Customer Lifetime Value: A Guide to the Northstar Revenue Metric

What Is Customer Lifetime Value?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLV as Profit Metric

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

CLV as Customer Persona Builder

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

Predictive CLV

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

CLV as Key Performance Indicator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Average Monthly Revenue Per Customer (ARPU)

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

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

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

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

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

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

Divided by…

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

Customer Retention Cost (CRC)

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

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

Divided by…

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

Customer lifetime value calculation in non-subscription models

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

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

*The average customer lifespan is calculated in months.

Segment Customer Lifetime Value to make it more actionable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Guidelines for Structuring Your Product Roadmap

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

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

The top-down approach to product development works best.

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

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

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

And speaking of getting lost in the weeds…

A product roadmap is not a list of features.

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

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

Five Guidelines for Structuring Your Product Roadmap

1. Product Roadmaps Should be Flexible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Product Roadmaps Should be Developed with Plenty of Input

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

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

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

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

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

4. Product Roadmaps Should be Visual

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

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

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

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

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

5. Tailor Your Roadmap Discussion to Your Audience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published June 28 2016, updated July 28 2020

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The 80/20 NPS Guide for B2B SaaS

In this guest post, Nathan Lippi, Head of User Research at PandaDoc, shares a Pareto principle approach to getting the most from a B2B Net Promoter Score program. 

NPS. It’s debated, loved, and hated, but in the world of B2B SaaS it’s rarely used to its full potential.

At PandaDoc, we’ve become increasingly customer-obsessed since the introduction of our NPS program two years ago, but we feel as if we still have meaningful room for improvement.

We’ve found there isn’t much written about NPS, specifically for B2B companies, so in order to level up, we’ve gone straight to the experts. With their permission, we’re sharing some key findings here.

We hope this guide helps you to get the most out of your CX program.

Let’s get to it!

The main purpose of NPS is to drive action

NPS is an easy, trusted, and benchmark-able way to start driving customer-focused action at your company.

Many companies obsess too much about the number when they’re starting out.

However, the most successful companies never lose sight of the fact that the primary purpose of CX metrics is to drive customer-focused action.

Once you’re driving customer-focused action, you’ll start to actually reap the benefits of increased retention, expansion, and word of mouth.

One Oracle VP’s Three-Step Recipe for NPS Survey Success

Joshua Rossman is an NPS OG, having run NPS at eBay and McAfee, among other companies. He’s now Vice President, Customer Experience Strategy at Oracle.

Through his years of experience, Rossman has created a three-step system he uses to get the most out of customer experience surveys, including NPS. He’s been kind enough to give us permission to share it publicly.

Step 1: Ask an easy-to-answer anchor question first to improve response rates

This principle is standard for NPS, but powerful enough to use across other CX surveys.

Ask your broad question first, and get a quantitative rating. Making your first question easy to answer will improve your overall survey response rates.

Step 2: Get S-P-E-C-I-F-I-C with your open-ended ask

Rossman has found that the standard open-ended question, “Care to tell us why?” often leads to vague, inactionable responses (e.g. “It’s hard to use”).

He’s found that asking promoters for specific reasons they recommend — and non-promoters for specific ways to improve — leads to much more actionable feedback.

Here are the specific questions he recommends for brand-level NPS:

Promoters: “What is it that makes you most likely to recommend {{company}}?”

Non-promoters: “What is it we could do that would make you more likely to recommend us in the future?”

These questions ask more specific questions — and tend to get more specific answers.

Various platforms such as InMoment can help you automatically categorize your now-more-specific NPS verbatims!

Each company will want to tag their work in a way that makes the most sense to them, but Shaun Clowes, former Head of Growth at Atlassian, says that they used machine learning to tag their feedback into three categories: Reliability, Usability, and Functionality. They used the ratio of different complaints to understand, at a high level, where their product needed work.

Step 3: NPS’ Secret Third Question

Even with the more specific responses you’ll hopefully get from the tweaks recommended in Step 2, not all B2B companies get such a high volume of responses that they can glean mathematically reliable responses from text alone.

One way to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that lead to an excellent (or poor) user experience is to follow questions about satisfaction with questions about various attributes of your brand. Ask a few extra questions with NPS and you can capture the overall sentiment for each area:

Wireframe example | Rating satisfaction of multiple attributes

After you’ve captured these details you can then run a simple linear regression, which will tell you which factors most influence if a person is a promoter or a detractor.

Various versions of the linear regression technique were also mentioned by Allison Dickin, VP of User Research at UserLeap, and other experts.  Hearing them reinforce the power of this third question helps us get really excited about what we might do with it.

“Extra questions should be used judiciously,” counters Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer at Wootric. “Think about it: When was the last time you responded thoughtfully to a multi-question survey?”

If you’re worried that such a long third step may lead to a negative user experience or lower response rates, a lighter option may be to ask the respondent to tell you what drove their score by selecting from a pick list of reasons.

If your follow-up question to detractors is, “What is the main thing we need to improve?,” you could offer a picklist that includes product, support, training, and value.

Not only are you learning what’s driving your score overall, but you’re also generating groups of users to follow up based on their interest. For example, your customer support team can learn more by reaching out to detractors who cite “support” as an issue.

Example 2-step in-app NPS survey with a pick list

Drive Strategic Action with a Cross-Functional Cadence

You may have noticed that our first heading was about driving action on behalf of the customer.

We’re touching on it again because, ultimately, driving action on behalf of your customers should be the primary concern of an NPS program.

Driving tactical action on behalf of customers was something we were already doing well at PandaDoc, before talking to the experts. Getting NPS data into Slack and other systems has been a pillar of our NPS program — this helps us take immediate action on issues that surface in feedback. One example: reaching out to an unhappy detractor and quickly fixing the issue that her NPS feedback brought to our attention.

However, learning how many companies drive strategic action on behalf of the customer in the following way, was eye-opening:

  • Collect customer feedback in a central repository (NPS, sales feedback, CS feedback, etc. — all combined together, somewhere like InMoment, UserVoice or ProductBoard.
  • Perform a 360° analysis of this data on a quarterly basis
  • Set up a monthly cross-functional cadence to decide which action to drive, and to track progress and accountability on ongoing courses of action

Fictional Examples of Driving Strategic Action:

Product Team

Diagnosis: Self-serve onboarding is our most common NPS complaint.  People often come away without understanding our platform’s core concepts.

Initiative: Improve self-serve onboarding to teach core concepts of the platform.

Success Team 

Diagnosis: Feedback about CS indicates all roles except admins are quite happy. Admins specifically have trouble understanding how to set user permissions, and they’d rather avoid going through training to learn something so small.

Initiative: Create micro-videos that explain to admins on how to manage user permissions.

Support Team

Diagnosis: NPS feedback indicates enterprise customers are unhappy with the time it takes to resolve support interactions involving custom features. 

Initiative:  Route tickets from enterprise customers directly to senior agents who have the expertise and product knowledge to resolve their issues.

Marketing 

Diagnosis: Many of the leads we’re attracting cannot benefit from our core value proposition.

Initiative: Better align their SEM campaigns and landing pages with promises that the product can fulfill.

Your metrics should flow from your unique business strategy

NPS has been sold by some as the be-all / end-all metric of a customer-centricity program. But this approach can be harmful.

While NPS is often a great way to understand brand-level sentiment, it makes sense to layer on additional metrics as your CX program progresses.

Jessica Pfeifer at Wootric and Allison Dickin at UserLeap agree on the idea that your CX metrics should flow from what’s most critical to your business’ success.

“You’ll be able to benchmark and track trends over time when you complement NPS with established metrics like CSAT, PSAT, or Customer Effort Score at critical touchpoints in the customer journey,” says Pfeifer.

“For example, you might trigger a Customer Effort Score survey to gauge how easy it is for a user to achieve ‘first value.’ What is that critical milestone in your product? In PandaDoc’s case, it might be sending a document. Here at Wootric, it’s when a customer has live survey feedback flowing into their dashboard.”

Both took time to talk to us about questions that can be used in addition to (or as an alternative to) NPS. Here are some examples:

Example Non-NPS Questions

Business question How to ask it
Examples from Allison Dickin @ UserLeap
What are the factors that affect churn, and what can we do differently to reduce it? First question:

How likely are you to use {{company}} for the next 3 months?

Follow-up question:

What would make you more likely to continue using {{company}}?

How well are we delivering on our core value proposition? First question:

How well does {{company}} meet your needs for {{value prop}}?

Second question:

How could {{company}} better meet your needs?

How is our first session going for users, and how can we improve it?
One option here is to pop up a question in-app, before the median session time. Another option is to email users after their first session.
First question:

How would you rate your experience getting started with {{company}}?

Second question:

How could {{company}} better meet your needs?

Examples from Jessica Pfiefer @ Wootric
How satisfied are users with our product, a feature, or service and how can we improve them? E.g. support interactions. Survey in product for feedback on features, survey via email or Intercom Messenger for support interactions. CSAT

First question:
“How satisfied are you with your recent support interaction?

Second question (customize based on score):
“What could we do to improve?

We have a key but difficult task that we need to make easier for users.
How difficult is the task, and how can we make it easier to do?
CES

First question:
“How easy was it for you to {{key but difficult task}}?

Second question:
“What could we do to improve?”

Takeaways

  • NPS is a great way to get started with driving customer-centric action
  • Use Josh Rossman’s three-part system to get the most out of your CX surveys, including NPS
  • Use analysis and a cross-functional cadence to drive org-wide, customer-focused action
  • As your business grows, layer on metrics that fit your specific business needs

This is just the tip of the iceberg for NPS, but we hope it will help your company squeeze the most out of your CX research program.

Hit me up on Twitter (@nathanlippi), and to let me know what’s worked well for you and your company!

Retain more customers with InMoment, the #1 Net Promoter Score platform for SaaS

Customer Experience in the Era of Product-Led Growth

Executives and end-users look for different things when choosing software products. An executive, for example, might be more interested in ROI and scalability, while the end-user often cares more about just getting their work done, quickly and easily. 

There was a time when executives were the gatekeepers who decided which B2B software products their companies purchased while the end-user experience took a back seat—but that era has ended. Today, you’ve got to win over your end-users to gain a foothold in an organization and give your product a fighting chance.

What does this look like? Picture Sophie, an Accounting Manager who uses the free version of Zoom to chat with her brother in Spain. She prefers Zoom over Skype, so she recommends it at work. The department tries it out, likes it, and begins using the paid version. Eventually, other departments try Zoom and it gains company-wide adoption.  Cut to Zoom’s IPO in 2019, and global adoption in the wake of the pandemic. 

What is Product-Led Growth?

A Product-Led Growth (PLG) model focuses on the end user’s needs when developing products, crafting education and support strategies, and shaping user experience.

“Growth in a PLG business comes from consistently fine-tuning the product experience to optimize the rate at which new users activate, convert, and expand in the product. Ideally, these improvements start to compound over time, allowing PLG businesses to accelerate growth as they scale (unlike traditional SaaS businesses). Customer feedback is critical to prioritizing the areas that will make the biggest difference to your customers.”
— Kyle Poyar, Market Strategist, OpenView

Where end users rule, customer experience is everything

Welcome to the end-user era, a time when users (rather than CIOs or other executives) introduce SaaS products to organizations and drive product adoption.  If you want to succeed as a SaaS company in the end-user era, you need to find ways to eliminate end-user pain points and create a seamless experience.

Word of mouth drives new customer acquisition. Then viral adoption within a company increases customer lifetime value. This is a powerful combination. In recent years, PLG is how many of the most successful SaaS companies have rocketed to IPO. Think Zoom, Slack, Hubspot, and Atlassian.

If you’re at a company that takes a traditional approach to CX—tinkering around the edges, nudging the product team to “improve customer experience”—get ready for a big change. Once your C-Suite or VP of Product embraces Product-Led Growth, the spotlight will be on customer feedback in all forms.  CX metrics will drive cross-functional alignment and priorities. 

The relationship between CX and Product-Led Growth

Despite the name, Product-Led Growth is not solely the domain of the Product team. Customer experience is an integral part of any PLG strategy. “If there is a challenge in implementing Product-Led Growth, it is actually achieving alignment across and within teams along with monitoring the multiple digital and physical touchpoints affecting customer experience,” says Despina Exadaktylou, Director of Programs, Product-Led Growth Hub, the world’s first PLG academy.

Product Teams are taking note and initiating collaboration.

“Customer Experience focuses on brand loyalty and customers’ likelihood to recommend. User Experience [within a Product team] focuses on the immediacy of user interaction with your product. But the lines between them have blurred as the role of the UX researcher and the tools in our toolkit have expanded beyond the narrow focus of the user’s engagement with the user interface, “ says Carol Barnum, Director of User Research and Founding Partner at UX Firm. She counsels product teams by saying, “If you are siloed within a UX group that isn’t engaging with CX stakeholders, seek opportunities to … collaborate with them. We all want the same thing—great user experiences and strong loyalty to brand.”

Venn diagram of Relationship between business KPIs and UX measurements
Source: UXMatters

Kieran Flanagan, VP of Marketing and Growth at Hubspot, takes this one step further. “To excel and thrive in a product-led company, you must be great at cross-functional collaboration,” says Kieran “A lot of the benefits that [PLG] has brought to companies is distilling your funnel down to these very concise metrics and the ones that actually matter.”

The importance of end user feedback

In the Product-Led Growth era, a seamless end user journey is paramount–from acquisition to advocate. As a result, product teams are hungry for data about user experience inside and outside of the product. Product managers and UX teams need to understand anything that is slowing end users down, so they can figure out how product design can alleviate that friction.

CX professionals and front line teams are skilled at using established CX metrics to monitor loyalty and gather feedback. They have valuable information about end user pain at critical touchpoints in the SaaS user journey, including:

    • Onboarding experience
    • Support experience
    • Product or feature adoption

Creating Alignment

Product-Led Growth success demands shared accountability for metrics, so be ready to co-create a plan. Product teams benefit from the customer journey insight that CX teams (along with Success, Support, Sales and Marketing) bring to the collaboration. CX champions finally have the kind of cross-functional partnership that they’ve been seeking all along.

Learn how Wootric can help you measure and improve customer experience. Book a consultative demo today.

10 Things Every SaaS Business Should Know About Net Promoter Score

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…

What Customer Success means now, during the COVID-19 pandemic

Three years ago, I wrote a post on “How to start a customer success program from scratch” and outlined all the reasons to do so: 

  • The ROI from increased referrals, cross-sells and upsells
  • The potential for a customer success program to become a “growth engine”
  • The sheer impact of returning revenue and customer lifetime value
  • The ‘free marketing’ of brand advocacy

And the list goes on. But, we’ve all had some paradigm shifts recently, haven’t we? So I’m not going to talk about what customer success can do for you. Because it’s not about you. It’s never been about you. It’s always been about other people.

What they need most, and what they need right now.

I predict that the companies that will grow from the Covid-19 pandemic crisis are the ones who deeply, genuinely care about their customers’ wellbeing. Not just their success.

How are your customers feeling right now? And how can you support them?

We can answer the first question ourselves — we’re all feeling isolated, lonely, cut-off, mournful, insecure, anxious. Maybe our kids/partners/dogs/cats are driving us a little crazy at this point. Maybe we’re self-isolating alone and wish we had kids/partners/dogs/cats around.

What we need most right now is to feel connected and cared about. And I’ve seen two companies step up to meet this need in vastly different ways.

[Yes, if we were to put traditional “Customer Success” verbiage around this, we’d say “what success looks like for your customer right now is to *feel* less alone. Not to get their work done faster. Not to multi-task with better focus. But to *feel* connected.]

Community Building

When these lockdowns started, many of us shared memes that read: “Check on your extravert friends… they’re NOT okay!” 

As time dragged on, however, even the introverts among us started to crave human connection. Human beings thrive on community, and you may be in a unique position to give it to them.

Wootric held informal CX “office hours” via Zoom for CS and CX professionals who want to offer each other support, ask questions and compare notes on how they’re adapting (or anything else, for that matter).

 “I’m part of an online community of marketing leaders. There’s something incredibly valuable about being with others who are facing the same challenges that I am, so offering that kind of forum to leaders in the CS/CX trenches became a priority for me, ” says Lisa Abbott, VP Marketing at Wootric. 

On the last CX Office Hour call, a Customer Success professional at a startup shared that she was feeling overwhelmed after losing her team and being placed on the front lines, dealing directly with customers. Members of our newly formed community jumped in with advice on how to prioritize and set boundaries, helping her get through it while maintaining her sanity.

Consider creating a similar forum for your customers—a live video conference where they can come together, connect, and share their wisdom and support.

Be there for a chat

I got an email last week from one of my favorite online companies, Greetabl, a service that sends beautifully packaged thoughtful gifts. I’ve been using them for years to cheer up friends from afar or show appreciation to clients and colleagues, and I didn’t think I could love them more, until I found this in my inbox:

Hey there Greetabl Insider, 

Brittany from Greetabl here (you might recognize my name from Greetabl’s marketing emails). If you saw Joe’s note on Medium over the weekend, you know that Team Greetabl has cleared our calendars of all scheduled meetings and we’re reaching out to our people to see if they want to talk. About anything. 

There’s a lot of uncertainty right now and social distancing can get lonely FAST, so I just wanted to let you know I’m here to talk. No sales pitch, no agenda; just a virtual coffee meeting to talk about whatever’s on your mind. Drop some time on my calendar if you want to chat. 

Best,

Brittany

Director of Marketing

Joe Fischer, Greetabl’s CEO, had everyone clear their calendars of their regularly scheduled meetings and instead, reach out to talk to people. Brittany, their Director of Marketing, sent out this charming email, and my favorite part is “No sales pitch, no agenda; just a virtual coffee meeting to talk about whatever’s on your mind.”

My friend, copywriter Lauren Van Mullem, took her up on this offer and says “Chatting with Brittany was the highlight of last week for me. We just hopped on a video chat, and we were both in our comfy sweaters, and just talked about life, these weird times, and some of the best and worst things we’ve seen from companies right now. It felt like talking to a friend, but almost better in a way. Our social circles are sort of confined right now. You don’t get a chance to talk with a stranger very often these days. So having a chance to connect with someone I didn’t know was really special. I can’t wait for a chance to repay that kindness by sending Greetabls, especially since I know that wasn’t the point of the call at all.”

SaaS companies are uniquely positioned to help

SaaS companies of all sizes have something to offer that even the big companies don’t have: Many of us are used to working remotely and using online tools to stay focused and connected at scale. We’re agile by nature, able to navigate quickly-changing environments. We’re adept at creative problem-solving, finding opportunities in challenges, and listening – really listening – to what our clients need.

Those are life skills not everyone has right now.

So now, more than ever, listen to your customers and your community. 

Create the solutions they need right now

Give them the frictionless customer journeys that get them where they need to go under the current, world-upside-down, circumstances. And don’t assume their “ideal outcome” this month is the same as it was just a few weeks ago. Everything has changed.

And above all: Reach out. Genuinely. Meaningfully. Human to human. Because generosity and human connection are what’s really going to get us all through this.

What can you do as a CSM right now?

Back to Customer Success – what can you do as a Customer Success Manager to support your customers during COVID-19?

Focus on empathizing with your customers and doubling-down on retention.

Because in times of crisis, existing customers are the lifeblood of your SaaS company.

Four questions to ask your customers

Be proactive. Reach out and get the conversation started. How to begin?  Recently, on a CX Office Hour call, customer experience thought leader Melinda Gonzales suggested that CSMs ask every customer these questions:

  1. How are you doing, personally? 
  2. What is the impact of the pandemic on your business?
  3. How do you think it will impact your plans for 2020?
  4. How can we help?

And, many clients right now are ranking their spending to decide what gets cut. Where your company lands on that list may depend on…

Empathy

How can you show empathy for your clients? Both personally, individually, and for their businesses? What solutions might greater empathy lead to? Here are some options to consider:

  • Being open to negotiating contract terms – especially payment terms.
  • Offering a short-term discount.
  • Show your customer how they can get more value from your product without spending another dollar. Are there features they are paying for but not using? Can you share a best practice that will help them see more success? 
  • Presenting downgrade options from a Customer Success standpoint (give them what they need to succeed right now, with the awareness that this may mean reducing spend).

Sure, will a few opportunists try to use COVID-19 as an excuse to negotiate a better deal? Maybe. And if you get one of those, present the “downgrade” option and make it very clear what that means in terms of reduction of services and reduction of results. 

But for most customers, give them the benefit of the doubt. So many industries and individuals are struggling right now. And the long-term ROI of empathy is worth some short-term sacrifices.

What you choose to do right now can ignite and cultivate long-term, lucrative relationships in the future.

And for our CSM friends and clients, can we just say: We understand how hard this time is for you too. 

You may not be able to do your best work right now, or afford the best tools to support your work. You may have dogs/kids/spouses/cats interrupting your client calls. You may be feeling what we’re all feeling — frustration, helplessness, fatigue, fear for the future.

Take it easy on yourself if you can. Upsells aren’t likely to happen right now, and that’s okay.

But your core goal remains the same: Helping your customers reach the results they need, by whatever means necessary.

Measure and improve customer experience. Get Net Promoter Score, CSAT or Customer Effort Score microsurvey feedback with InMoment.

Understand how your team is doing with free employee pulse resources from Wootric

RESPONDING TO COVID-19 

Everything has changed.  How are your people doing?

Understanding how your employees are feeling right now has never been more important, nor more difficult.

Let us help. 

Wootric is offering free employee pulse tools to help you stay connected to your teams. The program includes access to our CXInsight text analytics platform for 6 months.  

You have a couple of options:

Free employee pulse survey program  

We’ll get you a new Wootric survey project account to get started with simple link or email surveys to employees. This account includes a survey dashboard and the ability to forward feedback to an email address or Slack channel.

Employee Pulse eSAT Email Survey during Covid 19

Analyze existing employee survey results at scale. 

If you already have an employee survey program, Wootric will help you understand what employees are telling you. For the next six months, companies with more than 200 survey responses with comments are eligible for a free CXInsight account. HR teams can upload survey data for instant insight. Qualitative feedback comments will be autocategorized for theme and sentiment using our machine learning algorithm that is optimized for employee engagement feedback.

Reach out to us and we’ll get you started. Employee feedback text analytics example during Covid19 crisis

How to Send Employee Pulse Surveys

Step 1. Decide whether you want to ask about satisfaction or effort.

Asking about satisfaction. You will customize the classic two-step satisfaction (CSAT) survey  “How satisfied are you with _______?” and followup question. 

Example questions about effort:

      • How satisfied are you with the support you are receiving from [our company] during the crisis?
      • How satisfied are you with the resources you have to do your job at this time?
      • How satisfied are you with the communication updates you are getting from us?

Using the customizable followup question, gather employee comments:

Example follow up question for satisfied employees:  Thanks for letting us know. Please tell us how you are doing, and any concerns or suggestions you may have.

Example follow up question for unsatisfied employees: Sorry to hear this.  Please let us know any suggestions you have, and reach out to ____ directly if you need support. 

Asking about effort.  You will customize the standard two-step effort score survey (CES),  “How easy was it for you to __________?” and a followup question. 

Example questions about effort: 

      • How easy was it for you to work from home this week?
      • How easy was it for you to manage daily life this week?

Example follow up question for satisfied employees:
Thanks for letting us know. Please tell us how you are doing and any concerns or suggestions you may have.

Example follow up question for unsatisfied employees:
Sorry to hear this.  Please let us know your biggest challenges and any suggestions you have. We know this is hard. Please reach out to ____ directly if you have an urgent request.

Step 2: Think about how you will survey your employees.

Do you want to send a link to a survey or send an email survey?

If you want employee responses to be anonymous, send a link to a survey in an email, Slack, or other means.
If employees know their response is anonymous, they may be more likely to be honest. However, you won’t be able to reach out to individuals who express concern or offer good suggestions. Here is our help article about survey link setup

If you want to be able to respond to employees one-on-one, use Wootric email surveys. You will be able to see every individual’s survey responses and reach out to address concerns, right from the Wootric dashboard. However, advise your employees of this so they don’t share private information.

Note: Organizations with more than 200 survey responses with comments are eligible for free access to the CXInsight text analytics platform. Employee comments will be automatically categorized by topic and sentiment, giving you instant insight into what is most important to employees.

Step 3. Sign up and get started!
(Existing customers please reach out to us)SIGN UP

Deepen connections and retain your team

An employee pulse program will help you:

  • Learn how employees are feeling and uncover needs in real-time.
  • Prioritize ways you can help your team feel supported and productive during this challenging time.
  • Monitor sentiment over time.
  • Stay connected by sharing what you are hearing and how you are responding to requests and feedback.

We’re here to help you get the insights you need to understand and support your people. 

Learn how Wootric can help you measure and improve customer experience. Book a consultative demo today.

How to Retain Customers in a Time of Crisis: A CX To-Do List for SaaS Companies

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.

SaaS Customer Journey touchpoints and surveys

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.

SaaS Product Feedback with topics auto-categorized
Source: Wootric CXInsight Analytics Platform

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.

End User Era - example software products

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.

Learn how Wootric can help you measure and improve customer experience. Book a consultative demo today.

A Sales Gong for CX : Broadcast Real-time NPS to Your Entire Workplace

The sales gong is a motivational technique used on sales floors around the world. Every time someone closes a deal, they bang a gong or ring a bell to celebrate their success. And when the office gets quiet? Everyone knows it’s time to hustle. 

In other words, there’s never any question about how the team is doing at any given moment, and the constant feedback gets the entire sales force aligned in their mission to sell, sell, sell. 

Now… imagine doing the same thing, for your entire organization, regarding Customer Experience (CX)? Rather than a sales gong, picture a TV monitor that broadcasts real-time customer feedback and Net Promoter Scores (NPS), getting everyone from accounting to operations aligned in the mission to turn customers into raving fans.

Broadcasting real-time NPS data will help you build a customer-centric culture, which ultimately leads to greater customer loyalty and powerful returns.

What is a Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

Measuring your Net Promoter Score is relatively straightforward. An NPS survey asks your customers to rate, on a scale of 0-10, how likely they are to recommend your company, products, or services to a friend or colleague. 

Responses are then grouped into:

  • Detractors (those who responded 0-6)
  • Neutrals (7-8)
  • Promoters (9-10)

To determine your Net Promoter Score, subtract your percentage of promoters from your percentage of detractors.

NPS = (% Promoters – % Detractors) 

Example: You survey 500 customers, asking how likely they are to recommend your company to friends or colleagues. 50 respondents (10%) answered 0-6, another 100 (20%) answered 7-8, and 350 (70%) answered 9 or 10.

Your Company’s NPS is 70% – 10% = 60.

The Net Promoter Survey is then followed by one of the following open-ended questions (depending on their answer):

  • “What can we do to improve?” (those who rates you 0-8) 
  • “What did you love about your experience? (those who rated you 9-10)

Why does NPS matter?

The correlation between revenue and CX is solid. And, NPS is the foundational metric that can serve as a north star on the journey to customer-centricity and the growth that comes with it.  However… simply gathering feedback and measuring NPS gets your nowhere. 

The real power of NPS comes from the system you build around it. This means:

  • Closing the loop with customers (i.e., fixing the problem, thanking them for their feedback).
  • Analyzing responses to prioritize improvements to products and services.
  • Using NPS to create a more customer-centric culture.

Only then does NPS help you retain more customers and drive growth. 

In a custom-centric company, the Success and Support teams works diligently to close the loop with customers, the Product team analyzes the data to create superior products, and Marketing crafts their messaging to educate and answer objections before they arise. 

As for shifting company culture? That’s a job for the CEO or a C-Suite sponsor of your NPS program (often with the support of the VP or Director of Customer Experience). 

Creating a more customer-centric culture with NPS

Culture change is a multifaceted undertaking, but you can anchor it with your NPS program. Evangelize NPS as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI), right alongside revenue, churn, and other important figures.  

What does evangelizing NPS look like? 

  • Educate everyone (from new hires to the board) about why NPS is important to customer experience management.
  • Share the results of NPS surveys in company newsletters and quarterly board decks.
  • Don’t just share the score by itself. Include customer comments and NPS trends by customer segment.

Where reports and memos fall short

Unfortunately, in between those quarterly reports, NPS can get lost. Unlike the Sales gong that keeps everyone on the floor tuned into customer acquisition as a Key Performance Indicator, NPS can be out of sight and out of mind. 

And that’s where a real-time display of NPS feedback comes in. You can bridge that gap between reporting cycles when you display your evolving NPS live, on a monitor, along with raw customer feedback.

Real-time NPS displayed on a monitor in the workplace
Real-time NPS, trends, topics, and comments on a Wootric TV display.

4 Reasons to broadcast real-time NPS and feedback in the office

If your goal is to create a more customer centric company and reap the benefits of a high NPS, an “NPS TV” can help unite everyone on that mission in the following ways.

1. Reinforce awareness of NPS as a KPI.

Certain KPI’s are more obvious than others. Revenue, profit, and conversions get a lot of airtime, but NPS is easy to ignore unless you put it front and center.

In reality, everyone should be thinking about NPS if you want to drive growth!

2. Build empathy with the customer. 

There is nothing quite like seeing the latest comments from active customers appearing on screen. Overjoyed, frustrated, curt, complimentary—it’s the emotions in the verbatim comments that humanize your customers and creates a connection to their experience. For more tips, check out these ways to build customer empathy

3. Reach departments that don’t normally engage with customers. 

The customer success team lives and breathes NPS because it’s an early indicator of churn. But the finance team? Not so much. At customer-centric companies, everyone understands their responsibility for customer loyalty. 

Set up the monitor in a prominent place. It could be on a wall everyone sees as they come in or out of the office, opposite the coffee machine, or in any hub in the workplace. 

That way more people are likely to read customer comments and tune into NPS trends.

4. Invest in an easy, low-cost enhancement to your NPS program

For the cost of a computer and a monitor, you’ll be in business in minutes—and that’s a small price to pay if you are after customer experience transformation.  As far as NPS tools go, it’s one of the cheapest and most effective ones on the market.

Note: For remote teams, a monitor doesn’t work. What to do? Create an NPS Slack channel! Click here to learn how to use Slack and NPS date to build customer-centricity.

Customer centricity… and beyond!

Your customers are the lifeblood of your business, but unless an employee’s job is customer-facing, it’s easy to lose sight of what your customers are going through. Making everyone aware of NPS brings the customer experience into stark relief, and it unites everybody in a single, all-important mission.

Remember: Net Promoter Score has a solid impact on revenue, and it’s the single best metric for predicting long-term growth and success—when you build a customer-centric culture around it. If you can involve everyone with creating a positive, seamless customer experience, your NPS score will rise and your revenues will soar. 

Learn how InMoment can help you measure and improve customer experience. Book a consultative demo today.

Top 7 Tips for Writing UX Copy that Improves the User Experience

Software interface design and user experience are interdependent. What connects and drives them is the aspect of visual engagement. If a user finds a platform easy to navigate and enjoyable, they are more likely to use it and to explore additional features, and they are less likely to contact support. These seven tips for writing UX copy will help you contribute to that optimum user experience. Let’s begin by reviewing some fundamentals. 

Fundamentals of Successful UX Copy

People have different attention styles depending on the content, presentation and recurrence of what they are exposed to. Combining visual and text components is important to grasp and guide an individual’s attention when conveying information.
The text content of any user interface has to be:

  • Clear, so users know what you’re saying without confusion or complication;
  • Concise, so you don’t have any extra words or fluff that isn’t necessary;
  • Useful, so the users receive important information;
  • Consistent, so all products have the same terminology, tone, and style. 

Now that we know this, let’s explore the top tips on writing successful copy for UX.

1. Use Real Copy in UI Right Away

UX designers will usually use the “Lorem Ipsum” text when they start work on a user interface. It’s a placeholder text but has no meaning, it just helps them conceptualize what text would look like. This is a bad idea because text should be a part of the design. If it looks good in Lorem Ipsum, it doesn’t mean it will deliver on communication goals once the real text is in place. Using real text also helps to make the prototype feel genuine and easier to connect the concept with the goals. The copy should work with the rest of the layout.

2. Build a Text Hierarchy

Users naturally won’t read every piece of text on the screen. They will scan through it quickly to see if anything jumps out at them. If the hook is good enough, the user will look in more detail. Although pictures are catchier,  text is what will guide users inside a software product.This means that the main message in text should be located right away so the user knows what’s important. 

3. Grab User Attention with Numerals

Studies show that numerals will grab users’ attention when they’re scanning text, even when they’re buried in words. That’s because users think that they’re important facts or stats, which is useful for them. That means your copy can rely on the numbers instead of the word variant. 

4. Be Flexible with Grammar

While it’s important to have correct grammar when it comes to the text UX, if you’re writing microcopy for a button or you have only a few characters to work it, you have to be flexible with grammar. Eliminate all the elements that aren’t important and stay away from complicated sentence structures. For example, avoid punctuation that isn’t necessary. 

5. A/B Test the Copy

The buttons copy is critical for user experience, so you should be spending time to do it right. The button should be clear about what the action is and the next step. It is especially important to test if the designers aren’t the target audience, i.e. if the product is for non-technical users who are unfamiliar with developer jargon. 

6. Be Consistent

You want to make your text natural and consistent, just as though the user were communicating with a human being. Use terminology that makes sense and use the same words everywhere in your copy. Synonyms aren’t useful for a user interface, so avoid putting “delete” in one spot and “remove” somewhere else.

7. Have Accessible Dialogue 

Similar to the previous point, the dialogue should match what the target audience expects. It’s more important to be friendly and accessible instead of being grammatically correct and full of jargon. Make sure you understand your audience and what kind of language they expect. 

By following these suggestions, you can understand the impact that writing has on the user experience and modify your strategy accordingly.

This article was written by Ellie Cloverdale,  technical and career writer with UK Writings and Academized. Ellie loves the intersection between product development and user experience research. 

Ready to Tackle Customer Churn? Here’s How.

Is there a business that hasn’t lost a single customer? Doubtful. Customer churn is inevitable. For this reason, maintaining superior customer experience in a world of insurmountable choice and lagging brand loyalty is of utmost importance. Now I’m no mind reader, but since you’re still here, I’ll assume that you’re struggling with generating new demand for your business and keeping existing customers around at the same time.

For starters, let’s define customer churn.

Also known as customer attrition, churn refers to the rate at which your customers stop purchasing your product or service, signaling the end of their relationship with you. These customers stop bringing in revenue for your business. 

Customer Churn Rate Equation

Let’s say that you started this quarter with 500 customers but lost 25; this means your churn rate is 5%. 

Other measurable ways for customer churn include:

  1. Number of customers dropped
  2. Percentage of customers lost
  3. Amount of monthly recurring revenue (MRR) lost
  4. Percentage of MRR lost

What Causes Customer Churn?

  • Value Pricing is tricky because customers are always looking for the most cost-effective solution to the problem they wish to solve. Customers need to feel like their purchase was worth the cost, so it’s crucial to establish value early on, through customer onboarding and education. Otherwise, they’re at risk for churn. 
  • Product Fit – Another common reason for customer churn is an inferior fit. If you have a sales team that’s hustling to hit quota but isn’t incentivized to sell to good-fit customers, your company will face consequences. Soon after their purchase, customers will realize they can’t achieve their goals with your product and will churn.
  • User Experience – If you have a product that’s not very intuitive or your software is glitchy, chances are customers will be less likely to use it on a regular basis and build expertise with it. They may not stick around for long. 
  • Competitors – Even if you believe you’re assisting customers to achieve their desired outcomes, they’ll still churn if they firmly believe that a competitor can do a better job. Competition is fierce these days, so you need to work hard to set yourself apart from your competition.
  • Missing Features/deliverables – Let’s say you fail to fulfill a goal that was initially agreed on while getting a client on board. When you fail to provide services as promised, you’re bound to lose a customer.

What Are Some Churn Indicators to Watch Out For?

1. Weak CX metrics – When thinking about churn, there are two CX metrics, in particular, that you should pay close attention to:

    • Net Promoter Score.  The grand-daddy of customer experience metrics, a detractor or passive NPS survey response is a leading indicator of churn. 
    • Customer Effort Score. Many software companies have adopted CES to measure the ease of getting started with your company or product. If this critical phase, often known as onboarding, is too difficult, churn can follow. 

2. Usage levelCustomer churn is often preceded by a period of decreased usage level, so keep a close eye on users’ login activity. This will help you to identify at-risk customers right before they churn. Also, if a customer downgrades to a lower tier of your product, this should be worrisome news – there’s a good chance that this customer will soon stop using your product altogether.

3. Customer’s KPI’sIf your product or service isn’t helping customers achieve their KPIs, then the chance of them churning is much higher. If you notice that a valued customer isn’t reaching their desired goals, it’s crucial that you reach out to them and find out what you can do to better help them achieve those goals.

4. Customer HealthWhile measured definitively when a customer renews or doesn’t, customer success teams look at a number of factors to assign a customer health score to an account. Take a look at the kinds of customer support interactions you’re seeing from the customer. After using your service, do you think the customer is getting what they’re paying for? How does the account manager feel about the customer’s state of mind about the services they’re buying from you? Factor in the account’s CX metrics. As soon as you have an idea of who might leave, you’ll be able to take all the relevant steps to define the problem, fix it, and retain their business. Eventually, you can start to implement a systematic approach to measuring customer health, uncovering at-risk customers, and reaching out to them.

5. Feature AdoptionEvery product or service has some key feature that makes it stand out from competitors. If a valued customer isn’t using these features, this is an indicator that they might churn soon.

6. SupportThis point refers to the number of support issues raised, the severity of the issues, the time it took to resolve them, and the customer’s satisfaction with the interaction (often measured with a CSAT survey). These factors can have a significant impact on a customer’s health, so they’re important to pay attention to. If a customer hasn’t reported any issues or asked any questions, this could also be a red flag – a silent customer doesn’t mean they are happy with your product. 

What Needs to Be Done?

1. Engage with your customers.

This might sound obvious, but engaging with your customers is the best way to make them stay. Proactively inquire about how they are doing using CX surveys at key journey points. This will help you identify who is happy and who is at risk. Armed with this information, follow up with a conversation if warranted. Get them on the phone and show that your company genuinely cares. But don’t stop there – keep engaging. Depending on the size of the customer, you may want to schedule a quarterly check-in, and certainly one in advance of renewal. 

In addition to talking directly to customers, provide ample and educational content about the key functional benefits of your product. Offer regular news updates, to communicate your commitment to innovation in service of their success.
With this kind of communication, you can get customers to keep coming back by showing them the value of using your product and how they can make your product a part of their daily workflow. 

Last but not least, I’d like to recommend social listening – the process of finding and contributing to conversations about your company online by seeking out brand mentions, specific keywords or phrases, and comments. 

By doing these things, you’ll be able to keep tabs on what’s going on in terms of customer satisfaction.

2. Educate Your Customers

Another churn-prevention trick: provide plenty of quality educational or support materials. Try offering free trainings, webinars, video tutorials, and product demos. Do whatever it takes to make your customers feel comfortable and informed. Put simply, you must not only give customers tools that work but also offer training on how to best use these tools. In this way, you’ll also be able to demonstrate the full potential of your product or service.

3. Set realistic expectations

As I mentioned before, failing to deliver on services as promised can result in a very unhappy customer that is at high risk of churning. One of the common practices I have seen across several industries is to over promise and under deliver. Why would a salesperson want to do this? There could be numerous reasons: 

    • They fear they might lose a potential customer
    • They’re facing pressure from their boss
    • They desire to come across as the “deal maker”  
    • They’re desperate to close the deal
    • They’re unwilling to tell the customer what they don’t want to hear

4. Keep a keen eye on competitors

It’s a bad sign when your customers perceive your competition to be better. As you work on reducing customer churn, pay close attention to how your customers might perceive your competitors’ products, and don’t forget to benchmark your overall performance and customer satisfaction against your competitors. 

Lastly, remember, the stakes are higher than ever. It’s time to make smart moves!

Author Bio:
Vikash Kumar works as a manager in the offshore software development company Tatvasoft.com. In his free time, Kumar enjoys writing and exploring new technical trends and topics. You can follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Customer Experience Enablement: What it is and How it Can Help Your Business Bottom Line

Since you’re here on the Wootric blog, you probably already know that providing a high-quality experience to your customers is vital to your business.

You’ve heard people talk about CX becoming the key differentiator for brands in the coming years.

Stats on how customers values CX

(Source)

You’ve watched brands in a variety of industries revamp their customer-facing operations to improve the consumer’s experience.

You may have even begun investing in improving your brand’s customer experience in a variety of different ways.

But, when it comes down to it, you still aren’t exactly sure if your efforts are paying off for the customer—or for your business.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone: According to a 2018 report from CustomerThink, only 30% of brands report experiencing enhanced differentiation or any other tangible benefit from their CX-related initiatives. Moreover, Oracle reports that only 43% of CX executives are highly confident in their organization’s preparedness and ability to provide an enhanced CX as time goes on.

While there are a number of reasons this is (which we’ll get to), the overarching takeaway is that improving the overall customer experience requires much more from an organization than most realize. In order for a company to make sustainable improvements to its CX—improvements that lead to tangible benefits for the business—a fundamental shift within the organization must occur.

This is where customer experience enablement comes in.

What is Customer Experience Enablement?

Customer experience enablement is an holistic approach to improving CX by making foundational changes to both customer-facing and internal processes within a company. It is worth noting that approach is sometimes known as customer experience management (CXM or CEM). So many acronyms!

Breaking that down a bit more, customer experience enablement (CXE) is all about:

  1. Providing a branded experience that aligns with both the customer’s expectations and the experience the company intended the customer to have
  2. Enabling teams and individual employees within an organization to provide this experience to the customer effectively and efficiently—so that the customer’s experience is equally as efficient throughout their buyer’s journey

As we mentioned above, it’s the second part of our breakdown that organizations often overlook. Unfortunately, this leads said companies into a situation in which they have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done to improve their CX—but are unable to actually put these initiatives into action in ways that benefit both the customer and the business.

That being said, let’s now dig into the key components of customer experience enablement—and why becoming more aligned with these components is essential to the growth of your business.

3 Key Components of Customer Experience Enablement

In the previous section, we broke down customer experience enablement into the customer-facing and internal sides of the same coin.

As you’ll see as you read through the rest of this article, the key components of CXE can touch on either side of this coin—and can sometimes touch on both at the same time, as well.

(If this is a bit confusing, don’t worry: It will start to make sense right away. We promise.)

Without further ado, let’s dig into the three key components of customer experience enablement.

1. Organizational Alignment

In order for an organization to become truly able to enhance the experience they provide their customers, everyone within the organization needs to be on board with the initiative.

Instill Ownership of CX Throughout Your Organization

In some cases, this is pretty obvious. Of course your marketing, sales, and support staff will be involved in CX-related initiatives; they do engage directly with the customer, after all.

In other cases, though, it can be a bit difficult to get certain team members on board. That is, it’s not exactly uncommon for teams that don’t interact with the customer (e.g., accounting, logistics, etc.) to overlook the role they play in the customer experience.

The thing is:

Your team needs to be willing to put in the effort required to improve your CX before they are able to do so. Or, more accurately, if your various teams aren’t willing to work toward improving your brand’s CX, it won’t matter if they’re able to or not: it’s just not going to happen.

Unfortunately, data collected by Adobe shows that a “lack of clear ownership of the customer…holds companies back from a true customer focus,” with nearly half of responding organizations denoting this as a problem.

Furthermore, Kapost’s 2016 B2B Benchmark report found that only 12% of B2B marketers believe that they’re “very effective at delivering a consistent customer experience.”

Only 12% of B2B marketers say they are delivering consistent CX

(Source)

The silver lining of all this is that, if you can instill ownership of the customer throughout your organization, you’ll be a step ahead of half of your competitors.

Communicate the Benefits of CX Ownership

Another area in which generating buy-in is vital to your CX-related initiatives is in proving the value of doing so to your company’s various stakeholders.

At this point, it’s important to frame the benefits of CXE in ways that matter to a specific team or individual. For example, marketing managers will likely care more about engagement metrics, while executives will be focused on revenues and profit margins of the potential initiative. For teams responsible for internal processes, this value likely comes in an ability to be more efficient in their duties, overall.

(Keep this all in mind, as we’ll talk a bit more about it toward the end of this post.)

Enabling Your Teams and Facilitating Ownership

Once you’ve generated buy-in throughout your organization, the next step is enabling all of your teams to actually play a more active role in creating a top-notch experience for your customers.

As CXE specialist Melissa Madian explains in an interview with Vision Critical, CXE is about enabling “revenue-generating and customer-facing teams with the processes, tools and training they need to help close business faster and deliver a superior customer experience.”

While “playing a more active role” can mean different things to different team members (and different organizations), the key to being able to do so is active, intentional, cross-team communication throughout a given organization.

For one thing, this means building avenues of communication between all teams—and breaking down any barriers to communication that may exist within your organization. In a literal sense, this may mean making it easier for your various teams to interact with each other (whether physically or via technology). More symbolically, this means breaking down silos and cutting through any red tape that may hinder communication between certain teams.

Secondly, you’ll need to actively facilitate and systematize internal communication processes (as opposed to just hoping it occurs organically simply because you’ve “enabled it”).

This may mean restructuring processes to include more of your team members as needed—with the focus remaining on the customer experience at all times. Again, even if a certain internal process doesn’t seem to impact CX all that much, your marketing, sales, and support teams might discover otherwise when an internal decision ends up causing chaos for your customers.

Going along with this, another way to facilitate and enhance internal communications is via knowledge management, specifically by making use of knowledge sharing and knowledge transferring systems. Doing so will allow various teams to stay apprised of the goings-on throughout your organization, and can also easily communicate vital information from their department to other teams as necessary.

To reiterate, the goal of this initial step toward customer experience enablement is to get your team members on board with your initiative—and to begin putting structures in place that allow all of your team members to pursue this initiative both individually and as a company.

Bluntly speaking, without this piece of the puzzle in place, it’s nearly impossible to accomplish what we’ll be discussing next.

2. Focus on Customer Intelligence and Other Valuable Data

The second key component of customer experience enablement revolves around the collection, assessment, and analysis of audience-related data.

To be sure, most modern organizations already know that big data plays a huge role in their CX-related initiatives and efforts. According to data collected by MarketingProfs, 40% of marketers say data is “critical to improved decision making,” while 36% say data “drives the ability to provide personalized experiences.”

importance of big data to executing customer centric programs

(Source)

The problem, though, is that most organizations don’t feel fully equipped to actually put the data they collect to good use. Case in point, 61% of CMOs admit to shortcomings when it comes to using big data to make improvements to CX.

While Adobe’s data shows companies are adept at data hygiene-related processes (i.e., ensuring data is accurate and reliable), this is only a part of the equation. It’s in understanding the contextual meaning behind the data that causes issues for most companies. And, when it comes to data relating to the customer experience, context is key.

Collecting Customer Data that Matters

With the above in mind, your first order of business is to focus on uncovering the data that provides the most valuable and accurate insight into your customers’ expectations. This is where Voice of the Customer is huge: it’s all about digging into the specifics of what your customers want from your brand—and minimizing the potential for your customer-facing data to be taken completely out of context in the future.

It’s important to note, here, that customer experience—and, by extension, CXE—refers to all engagements that occur between your organization and your customers, whether pre-, post-, or during a given purchase.

By looking at a specific data point, metric, or piece of customer feedback with the customer’s journey in mind, you’ll add an extra layer of context to the data you collect and analyze. In turn, you’ll be able to tailor their experience with your company even further—making them more likely to stay loyal to your brand for some time to come.

(Again, we’ll get to that momentarily.)

Collecting Internal Data that Matters

Another data-related part of CXE is prioritizing customer-facing info that provides the most value to your company.

Essentially, this means focusing on data that refers to your most valuable and loyal customers, as well as your highest potential prospects. This will enable your team to start making CX-related improvements to get your high-value customers even more engaged with your brand. Needless to say, this will lead to nothing but good things for your business moving forward.

Speaking of making improvements to your customer experience…

3. Improvements to CX that Matter—and Last

Before we get too far into this last section, let’s quickly go over the aspects of CXE we’ve discussed thus far:

Now, to be clear, all of these initiatives are done for one main reason:

To be able to make impactful and lasting improvements to your brand’s processes—in turn enhancing your brand’s overall customer experience.

As we said earlier, these improvements can manifest in any number of ways, such as:

  • Streamlining transactional processes, making it easier for customers to receive the product or service they require quicker and with less downtime
  • Improving onboarding processes, allowing customers to “hit the ground running” with your product or service—and maximizing the value they get out of it, as well
  • Making iterative changes to your product or service based on customer feedback, ensuring your customers continue to receive more and more value from your brand over time

Notice that each hypothetical improvement listed above is tied to a specific target outcome focusing directly on the customer’s experience. At the risk of being redundant, that’s literally the point of customer experience enablement: to enable your team to provide a better experience to your customers.

CXE is also about making sustainable and long-lasting improvements to your processes, ensuring that you’ll be able to provide an enhanced experience to your customers not just once or twice, but from here on out.

This is why it’s essential for CXE to start at the foundational and systemic level of your organization: Skipping this crucial step could cause your team to revert back to the “old way” of doing things—rendering any gains you may have experienced in the meantime moot.

But, with a deep-seeded, evidence-backed understanding of all that goes into enhancing CX, your organization will understand the importance of adopting and integrating new CX-related processes into their daily operations.

While any temporary or superficial improvements made will likely not lead to any long-lasting benefits for your organization, those more systemic and strategic improvements can only lead to great things for your business.

First of all, the more enjoyable and valuable your CX in the eyes of your customer, the higher your customer satisfaction rate will climb. Of course, with this increase in customer satisfaction, you’ll also likely experience a boost in retention, advocacy, and acquisition, as well.

Additionally, as your organization becomes more acclimated with your CXE-related initiatives, your teams will become more proficient and efficient in completing their individual duties. More efficiency means less wasted resources—which, in turn, means more resources on-hand to reinvest into improving your CX even further.

Finally, we’d be remiss if we ignored the fact that effective customer experience enablement leads to massive profits for companies of all sizes.

The more value your customers receive from your brand, and the easier it is for your company to provide this value to them, the more money your company will make as time goes on.

It’s that simple.

Josh BrownAbout the Author: Josh Brown is a Customer Success Engineer and part of the marketing team at Helpjuice. Helpjuice provides easy-to-use knowledge base software that guarantees less support emails and more happy customers.

Learn how Wootric can help you measure and improve customer experience. Book a consultative demo today.

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