So you’ve been reading up on Net Promoter Score. Your colleagues in the SaaS world tell you that it’s the best way to take your customers’ pulse. You’ve seen a few case studies claiming it’s the only number you need to measure.

It’s true that Net Promoter Score is a great way to engage with your customers and solicit tons of feedback. But it’s also true that there are quite a few nuances that result in a successful survey program.

As a SaaS company with SaaS customers like Zoom, DocuSign and Hubspot, we have a unique perspective on NPS in cloud software. To make the most of your time and energy, we’ve put together this list of things SaaS businesses should know before they dive into the NPS world. Read More…

Financial markets are sliding, a pandemic is spreading around the world, and every company is scrambling to respond to quickly changing circumstances. Planned investments that were intended to drive growth — like hiring, media spend and software purchases — are being reevaluated as business leaders are forced to triage what they need to do to weather the storm. We’re all in survival mode, but survival is about prioritizing what is most important.

And what is most important to a SaaS business at this moment?

It’s not toilet paper.

It’s our existing customers.

Now more than ever, customer experience is job #1. 

We think the SaaS businesses that focus on retaining customers and building loyalty are the ones that will survive and thrive in this uncertain climate. 

Of course, the question then becomes how do you retain customers and build loyalty?

Shift from a growth mindset to a retention mindset 

This may not hold true for every business we work with – Zoom, GrubHub, and the e-commerce toilet paper company Who Gives a Crap are having quite a moment. But most businesses are facing contraction because people don’t buy in a panic. Budgets are being trimmed everywhere, and customer success and renewal conversations must be deeply empathetic to this.

So, if a customer is achieving goals with your software, and you have other features and capabilities that will make them even more successful in 2020, then, by all means, paint a bold vision of an expanded partnership. But, if that isn’t the case, and they want to reduce or leave, don’t come across as tone-deaf. It’s likely that everyone in their company has been asked to find ways to trim spend.

That means that it’s even more important to know that your internal champion can confidently advocate for you – because you are delivering value. Step up your customer success initiatives. Make sure you and your clients are recording successes. And don’t be afraid to change the conversation from trying to get the customer to buy more, to showing him or her how the company can get more value from what they’ve already purchased.

Listen to your customers even more carefully – and respond

Even when you’re focusing on your existing customers, don’t make the mistake of thinking they’re the “same” customers – they’ve changed. We all have. Because our needs change in a downturn. Companies that are on the pulse of those changes by proactively listening are better poised to adapt, innovate, survive, and serve.  Make calls to key customers.  It’s even more important now than it usually is to listen and respond to concerns quickly. 

Take care of your people

Your employees, your teams, are the key to your customer relationships. They may be concerned about their health or the health of their parents, or grandparents. They may be struggling to find childcare options if their schools are shut down. They may be stressed about their 401K balance. Whatever it is, empathy and flexibility are going to be key – and so is prudent business planning. How can you plan to support your employees through these challenges?

Be a good citizen

For the collective good, and for the good of your brand, it’s so important right now to prioritize the good of the community and show conscientious, caring judgment. To do this, you may need to make some tough calls that hit your short-term profits, but protect people. We’re all making sacrifices – the New York Times dropped its paywall for coronavirus news and Zoom is giving K-12 schools free video conferencing. Is there a way your company can help people in need right now? You’ll be remembered for it. 

Establish a company policy of flexibility

Just as you have to be flexible with your employees and their quickly-changing challenges, you also have to be flexible as a company. For example, if a client calls customer support to request an extended payment plan, empower your support team to deviate from your standard policies and allow it. Be open to changing how you usually do things if it makes sense and shows compassion. You’ll likely prevent avoidable churn.

Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer at Wootric, shared this recent story with our team:

“I just had a customer reach out about putting their subscription on hold. They operate in the hospitality sector which has been particularly hard hit. We offered to work out a plan to enable her to continue to get customer feedback during this critical time. Her response was ‘That would be amazing! Thank you!’ I know we’ve strengthened customer loyalty.”

Customers notice the companies that support them in difficult times, so be flexible when you can, and you’ll build loyalty for the future.

Close the loop with customers when they offer feedback

This may be built into your CX program already, but if not, now is the time to double-down on listening and responding to customers. Ensuring your customers feel heard and cared about in times of high stress carries more weight than when times are easy. So if a customer responds to one of your surveys, be sure to close the loop and let them know you value their time and will take appropriate action. 

Customer success managers can reach out one-on-one via email or phone, but that isn’t always practical. Closing the loop can be automated when you have your feedback readily available in systems like Intercom or Salesforce. Here’s a quick guide on how to automate closing the loop on customer feedback.

Improve customer experience at customer journey touchpoints

In SaaS, this often means using an NPS survey to gauge overall loyalty and surface any issues that may affect renewal. To get serious about retention, consider asking for feedback at critical SaaS journey points–after onboarding, support interactions, and during product/feature use.

This isn’t about quickly adding a slew of new surveys overnight; it’s about prioritizing improvements to moments that, if not successful, can sow the seeds of churn. Now is the time to double-down on understanding and improving the customer journey.

Also, remember to analyze the qualitative feedback from these surveys. A customer who is “satisfied”  but mentions a concern over price may now be at a higher risk of churn.

Focus product development on reducing friction for existing customers

In the software business, product experience is the all-important driver of customer experience. So, to foster customer loyalty, think about what you can do to create more ease for existing users.

Blake Barlett at OpenView says product-led growth is the key to success in the End User Era. In this era, end user annoyance spells opportunity. Think Slack vs. email, or Zoom vs. Hangouts.

In financially uncertain times, a product-led development philosophy can hold the key to faster end user adoption and increased retention. Tune into those day-to-day annoyances – they hold the key to retention.

Accelerate end user adoption

Happy end users make your application stickier, so if your champion is struggling to persuade others in their company to use your platform, you need to know why. You may need more in-app cues and guidance to make tasks easier. What is “so annoying” about your product? Ask your customers that, and you may find exactly what you need to reduce friction – which will pay off in retention.

Now is the time to deepen relationships and partnerships with promoters

Guneet Singh, Director of Customer Experience programs at Docusign, spoke about this in a recent Voice of the Customer webinar. He looks for champions among his promoters who have a common pain point, and then brings them together in councils that engage with DocuSign’s product team. Through this customer advocacy program, his customers learn from each other, get a first look at new product features, and provide valuable insights for the DocuSign product development roadmap.

How do you begin a customer advocacy program like this? Pay attention to customer requests and “start with small wins,” says Guneet. “If you complete the feature that a customer asks for, by listening and acting on their words, you’ve won that customer for life.” 

We couldn’t agree more!

The most valuable commitment we have is to our customers. And as much as we work to grow, to scale, to expand — it’s times like these where we have to remember to appreciate the people who already support us and show them support too. We’re all in this together.

What’s your biggest problem as a Product Dev professional? Too many demands and not enough time? Limited resources? Oddly enough, none of those topped the list for Hiten Shah’s crowd.

Hiten Shah (of KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, and Quick Sprout fame) recently wrote in his newsletter that “the problems people have on Product teams fall into two main categories: Customer Feedback and Alignment.” This conclusion came after Hiten asked his readers to share their biggest product problems, and in more than 100 replies, those two themes emerged as the leaders.

Wootric helps customers gather, organize, categorize and analyze customer feedback – at volume – every day. And we’ve got a few insights into how Product teams can solve the issues that come with customer-centricity – while improving alignment at the same time.

Let’s go through the problems real Product professionals sent Hiten Shah point by point.

“Fast/Effective ways to quickly recap and synthesize qualitative research”

Qualitative data – ie. freeform responses versus ratings or multiple choice answers – are notoriously difficult to sift through and analyze. It’s only recently that, with advanced technology and machine learning, it’s become much easier to tag, sort, and assign sentiment to qualitative feedback at scale.

Tagging, in particular, is a huge time-saver when you switch from just manual tagging to auto-tagging. Tagging comments with their major themes is the first step towards conducting frequency analysis to identify trending topics – or find relevant feedback with a click.

Using an NPS survey with an open-ended comments section, for example, you might find that your ‘detractors’ (low scorers) comments tend to be tagged with “slow loading time” or you may see a specific feature request recurring.

Yep, modern customer feedback software should be able to deliver every comment with a feature request, for example, tagged and prioritized by frequency, from the highest-value customers, in about a second.

You can even use tags to route specifically tagged feedback straight to the appropriate department for follow-up. No need to hunt for bugs – the bugs will come to you! (Don’t they always?)

“It’s [customer feedback] very subjective and sometimes doesn’t have context, therefore I take it with a grain of salt, but engineers may not see it that way and want to address the feedback immediately.”

When your customer feedback comes primarily through surveys that *don’t* include open-ended responses (to gather all of that golden qualitative data), it’s impossible to get the context you need to evaluate the issue and possibly solve it.

But understanding the why behind NPS, CES and CSAT scores (to name a few) isn’t all the context you need to decide where to allot your time and resources.

You literally have to consider the source.

Is the feedback coming from a high-value, ideal client? Is your existing survey solution capable of identifying those markers?

Did you know that it’s even possible to target specific customer segments with survey campaigns?

And for even more context – you can target customer surveys based on product milestones. For example, you can set a CES survey to deploy after new feature use to find out how easy (or difficult) new customers think it is to use.

“Feedback overwhelm – how to prioritize what users want/need the most.”

An overwhelming number of customer comments can leave you feeling like you are trying to drink from a fire hydrant. It’s time to talk about the wonders of machine learning.

Historically, extracting insights from piles of unstructured feedback has been difficult, expensive and time-consuming. That is not the case today. When you need insight from feedback at scale, it is time to invest in text and sentiment analysis using software with natural language processing.

Machine learning has come a loooong way. Yes, algorithms must be trained to understand your company and customers, so chose a software vendor that will keep their team in the loop and ensure you’re getting good insights right off the bat. Then the software just gets better and better at telling you what is most important to your customers.

Wootric CXInsight™ combines natural language processing with sentiment analysis to categorize feedback based on what matters most for your customers. When you know why your customers love you — or don’t — prioritization becomes a much easier task.

“Having a regular cadence of customer interaction to develop insights and product intuition.”

Okay, there’s no excuse – this is so easily doable. You can set any CX survey you want to deploy on a regular basis, or, deploy after customers complete specific milestones. Having to go get customer feedback shouldn’t be something you have to think about. It should be automatic! Part of your daily, weekly, or monthly routine.

But, it’s only that easy if you’ve got software that makes it that easy – let’s be honest here. Modern customer feedback software can integrate with Slack, Intercom, or whatever you use, as well as deliver surveys to customers while they’re in your app, and deliver it to you tagged, sorted, and prioritized.

Regularly!

You can have your finger on the pulse of customer satisfaction and will know immediately if there’s any fluctuation. As an added bonus, give a pat on the back to whoever built an update or solution for customers so they can see the results in action!

“My main problem is to get to know our audience and talk directly to them.”

Surveys are great – we love them. But you know what? Even with a qualitative feedback field, a survey can’t take the place of a real, person-to-person conversation. And usually, the biggest barrier to having those conversations is making the time.

We can’t pick up the phone for you, but we can save you time. Enough time to schedule interviews with your customers and get even deeper insights that they may never tell you in writing.

“In Product we’re expected to be customer-centric. We’re supposed to get feedback and talk to customers all the time. It’s literally our day job. But that’s on top of making sure we’re focused on building the right things and helping our teams ship too.”

Here’s the thing, Product friends. You aren’t the only department that has to be “customer-centric” and talk to customers all the time and review steady streams of feedback. So to make this part of your job easier, you might have to reach out to other departments and make customer-centricity a multi-team effort.

If you have a Customer Success department, start there – you might find that the Customer Success Manager is your new BFF. They’re also talking to customers every day, and in many ways, they’re closer to the problems customers face than you are. Most CSMs would be delighted to build better relationships with their Product Dev departments, working together to answer the question “What can we do to help our customers achieve success?”

“It’s not easy and it isn’t getting easier. Customer feedback can come from anywhere: Customer support requests, live chats, social media, the sales team, customer reviews, competitor research, and more. Adding to the pile are the endless opinions about what to do with the feedback from people on our teams.”

It’s not easy – true. But it is getting easier to solve qualitative feedback issues with modern customer feedback software!

Sorry, we can’t help with the ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ problem – that’s right up there with finding the cure for the common cold. We find that if you have to pick one source to guide product, NPS feedback is the going to be the most actionable.  That said, when it comes to gathering customer feedback from many sources into one, easily searchable place, modern technology comes to the rescue again.

What you want to look for is a customer feedback program that can pull all of customer comment sources together, like NPS or CSAT feedback, user interviews, support tickets, app store reviews, social and analyze those comments in a way that lets you see the big picture and slice & dice by theme, sentiment, survey date, and data source.

This guest post was written by Martin Ceisel, the lead Content Strategist at MindTouch. His hobbies include writing, writing, and writing some more. MindTouch is a self-service platform that helps companies improve support agent productivity, increase ticket deflection, and fuel self-service support.

A quick look at some Net Promoter Score benchmarks will quickly reveal a painful truth: bad NPS scores happen. It’s inevitable.

The worst response to your company’s detractors, though, is no response at all. So, how to best learn from bad Net Promoter Scores and use them to improve the customer experience?

Here are a few strategies to consider:

Do your research

Look at all of the support tickets your detractor customer has put in and read all the notes that your agents have written about these interactions. Review the goals they had when they initially became a customer. Check which help articles they may have read. This will give you important context when you close the loop with the customer.

Respond promptly and personally

Though the customers behind bad Net Promoter Scores might still be feeling the sting of their negative experience, receiving a prompt response to their NPS survey might help turn the tide. If nothing else, a personal response is an opportunity to take the NPS survey beyond a transactional call and response to an ongoing (and honest!) conversation. You’ll be surprised how much constructive feedback a simple “What can we do to improve your experience?” might unlock.

Segment response types

What customer group or business segment is driving the bulk of your bad Net Promoter Scores? One way to find out is to segment NPS scores to identify hotspots. You might find that a particular point in the customer journey, such as onboarding or renewal, is creating an inordinate number of detractors. Or maybe your NPS from product A is higher or lower than product B. Ask yourself why one group of customers is more successful than others. By categorizing responses, you can drill down and identify actionable takeaways. One way to see themes is to create reason codes, a method of categorizing responses so they can be organized and analyzed.

Don’t get tunnel vision

Remember that NPS is just one measure of customer sentiment. Don’t forget key metrics like customer effort (CES) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT). These, too, are important metrics that can lead you to the root cause of negative customer experiences. Regarding NPS specifically, consider trends in your industry. What are the NPS benchmarks you should be aiming for? This will help you decide how urgent an action to take—which bad Net Promoter Scores to prioritize first.

Because it’s about the whole customer experience

Tunnel vision makes for a good segue to my close: remember the reason we pay such close attention to customer sentiment. Perusing, parsing, and responding to bad Net Promoter Scores is about more than improving your company’s own internal metrics. It’s about improving the customer experience. If we can’t deliver low-effort customer experiences throughout the customer journey—if we don’t demonstrate a commitment to reading and responding to what our customers are telling us—we risk losing those customers entirely.

“What grade did you get?”

Do you remember getting asked that question in grade school? Or maybe you were the one asking it? Humans like to know how they’re doing compared to everyone else.

This carries over into customer experience as well. At Wootric, we advise companies on setting up an effective Net Promoter Score (NPS) program. We get asked questions about NPS industry benchmarks all the time.

In general, we believe focusing on an external NPS benchmark is not incredibly helpful.

The Net Promoter System is the quantification of customer loyalty and the process for improving it over time. The power of this system lies in the analysis of feedback and the action taken based on that analysis.

However, net promoter score benchmarks are still useful in certain cases, which is what this article is all about.

If you’re unfamiliar with NPS, here’s a quick rundown:

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric between -100 and 100 that captures the propensity of a company’s customers to attract and refer new business or/and repeat business.

NPS also stands for the Net Promoter System®, which was built around the Net Promoter Score. It is a model that ties a corporation’s bottom line to customer happiness and loyalty.

In the NPS survey, customers rate their likelihood to recommend your company on a scale of 0-10. To get your Net Promoter Score, take the percentage of people who are happy and willing to recommend your product or service (those who respond with a 9 or 10) — “promoters”– and subtract the percentage of people who would not be willing to recommend your product or service — (score of 0-6) “detractors.”

For example, a +50 NPS means that the company has more than 50% promoters and less than 50% detractors, so generally an NPS score of +50 is, indeed, great! You may see scales out there that say +30 is a decent score, and that +80 or greater is the ultimate dream score.

To learn more about NPS, get the ebook, The Modern Guide to Winning Customers with Net Promoter Score, which teaches how to modernize your NPS program for growth and higher loyalty.

Net Promoter Score industry benchmarks

There are two different types of NPS: absolute and relative. Absolute NPS refers to the NPS in and of itself, and comparing the score with what is generally considered a “good” or “bad” score. Relative NPS is taking into account the average NPS within an industry, which takes into account the factors that could affect an average Net Promoter Score, and can change the NPS benchmarks you set.

While an absolute NPS goal is nice and simple, it can be helpful to take a look at what others in your industry have been able to achieve, since every industry is different and has unique relative NPS results. The relative Net Promoter Scores generally achieved in each industry help construct what are called the NPS industry benchmarks. NPS Industry benchmarks give you a way to evaluate your NPS relative to your competitors. They help control for factors that often create major differences in what is considered a good NPS score.

Oftentimes, other companies in your industry have established an average NPS for you to use as a net promoter score benchmark. If you make smartphones or other tech hardware, for example, companies like Apple have been tracking NPS for years.

To get averages and examples from your industry, try reports from the Fortune 500.

NPS Benchmark variance between industries

Let’s take a look at some examples of net promoter score benchmarks according to your industry.

Let’s say you have an NPS of +50. As we explained, that’s already pretty good! But if you’re a department store or specialty store, you are actually below the NPS benchmark (+62) for the industry.

Walmart pharmacies have an NPS score of +32. Considering the highest score is +100, you’d guess that they’d be lukewarm with this score, but I’m sure that the folks in charge of customer experience there are actually ecstatic. Walmart pharmacies have one of the highest NPS scores within the drug store & pharmacy industry.

Compare this number to the software industry, where +34 is the average. Becoming a leader in the software industry would mean having an NPS in the +60 range, like Salesforce (+66) and Adobe (+62).

Caveats for using NPS industry benchmarks

Unfortunately, NPS benchmark programs aren’t always as helpful as you’d hope. This comes down to the nature of surveying for feedback. There are so many contributing factors to an NPS benchmark, such as:

• Which channels you use to survey customers
• Demographics and habits of your customer base
• Customer tolerance levels
• The size of your competition
• The difficulty of building brand loyalty
• External circumstances (such as a global pandemic)
• When and how often you ask
• Whether you have enough data to be statistically significant or not

All of these factors can have varying effects on your overall NPS score. For example, your competitor may ask the NPS question within the context of a longer annual brand survey, while you survey using just the NPS question after a transaction. These will have different consequences for the feedback you gather. If you don’t have enough feedback coming in, your NPS may vary significantly from quarter to quarter or month to month.

Bear in mind, a ‘good NPS score’ doesn’t just depend on your industry, since it’s not difficult to game the system. It’s not always fair to compare your NPS score to another company’s NPS score because you don’t know their survey methods, or their employee compensation plans.

When competitive individuals are incentivized based on NPS score, things can get ugly.

A motivated person or company could improve their numbers by letting their customers know that positive feedback would mean a lot to them or by only showing the survey to customers who are positively inclined. They might offer incentives to customers to complete the survey. Clearly, the feedback received from these methods will lead to an inflated NPS score that is not a useful comparison for those using a more objective survey process.  

Setting an NPS goal if you don’t have a benchmark

If no Net Promoter Score benchmark exists for your industry, benchmark against yourself.

The great thing about NPS is that it is an actionable metric. It’s a number that you can rally the company around as a north star to guide improvement efforts.

“A good NPS score is one that is better than the last.”
– Jessica Pfeifer, CCO & Co-founder of Wootric

Remember, NPS isn’t just a score. It’s a system that’s meant to drive business improvement in product and customer experience. It helps you identify and close the loop with unhappy customers and solve their specific problems in real time.

Your goal is to boost customer loyalty and retention, and that happens by reading verbatim comments to understand the why behind the scores you receive. By making changes based on customer feedback, and responding quickly to detractors, you will naturally see your NPS improve. And gains in NPS correlate with revenue growth.

How to report NPS

After all this, you will want to report numbers to the rest of the team on a regular basis. NPS should be shared along with other monthly or quarterly metrics like revenue, new customers and customer churn.

We understand that, so here’s what we recommend:

• Instead of fixating on your score in the absolute sense, we recommend focusing on improving your score over time. Understand NPS as a trend over several periods, like if you were looking at a stock’s price.
• Determine the business goals of your NPS program, then report NPS in relation to the goals. For instance, if you are trying to improve retention, report NPS alongside churn data.
• Pay attention to trending topics in your verbatim responses. Reporting these topics will help everyone understand what’s important to your customers, and the pain points they experience. Share what customers love and what they don’t love about your company with internal stakeholders. Then you can work to make those points as frictionless as possible. 

Note: For startups, be sure to read and respond to every single comment. As you grow, you’ll start needing aggregate and to pull themes from customer comments. To automate that process, check out AI-powered text and sentiment analysis.

• Segment your Net Promoter Score by relevant customer groups. For example, this could be by user role (in the SaaS example above), geography, or size/frequency of purchase–whatever drives your business. This will help you pay close attention to groups that are critical to your business success. Learn more about segmentation here.
  
• If you want to compare your score to a competitor, choose a company in your industry that you admire and use their score as an aspirational benchmark. Many companies have volunteered their NPS scores to research and reports such as this one by the Fortune 500.

Measure NPS and work to improve it over time.  Dig into customer comments and close the loop with customers. You will learn their needs, and their pain points, and have plenty of guidance to make those improvements. Both your NPS and your customer retention rates are sure to improve. 

What is Empathy?

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. For Product Managers looking to improve customer experience (CX), that definition translates to doing more than understanding the user’s pain points, but also looking at the emotional landscape of what it’s like to use the product – when it is working, and when it isn’t working.

Empathetic Product Managers ask themselves:

• How does using the product make the customer feel?
• How does the customer want to feel when using your product? What would be the best possible emotional outcome for them?
• How do I ensure the product developers understand and take the customers’ needs into consideration in their process?

The answers to those questions affect every facet of business, from acquisition to retention. It’s how, through CX, you can generate rapid growth through word-of-mouth recommendations, and sustain your success with customers who never want to leave.

Tying Empathy into CX

Empathy is a soft skill, and while those are typically difficult to measure, the effects of empathetic product development can be seen in every CX metric: Customer satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Sinead Cochrane, Senior Product Researcher at Intercom, wrote “For product teams, empathy building activities such as observing research or doing customer support is often not considered ‘real work’. However, product teams that consistently keep customer needs in mind are able to maintain and evolve their products in ways that won’t negatively impact the user experience.”

For her, empathy for product departments means “When a customer tells you something is broken, you are able to imagine the impact it’s having on the job they’re trying to get done,” and, “you realize the emotional impact the problem is having on that person.”

But I think we can go further than just recognizing the emotional impact of problems. That’s scratching the surface of what having empathy for customers can mean for producing superior customer experience.

Because empathy shouldn’t be reduced to realizing customers feel bad when a product isn’t working for them. A whole new world opens up when you also consider how you can design your product, updates, and expansions to enhance positive emotions as well.

Here are the questions that lie at the heart of empathetic product management:

• How can you get more emotionally in sync with your customers?
• Which are the most important negative emotional outcomes to manage?
• Which emotions should you seek to heighten (and how?)

To answer these questions, try these empathy building exercises.

Empathy Building Exercises for Product Managers and their Teams

1. Listen actively to discover underlying needs and emotional motivations

Often relegated to customer service and customer success departments, ‘active listening’ to find out why your customers use your product and what they really want to achieve is very important. You can’t get the depth and honesty of answers by just sending out a survey – this works much better if you do phone, Zoom or in-person interviews. In fact, Roman Pichler recommends product managers meet real users on a regular basis. You may find that your assumptions of why customers use your product aren’t accurate, or don’t tell nearly enough of the story.

“At first, our assumption was that they wanted to make more money. That often was true, but frequently we heard something different. Many simply wanted to maintain the business but run it more efficiently so they could have more free time (we heard about golfing on Fridays more than once). Others wanted to build a sustainable business they could pass on to their son or daughter.” – Jim Semick, Founder & Chief Strategist at ProductPlan

To get down to customers’ real motivations, ask open-ended questions beginning with “why” and “how.” Then make sure to record their answers in their own words (you can hand those assets to your copywriters for later use).

2. Use your own product

Empathy is often described as ‘putting yourself in someone else’s shoes’ – and there’s no better way to do this for a product manager than to actually use the product, just like any user would. You’ll empathize with users’ frustrations as you experience your own product’s shortcomings and hopefully find moments where it’s possible to create more delight.

But always keep in mind – you are not the average user. You’ll still need to listen to your users to get a complete picture of how they feel, and what problems they perceive as being severely aggravating.

3. Share verbatim comments

Someone, somewhere, is tracking customer experience metrics, sending out surveys, and collecting the answers. That someone might even be you. When reading users’ written responses, don’t just look for problems to solve and ignore the positive comments. Read them for emotion and see what conclusions you can draw about what people are feeling, and want to feel.

Pick a few relevant verbatim comments to bring to the rest of the product team. Reading these comments often helps engineers and designers feel the same joy or frustration as their users. This new emotional understanding will help you evangelize CX as a priority with everyone.

4. Mine your qualitative data and quantify customer sentiment

Those open-ended response answers are a goldmine for user research that can alert you to problems – and give you hints into the customer’s emotional state of mind. However, once you are getting more than a hundred comments a month, seeing the forest for the trees can be a difficult exercise. Qualitative feedback is notoriously tough to quantify, but it is now possible and easy to quantify sentiment with the help of machine learning.

AI-powered platforms, like InMoment CXInsight™, automatically sort your customer comments into themes while simultaneously assigning positive or negative sentiment. This provides you with a big picture understanding of how customers feel about your product and why. Categories of feedback vary by business sector and business model–payment processes & delivery for e-commerce, perhaps, while UX and usability may surface for SaaS products. Quantifying the sentiment of what your customers are talking about can help you track emotional trends over time. Presenting this kind of data alongside verbatim comments connects customer emotion with real business consequence.  

5. Set empathy KPIs

What gets measured gets done, and adding empathy into your product development work is no different. The KPIs for empathy may look a little different than your typical performance indicators, but the good news is: They’re not difficult to get. You’ll find key performance indicators like NPS, CES and CSAT are a good start, and comments in the open-ended questions can give you insight into the metric. Start identifying what kinds of ratings and qualitative answers correlate to genuinely happy customers – and frustrated customers likely to churn.

6. Chart out an empathy map

You’ve done your user journey, but even though it’s part of the buyer persona building process, you may not have done an empathy map.

• What your user sees – on competitors’ websites, common visuals in their industries, maybe what they enjoy watching or reading
• What your user says – how they measure success, what they say they want, what they say about your product
• What your user hears – what their influencers are saying, not just about your product, but about their jobs and what constitutes success, what they enjoy, what they don’t like about their experiences with your competitors, etc.
• What your users think and feel – worries, aspirations, what they really want, what really annoys them

Notice how the empathy map includes business/industry-specific observations, but also branches out into the user’s personal life and larger environment. People are not their jobs – or even their ‘jobs to be done.’ For true empathy, you have to look at the whole person.

This is a great activity to get other teams involved in – consider hosting a meeting with Customer Success, Sales, Marketing and Customer Service for a wider scope of insights.

Activities involving multiple teams help to build a shared understanding of your customers’ experiences that can strengthen the whole company.

7. Add happy moments to your Customer Journey Map

You’ve probably mapped out your customer/user journey, but you probably didn’t include this: Happy moments. See if you can take your old customer journey map and mark the points where positive, fun, delightful things happen. Can’t think of any? Then you have some serious CX work to do!

And of course, also note points where you’ve observed friction, difficulties, and problems, and address those in the order of biggest impact + easiest to implement.

8. Work in Customer Support for an afternoon

Whether that means answering the live chat questions, picking up the phone, or monitoring your product’s customer Slack channel, try out being the Customer Support agent for an afternoon to and put yourself on the front lines! There’s no better way to find problems than to let customers tell you exactly – and in great detail – what they are. And they’ll likely throw in how frustrated it makes them feel too.

9. Build a prototype to test your emotional hypotheses

By now, you probably have a few ideas on how you can improve the customer experience, and it might be time to test those theories. Create a prototype for a select group of qualified users to try (and react to). And, if possible, have them test the prototype in a testing facility that allows you to observe their reactions as they use your product.

If there is a Golden Rule for empathy, it’s a simple one: Forget your assumptions and be genuinely interested and curious about what people are feeling (not just what they’re doing) while using your product. Empathy is a learned skill that needs practice so don’t forget to try out these empathy exercises on a frequent basis for enhanced customer experience.  

To quote Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Data is the beating pulse of business, but customer data is more like DNA. Customer data, if we’re using it right, directs how we grow and what we develop. But what happens if that customer data becomes corrupted by our own bias?

We can’t grow or develop in the ways we need to.

But what is bias exactly? Where does it come from?

The most prevalent bias is, perhaps, confirmation bias – seeking out data that confirms our existing beliefs.

In an early study of confirmation bias, young children were asked what features in a sports ball are important to the quality of a player’s serve. Some said size, others said material, some dismissed color as a factor – but once they’d made up their minds, they failed to acknowledge evidence that was contrary to their theory – or explained away evidence that didn’t fit.

But what’s worse, especially for those of us using data to steer our businesses, is that confirmation bias caused them to not generate alternate theories unless someone asked them to. They missed exploring and finding other possibilities.

There are other types of bias too, including:

Algorithmic bias – When the data used to teach an AI machine learning system reflects the implicit values of the humans involved in collecting, selecting and using that data. You might remember the 2015 uproar around Google’s image recognition AI algorithm that auto-tagged photos of black people as gorillas? Yes, that happened. And in 2009, Nikon’s image recognition algorithms consistently asked Asian users if they were blinking.

Survivorship bias – When the data analyzed only comes from success stories.

Sample bias – When the population you collect data from doesn’t accurately reflect the population you’re trying to learn about.

Avoiding bias when gathering, analyzing and acting on data is impossible. Bias creeps in with assumptions, instincts, guesses, and ‘logical’ conclusions – and mostly, we don’t even know they exist until someone without those particular biases point them out.

But, while we can’t escape biases, we can try our best to account for them when we collect, analyze and interpret data.

How to fight bias in your data

In Forrester’s The illusion of insights recording, Forrester Vice President and Research Director Sri Sridharan makes three recommendations to reduce bias in data.

She says to “triangulate insight” by using multiple methods of arriving at an insight, and cross-validation. For example, pairing behavioral data with feedback from customer surveys to see if you arrive at the same or similar answers.

Her second piece of advice is to create a “self-correcting system of insights” that connects customer data with an effective action to create a closed loop of action, learning, and optimization. Essentially, this means testing the data by taking action and iterating based on how well you succeed in addressing the issue.

Tracking a ‘North Star’ metric like NPS or CSAT over time can be very helpful in confirming whether the changes you make are having the desired effect.

Sri’s third piece of advice is to “show your work to build trust” both internally and with customers. Your customers will be quick to correct you if your insights don’t hold true for them – and you have the bonus of showing them how hard you’re working to make sure they have what they need to succeed.

But there is also the potential for bias to happen before any of these fixes can be made – especially in Customer Discovery.

Bias in Customer Discovery, Before You’ve Even Gotten to the Data

Bias in whom you ask

Who you survey, interview or meet with can bias your results. This is called “sample bias” – but it can also turn into confirmation bias. Sample bias happens when some members of the intended population are less likely to be included than others. Think of all of the different segments of users you have – what would happen if you only surveyed one of those segments? You would get responses that don’t work equally well for all of your customers.

This can slide into confirmation bias if the population you select is more likely to give you the answers you want to hear.

And, there’s also the risk of “survivorship bias,” if the people you’re surveying are the customers who are still with you, rather than the users who have churned. Current users are much easier to collect data from, and while they can give you important insights, they can’t tell you why your churned customers left.

Bias in how you ask

How you frame questions can have a dramatic effect on the responses. In fact, by the wording you use in a survey, or even your tone of voice in a phone interview or facial expressions in an in-person interview, you can effectively steer the conversation to deliver exactly the answers you’re hoping to hear. Many of the words we use have positive or negative associations that cause people to react accordingly.

Biased question: How much do you like the color blue? (This presupposes they like the color blue at all)

Unbiased question: How does the color blue make you feel? (A much more neutral phrasing)

Or, if you aren’t specific enough about the information you want, you risk confusing your respondent and getting answers that aren’t at all helpful. Unless you have a professional market researcher on staff, you may want to stick with established questions like NPS and CSAT.

Bias in what you ask first – and last

The order of the questions you ask can also bias your results, and you’ll need to review your question order carefully to make sure the sequence doesn’t cause biased responses. Typically, you should ask general questions before specific ones, ask positive questions before negative ones, and ask questions about behavior before questions about attitude.

Bias in when you ask

Holidays and the summer months, when families often take their vacations, can be problematic for both response rates and sample bias. For example, if you send a survey during religious holidays, you’ll likely get different responses rates from different groups of people, who may or may not be taking that time off.  Be aware of your timing, including if you’re sending surveys during deadline rushes, before or after holidays, or other significant patterns that may affect who responds and how they respond. To be on the safe side, don’t send your survey at the same time every year – send a few, at different times, to get the most accurate feedback.

Objective Data Leads to More Accurate, More Valuable Insight

Sherlock Holmes famously tells Dr. Watson that he never forms a theory before he gathers all of the facts. But he’s much better at disassociating himself from the results than most of us are (and he’s fictional). Bias has a way of seeping into our results, and how we view and react to our results. But, when we put bias-countering measures in place, like gathering data from different sources, using different types of data, and checking our work through a process of action and iteration, we can get to the truth in the end.