely your customers will be brand enthusiasts or promoters. And the more promoters you have, the higher your Net Promoter Score will be.” – Jes Kirkwood, Content & Community Marketer at Autopilot

“The social media sites that have perfected the art of public reviews are the best customer experience gauges available.  Yelp is a great example for the service industry, Capterra is a grand example for the software industry.  Monitoring those channels is a passive way to manage these gauges.  If you want quality, meaningful results, you will have to intentionally drive customer traffic to those platforms. Be brave. Invite them to be honest.” – Joe McCollum, Configio Support/SaaS Consultant

Customer Experience Experts on Retention

Sure, you can keep customers even if you provide a lackluster experience – if you’re the only game in town. But with competitors coming out of the woodwork, nobody has any market cornered for long. Offering superior CX is the only way to win the kind of loyalty that becomes the mortar paving the road to retention.

“I spend a lot of time with SaaS startup clients whose number-one goal is to improve recurring revenue. What I’m really excited about is a lot of my early stage startup clients are eager to put CX in place now so they are ready for when they scale. They know how vital CX is to corporate growth.” – Sue Duris, Director of Marketing and Customer Experience, M4 Communications, Inc.

“Customer experience is one of the two core pillars of customer retention — the thing is, you can’t grow if your customers don’t stick around. Keeping customers around is harder than ever—and delivering an unparalleled customer experience is the only way to win. Today, companies must curate a timely, relevant, and personalized customer journey, nail customer support, and take advantage of every opportunity to surprise and delight.” – Jes Kirkwood, Former Content & Community Marketer at Autopilot

“Efforts toward retention should start early in the customer relationship. At Wootric, we ask our customers the Customer Effort Score question to get feedback on our onboarding process. When we don’t get top marks, we get an opportunity to make things right with the customer immediately and get back on track. All because we reached out and proactively asked for feedback early on.” –Jessica Pfeifer, Cofounder and Chief Customer Officer, Wootric.

Customer Experience Experts on Leveraging Emotion

Emotion is a vital, yet often underappreciated, component of decision-making – but CX experts know that winning minds isn’t enough. Customer Experience is a game of winning hearts.

“In my experience working in varying industries, customer trust is a byproduct of an amazing customer experience. Whether it’s helping them with a purchase or teaching them how to use software; the make or break is how they feel when they walk away from you. If they walk away with complete trust, that type of experience translates to growth.” – Joe McCollum, Configio Support/SaaS Consultant

“We’ve found that it’s often the accumulation of small annoyances that does the most damage to a customer’s perception of a brand and their loyalty as a purchaser. Frustration metrics (things like rage clicks, error clicks and form abandonment) are a great way to quickly spot and fix major things that are actively blocking customers from achieving their goals and/or contributing to an overall negative experience.” – Amy Ellis, Marketing & PR at FullStory

“As a Product Designer, I understand that even more than having a great graphic design and program, the product needs to generate an experience that connects customers emotionally with your brand/service/product. Meaningful relationships are created by strong experiences. It’s how customers become allies for the marketing team for both referrals and acquisition.” – Diego Dotta, Developer & CXO at Youper

Customer Experience Experts on The Future

CX is a quickly-evolving field as new technologies make it easier to create better experiences, track those experiences, and leverage those experiences into engines for retention and growth. What does the near future hold – and what do you need to do to stay on top of the wave?

“I believe that CX will only become more important as it gets easier for newer, more nimble companies to disrupt larger slower companies. Technology will continue to get better at helping companies quickly and easily see where they’re letting down their customers – like causing them frustration and anger, complicating their progress toward their own goals, and missing opportunities to surprise and delight.”  – Amy Ellis, Marketing & PR at FullStory

“Right now brands are inundated with CX feedback–social, surveys, support tickets–and it’s all over the place. Companies that take a systematic approach to aggregating and analyzing all of that Voice of the Customer data in one place will have a competitive advantage.  AI–in this case a combination of machine learning and natural language processing–is making it possible to glean insights from those thousands of qualitative comments.” – Jessica Pfeifer, Cofounder and Chief Customer Officer, Wootric.

“Companies will need to focus on two areas:

1. Creating consistent omnichannel experiences that cover digital. CX tends to be fragmented which hurts customers and companies. A better approach is to create a consistent experience across channels, and companies miss the boat on digital because they have gaps in their technology. Companies should focus on setting up a strong technological foundation which encompasses the entire customer journey
2. Investing in AI. While current AI applications include chatbots for many tasks (Facebook Messenger currently has over 100,000 chatbots), a common application is to use AI for lower level customer service tasks. At more advanced stages, AI will be invaluable to CX in predicting sales and service behaviors and in augmenting engagement, to name a few.”

      – Sue Duris, Director of Marketing and Customer Experience, M4 Communications, Inc.

“As technology continues to evolve, customer expectations will continue to rise. Delivering a hyper-targeted, personalized customer journey will become standard practice—customers won’t accept anything less. Creative marketers will find unique ways to surprise and delight, setting the bar even higher. Any companies that are already falling behind will struggle to keep up.” – Jes Kirkwood, Content & Community Marketer at Autopilot

“The challenge I have here, in a behavioral health company, is to discover and solve customer issues before they realize it themselves. I also see a need for increased availability – even offline – for when customers need emotional support, which we can do by being proactive using AI and passive data.” – Diego Dotta, Developer & CXO at Youper

“A lot of companies are turning toward value-added membership campaigns. I personally feel these first round of loyalty driven offerings are based too much on the fear of losing market share, less on value added that builds and increases the trust of the consumer. The evolution of CX will force many companies that want to be successful to bite the bullet and put their money where their mouth is. The good news is, the future is bright for the consumer.” – Joe McCollum, Configio Support  / SaaS Consultant

Experts Agree: The Future is About Using Technology to Serve Customers Better

From customer success goals to metrics that measure emotion, to carefully planned and tracked customer journeys, Customer Experience reaches into every aspect of how companies relate to their customers. You can look at CX as the end result of how business decisions ultimately affect customers, or you can look at CX as the guiding light that becomes a company-wide compass for customer-facing decisions. Either way, it’s clear: To survive and grow, today’s businesses have align behind the customer experience.

Wootric has begun to leverage the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to solve the challenge of qualitative feedback analysis for our customers. Wootric utilizes the Google Cloud Natural Language API to complement its own machine learning to analyze qualitative feedback our customers receive. The goal is to use text and sentiment analysis to surface and aggregate insights for our customers, helping them to prioritize resources and follow up action.  

Our approach is interesting enough that Google recently blogged about it, and they chose to highlight Wootric’s work at the recent Google Next conference in San Francisco. Check out the video below:

Emotion is coming to the forefront of Customer Experience (CX) management, not because it’s warm and fuzzy, and not because leveraging feelings is devilishly manipulative, but because when you use emotion to drive your CX efforts, it becomes a powerful differentiator.

More companies are getting better at the functional basics of customer experience, like responding in a timely manner to questions, streamlining the purchase process, and smoothing out onboarding (not to mention creating a decent product) – which means they need something unique to offer that separates them from their competition.  

What is the most unique, even unforgettable thing you can offer? The way you make your customers feel. It’s for this reason the bar for CX is inching up.

Emotion not only carries the ability to define your company in a sea of competitors, it can also inspire viral word of mouth marketing from people who love you and want to express that to a large audience, whether because they’re influencers with their own followers, or reviewers.

Bad things are worse than good things are better

We are hardwired as human beings to be more sensitive to negative events than positive events. And this sensitivity only increases when we’re in a heightened emotional state – focusing on the negative becomes even easier.

As odd as it may sound, this is good news for those of us in the business of relieving pain points. You’ll get more appreciation from your customer by removing pain than creating delight. So, if a customer comes to you with a problem, you can expect them to be in a heightened emotional state, which means not only should you tread carefully, you’ll do well to relieve their most urgent pain points as soon as possible!

As a species, negative consequences take an enormous toll on us. In fact, we’ll go farther out of our way to avoid negative consequences than we’d go for positive results of equal measure (it’s called “Loss Aversion”). This behavior is predicated on the emotional truth that something bad feels worse than something good feels better. Losing $20 might wreck your day. Finding $20 may make you happier for an hour.

How does this translate to CX?

Vanguard, one of the world’s largest investment companies, was getting ready to redo its site, and rather than just considering customer acquisition, or lead-generating instruction, they studied how people felt about investing. They looked at whether their target audience was new to investing, had been investing for a while, and what their emotional baggage might be around the topic of investing in general. They discovered that, new or experienced, most people feel overwhelmed. Now, if you visit Vanguard’s site, their design is very simple, even sparse. They knew that visual clutter would only enhance the feeling of overwhelm. Their new design reduces it.

Delta airlines also makes a point to reduce customer pains. They set up their phone systems so that if you call in response to getting a text message saying your flight was canceled, their automated phone system will put you straight through to the appropriate person rather than route you through a dozen exhausting options.

United Airlines has been working diligently to improve its public image by tackling some of its thorniest customer experience pitfalls, like lost luggage. The airline recently introduced a service that lets fliers follow their luggage on the United smartphone app, and get text message alerts if their bags miss their destination. Instead of being angry and frustrated by lost bags, passengers are calling this “Amazing” customer service. As one passenger told the Huffington Post:

After I arrived, I received a text message alert that one of my two bags did not make it and would be delivered to my address within 24 hours,” she says. “I also received an email where I could track my bag, see who was delivering it and at what time. At no time did I have to wait in line or on hold for them to rectify their mistake. They simply took care of it and kept me informed every step of the way. To me, that was amazing customer service.

Amazon offers one of the most loved customer experiences, some argue, because it provides “an unparalleled sense of emotional satisfaction.” How do they do that? Not through being especially warm and fuzzy, but by reducing pain points with features like multiple wishlists, a save-for-later area, an easily accessible cart, and even more easily accessible price comparisons, along with shipping cost reduction and the nearly instant gratification of Prime. If and when a customer does have a problem, returns are easy and customer service gets top marks.

A lot of bad customer experiences are ‘death by a thousand cuts’ annoyances. Avoid exacerbating pain in an already painful situation, and the better the customer’s perception of their experience will be.

Emotions lead to loyalty – the key to growing SaaS businesses

Emotion is linked to loyalty (and CX is linked to emotion). In the hotel industry, which has the largest percentage of customers that reported feeling “valued” one study reported, 88% of the “valued” people will advocate for the hotel brand, and more than 75% will stay with the hotel brand.

The TV service provider industry, unsurprisingly, has the largest percentage of customers who report feeling annoyed. Only 8% of these annoyed people express willingness to advocate for the TV service provider, and just over 1 in 10 intend to keep their existing relationships with the provider.

For the SaaS industry, retention is a key metric for profit and growth – you can’t afford to annoy, disappoint, or frustrate your customers. Essentially, customers are 5 times more loyal when they feel valued, than when they feel annoyed.

The most important emotions for loyalty in the U.S. are, in fact, feeling valued, appreciated, and confident.

For example, there’s something about Slack that makes you feel confident (and a bit cool) that you’re part of something that’s on the leading edge. That’s not just because Slack is relatively new – they engender this feeling on purpose with Slack release notes (which are hilarious, self-deprecating, and charmingly relatable) that make updating the app a pleasure. Not only do they manage to keep everyone up-to-date, they remove the significant pain of updating an app and replace it with a positive emotion.

Note: Positive emotions that drive behavior like repurchases and advocacy differ by country and culture, even by customer base. In the UK, Germany and France, for example, the top three loyalty-inspiring emotions are slightly (yet significantly) different.

Loyalty weakening emotions differ by country and culture too. U.S. customers share their loyalty-weakening emotions with their U.K. friends.

Be sure to understand the emotions of your specific customer base rather than make assumptions.

Interestingly, customer loyalty itself comes in multiple flavors. Loyalty can mean retention (the customer will maintain existing business), enrichment (a customer will buy additional products and services), advocacy (the customer will recommend the company).

Do you know how your customers feel about their experiences with your business?

How to Measure Emotion in Customer Experience

Most CX measurement programs don’t quantify customer emotions – they focus more on metrics that reflect a rational or cognitive evaluation of experiences. Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian, senior analyst at Forrester, says businesses can begin measuring emotion in CX by first defining metrics that measure critical emotions in influential experiences (the ones with the highest impact on customer relationships).

Yes, that means you’re making it up as you go along. You have to figure out for yourself which metrics effectively measure emotion for your customers, in your context. One way to do this is by tracking sentiment in Voice of Customer data – people convey a wide range of emotions with the words they use. Some companies, like Lenovo, use text analysis software to measure changes in sentiment scores, alerting when sentiment falls below a certain threshold.

Using a sentiment analysis tool, you can track positive or negative themes and dig into specific words most often used by your customers to describe how they feel. You can also mine customer feedback and questions, or any other written message from your customer to you. Of course, the most straightforward way to get Voice of Customer data is through surveys, and if you time your surveys right (and ask in the right channel), you can begin to tell what events trigger which emotions.  

Whichever method you choose to get your emotion metrics, the goal is the same: to define the emotional context customers have around your product, industry, and specific touch points in your sales funnel, onboarding process, and usage. From there, you can identify and alleviate pain points, gain loyalty, and win brand advocates.

Prove the value of emotion to yourself first

Emotion is a relatively ‘wooey’ topic. It’s still considered soft. It’s not taken seriously by many. So make it your mission to prove the value of emotion early on in your program by first targeting the highest-emotion touch points, and developing experiments for how to improve customers’ emotions around those experiences. Then track your success rates.

But remember, emotion is contextual, and you don’t have control over the entire context of a customer’s experience. That said, companies who value customer loyalty are willing to go to creative lengths to keep customers feeling good about their brand. Join them.

Omni-Channel Customer Feedback

You know your business inside and out. You know that listening to customers and responding to their needs is the key to staying competitive. Still, you might be struggling with where and when to survey your customers. A pop-up survey in your web app? Send them an email? What about a text message on their mobile phone? Figuring out the most effective channel to ask for feedback can be confusing.

The good news is that you have more options than ever before.  We’d like to help by giving an overview of where companies are engaging their customers, and how multiple channels can work together. Then, you’ll be better equipped to develop a plan that best meets your company’s unique needs.

Why take advantage of multiple feedback channels

Start with a customer-focused approach: when, where and how do your customers want to give you feedback? This inquiry can quickly lead to a multi-channel approach.

Fight survey fatigue

An improved survey experience helps you maintain high response rates. Not every customer wants to fill out an in-app survey, not every customer opens email in their inbox. However, a lot of people do want to give feedback, and appreciate the opportunity to do so. So your goal is to get more and more sophisticated about the “where and when” over time.

Reach more stakeholders, in the right context

When you leverage more than one survey channel you can expand the pool of users you’re hearing from. You may have an email relationship with some customers, and in-product engagement with others. A multichannel approach also lets you choose the right channel for a given interaction, and to customize your Voice of the Customer program for your business model.

Which Customer Feedback Survey Channel is “Best”?

Is one survey channel more brand-oriented or more transaction-oriented?  Which is the best? This is a very common question. We think the most important factor here is when you survey, rather than which channel.

Here’s why. If you send an NPS survey right after purchase, you can expect that response to be more influenced by that last transaction. However, keep in mind, an NPS survey triggered by a transaction is still colored by the brand experience.

To help you think this through, here is some information about the different channels:

Email: Lower response rates, but higher rates of qualitative feedback. Think about it: How often do you take the time to open emails from businesses, let alone respond? However, those customers who do take the time to answer a customer feedback survey via email are more likely to be invested in your brand and take the time to write comments that provide more detail to the “why” behind their score.

In-app (Web or Mobile): Higher response rates, lower rates of qualitative feedback. In-app surveys can deliver contextual feedback, and we find that customers will answer the question they are asked. They are absolutely willing to provide higher level feedback when prompted in a web or mobile app. This is why customer experience management platforms offer feedback tagging, sentiment analysis, and other means of gleaning insight from the fire hose of data that many companies receive via in-app surveys. Nonetheless, fewer in-app respondents will take the time to give qualitative feedback.

The high response rate that in-app NPS surveys deliver can be a positive trade off, especially for SaaS businesses focused on reducing churn. You may prefer to get a gut impression that you can follow up on rather than radio silence from a passive or unhappy user that ignores an email survey.

SMS:  With transactions, deliveries, and services, sometimes texting is the most effective and immediate way for you to interact with customers. It also allows you to grab customers in the place they tend to spend more and more of their time – on their mobile phones.

So, really, it’s not about which is better. The question is, “Which channel or channels are the best fit for my business and my customers?”

Scenarios Where Using More than One Customer Feedback Channel Makes Sense

1. Targeting Distinct Stakeholder Groups with Different Survey Channels.

Consider the enterprise sales model as one that can benefit from both in-app and email surveys. Here we are talking about a SaaS company or other business with a very strong digital presence. In this example, your company is using the Net Promoter Score system to measure customer loyalty.

If your brand is an online product, we’ve seen huge success when you choose in-app surveys as your primary channel. This is because end users of a SaaS product relate to your company through your digital platform. They probably don’t open your marketing emails because they aren’t looking to be sold to. They just want to do their thing in your product everyday. For them, it makes sense to give NPS feedback in-app, and they are mostly likely to respond there.

Now consider some executive stakeholders or buyers of your platform. They don’t spend as much time in your product (if any), but you definitely want to know their opinion. For this group, delivering an NPS survey via email is likely the way to go, and email gives you a higher chance of getting qualitative feedback in their response.  

So, in this case, it’s the combination of in-app and email surveys that gets you the info you need. 

2. Reaching Customers Throughout their Journey

E-commerce is an interesting use case here. The e-commerce business often has a couple of different customer survey touchpoints: online and offline. Every customer needs to place an order–typically on a website or mobile app. It can be valuable to learn how a customer feels after the ordering process, and that survey can often happen in the web application.

Once the product is delivered, the customer may register delight or dissatisfaction. For e-commerce businesses, it really makes sense to capture that sentiment via email or SMS because, honestly, if the customer had a bad experience, they’re probably not going to come back to your site to give you feedback.

The power of those two surveys together—one in-app and one via email—can give you an insightful story of the customer journey, and it can only happen by tapping into multiple feedback channels.

3. Surveying Customers Across All Lines of Business

As companies evolve and develop new forms of business for growth, customers of those different products might require distinct feedback channels. A good example is a technology company that hasn’t fully migrated to the cloud and still has legacy software offerings. These types of businesses in transition have a software user base “on premise,” where the only option is to do an email survey. Newer, cloud-based offerings from the same company can opt instead for in-app surveys.

Here is another example. A media company might get in-app survey feedback from subscribers or readers who visit their website. However, the same company may find that email surveys are a better channel to reach customers that receive subscription services via home delivery.

4. Improving Response Rates among Low Engagement Customers

Supplementing one channel with another may help you get a higher response rate.  For example, if you start your feedback program with in-app surveys and you find that certain customers just aren’t using your application that frequently, or aren’t receptive to an in-app survey, then you have the flexibility to try another channel. See what those customers prefer to respond to–try an email survey, try SMS, or try surveying in a mobile app if you have one. That way, every customer’s voice is being heard on their terms.

5. Evolve to Reach Your Customers Where They Are

There are times when companies communicate with customers primarily through SMS. Think about your mobile provider, bank, airline, or ride share service. You expect to hear from them through that channel and count on the immediacy that texting provides. This is when it makes good sense to survey through SMS in addition to other channels, particularly for transaction-related feedback.

You’ve Got Choices

There are times when “it just depends.”  Multi-channel customer feedback gives you the flexibility to survey customers based on the way they prefer to communication with your business. It lets you engage a broader segment of users across multiple touch points and lines of business. You can get the big picture, each step in your customer’s journey.

And, it lets you meet your customers on their terms. Don’t risk filling your customer’s devices with unwanted messages. The sensitivity that multi-channel feedback offers can help you avoid survey fatigue. That means higher quality feedback to help you grow your company.