Should enterprises build their own customer feedback software? After all, they’ve got the engineering talent and resources to take it on.

If you’ve got the resources to do it, creating such tools can be tempting, but more often than not, these solutions are trouble to build and maintain.

Why Companies Choose to DIY

Forget “to be or not to be”.

For businesses facing software decisions, it comes down to “build vs buy”. It’s always a balance between finding immediate solutions to problems and considering long-term growth.

Here are a couple of the tempting advantages of building software solutions for yourself:

• “Anyway you want it, that’s the way you need it” – Journey

When you build something for yourself, it will solve all of your problems in exactly the way you wish. The dashboard will look exactly how you want it to look. The functions will pull from exactly the data you want it to pull from. If your business has specialized needs, a custom solution is functionally ideal.

• Guaranteed compatibility with everything you already use

Your company has a suite of software that it’s already using. When the data in one software can’t be read by your system of record, people end up typing notes in manually, or other time-consuming methods to get important information recorded for everyone else in the organization. Building software for yourself means you can guarantee compatibility with everything you already use, and if you think ahead enough, compatibility with software you intend to acquire.

Unfortunately, these benefits will only bring value if you can spread out the significant cost of building custom software (time, energy, and resources) over a large number of clients and your engineers’ time isn’t better spent on other projects. Let’s face it, a customer feedback solution for Customer Success/ Customer Support is unlikely to be a priority for your product team.

Building your own software is expensive and getting a high enough ROI on this kind of project is difficult. Add in the ongoing costs associated with maintaining what you’ve built and buying a solution becomes very appealing.

Why You Should Buy Customer Feedback Software

Besides being incredibly labor and resource intensive, trying to build a solution requires months and months of brainstorming, planning, and coding. If the in-house solution isn’t properly and thoroughly planned out, with input from multiple functional teams, this can actually create more headaches and manual processes in the long term. Even worse, if the tool does not add value to the employees that it was built for, it could go unused.

When it comes to surveying your customer base, experts have already thought out a vast number of details, building standard settings and customizable options based on best practices. There is a reason why customer feedback is a whole industry, and that is because rigorous methodology is paramount to actionable insight.

Customer feedback software creators like Wootric have developed and iterated a variety of features to make starting and running a robust feedback program convenient and valuable. These tools automate gathering feedback and surfacing insight, which can be sent out for action. Buying customer feedback software gets both immediate and long-term value out of a customer feedback program:

Automated Sampling

If you’ve ever gone through the trouble of listing out, segmenting, and randomly sampling your users/customers, you know how tedious this task can be.

Multi-channel survey solutions – that reach your customers via email, in web products, and via text – help you automatically survey the appropriate random sample to capture different segments of your customer base. You can get feedback from both decision-makers who do not log-in to the platform very often via email surveys, and feedback from daily end-users via in-app surveys.

Wootric’s standard settings allow you to survey your customers with two different methods. You can keep the flow of feedback constant and random, avoiding various biases that may sneak in if you are not aware of them. This method gives you a daily pulse of feedback, usually Net Promoter Score (NPS), which provides a good sense of user sentiment on any given day, and can show you trends over time.

You can also send surveys based on completion of different events. For example, you may want to send out a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey after a support ticket is closed, or trigger a Customer Effort Score (CES) survey after a customer completes onboarding. Implementing these three micro-surveys at various customer journey touchpoints will get you a holistic “Trifecta view” of your accounts.

With both of these methods, you have the power to change the time frame dictating eligibility to take a survey and what percentage of users/visitors we sample, including the option to survey less than 1% of the customer base, if necessary.

Automated Safe Guard: Intelligent Throttle

It’s always important to have safety features. Customers are already inundated with information every day. You don’t want to add to that annoyance by sending the same survey to them over and over again in a short period of time.

Avoiding survey fatigue requires having separate controls for a slew of different situations that enterprise feedback software companies have thought out and prepared for. These include control over how often any individual will see a survey and how often individuals can respond to the same question.

For example, after one of your customers takes an in-app survey, that customer will not be shown another survey for another 90 days. You can change the number of days between surveys to suit your needs. You also have control over the number of days between surveys for people who decline your surveys.

All of these settings can be manipulated for each of the survey delivery channels that Wootric provides, as well as for each type of survey (i.e. NPS, CSAT, or CES) you choose to send. For Voice of the Customer programs using multiple delivery channels, Wootric has cross-channel safety features so customers don’t feel overwhelmed by your surveys popping up everywhere they turn.

If you decide to base your surveys off a triggering event, our survey throttle prevents customers from being bombarded with the same satisfaction survey in a short amount of time. While it is standard to have this throttle on, this can be overridden if you want every single triggering incident to fire off a new survey.

Auto-tagging and Segmentation for Insight

A Voice of the Customer feedback program doesn’t stop at just gathering feedback. The key to success is in the insight and action that happens after you’ve gathered customer feedback. If your engineers build a way to gather feedback but that data ends up sitting in a silo, unorganized, then you will never realize any value.

Tagging and segmentation features in enterprise customer feedback solutions aim to make sorting and analyzing survey responses easy and insightful.

Different customer segments will have different needs and therefore different feedback. The segmentation feature in software platforms like Wootric enables you to analyze customer experience KPIs like Net Promoter Score by customer properties. You can pass various properties, like geographic region, or persona, to drill down to specific segments and understand what’s important to your different types of customers.

Tagging is an incredibly powerful tool when it comes to dealing with qualitative feedback. Frequency analysis lifts trending topics out of customer comments, and various teams can find relevant feedback with a single click. 

For example, a product team can view all comments under a feature request tag and prioritize the most frequently requested ones from the highest-value customers.

Tagging can be done manually for companies receiving smaller quantities of responses. For companies overwhelmed with feedback, expertly built tools like Wootric can save you time and effort.

Check out our guide to auto-tagging for more benefits and ideas on how to start.

Integrations & Webhooks: Break Down Data Silos & Trigger Workflows

With native integrations and webhooks, you can achieve some of the same benefits of building your own software, i.e. automated workflows among platforms and a consolidated overview of important account information.

Switching back and forth between platforms disrupts workflow. With that in mind, Wootric has built a host of native integrations such as Slack, Salesforce, Gainsight, and Hubspot, to get customer feedback into the hands of those who can act on it like Customer Success, Product, Marketing & Sales. For other apps, Wootric can connect via incoming and outbound webhooks or Zapier.

This means you can push Wootric’s data out onto the platform of your choosing, and Wootric can listen for instructions to fire a survey based on events from whatever app you choose. The possibilities for data exchange are endless. Best of all, this sharing happens in real-time, so your information will always be up-to-date.

Spend Your Time Acting on Insight Immediately

When it comes to build versus buy, there is great peace of mind that comes with buying an enterprise feedback management platform. You’ll have experts guide you through the set-up, listening to your company’s specific needs. You can get started immediately, reaping the rewards of a stellar customer feedback program now, including higher customer retention, happiness, and company growth.

“Soft skills” have traditionally been undervalued, and that’s slow to change. But more companies are realizing their worth. And even if the skills themselves are difficult to quantify (how much more likeable is Job Applicant A than Job Applicant B?), their effects aren’t.

The soft skills CX professionals possess directly affect metrics like:

• Net promoter scores
• Customer satisfaction scores
• Customer effort scores
• Qualitative survey feedback on customer support interactions
• Qualitative data gleaned from online customer reviews
• Number of referrals and recommendations

Human-to-human interactions can make or break those scores, generate referrals or cancellations, and either fuel word-of-mouth growth or silence it.

But before you break out your old copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (a classic for a reason), I’d like to talk about why I’m reading more articles now on “soft skills” as they apply to customer service, customer success, and customer experience.

Because we need them more now than ever.

“So let’s uncomfortably call them real skills instead.

Real because they work, because they’re at the heart of what we need to today.

Real because even if you’ve got the vocational skills, you’re no help to us without these human skills, the things that we can’t write down, or program a computer to do.”

– Seth Godin, Let’s stop calling them ‘soft skills’, Medium

What Exactly Are Soft Skills?

Often referred to as “people skills,” ‘soft skills’ don’t have a hard definition. In fact, they’re remarkably hard to pin down.

If you try to define these skills with a list of what they entail, you’ll run into trouble. Everyone has their own set.

Some argue that part of the definition of ‘soft skills’ is that they are something you’re born with. But others, including Seth Godin, say that’s “crazy because infants aren’t good at any of the soft skills. Of course, we learn them.”

(When was the last time you met a baby with a good work ethic?)

Seth Godin calls for five categories of ‘soft’ skills: Self Control, Productivity, Wisdom, Perception, and Influence.

Others cite the ability to listen, accept feedback, and communicate effectively. Or qualities like charisma, empathy, friendliness, patience, and reliability. Problem-solving skills get thrown into the mix with teamwork and attentiveness.

I like this exhaustive list from the balance which offers 6 categories of soft skills with sub-lists of specific skills under each. Their categories are:

1. Communication skills
2. Critical thinking
3. Leadership
4. Positive attitude
5. Teamwork
6. Work ethic

But even those don’t make it into “The Five Soft Skills Recruiters Want Most” that made it into the eponymous Fast Company article. Those were: Problem solving, adaptability, time management, organization and oral communication.

In 2013, Google tested its hiring hypothesis that prioritized top grades from elite universities in STEM subjects. They found that, in practice, the eight most important qualities of Google’s top managers were:

1. Ability to be a good coach.
2. Willingness to empower, rather than micromanage.
3. Taking an interest in people’s success and well-being.
4. Ability to be productive and results-oriented.
5. Communication and listening skills.
6. Willingness to help employees develop their careers.
7. Holding a clear vision and developing a strategy for the team.
8. Possessing key technical skills that allow the manager to advise the team.

Technical skills came in dead last. The rest were ‘soft skills.’

For our purposes, I’d like to simplify the definition of these skills and stop calling them “soft” – period. Let’s call them “people skills.”

People skills are what you need to relate to people, be understood, and be liked. Likeability is one word that encompasses myriad characteristics, including charisma, reliability, empathy, and willingness to take a stab at solving problems. Above all, we’re talking about genuinely caring about people.

If you get that one thing right – you’ve already got the core soft skills you need.

Relationships Can Make Or Break a Business

Businesses are rising and falling based on the quality of their relationships with their customers – and employees.

For subscription-based services in general, and SaaS in particular, success metrics like retention, customer lifetime value and cost-to-acquire are all correlated with how well businesses relate to, and engage with, their customers.

These are people skills.

And as artificial intelligence is taking over so many of the human-to-human interactions businesses have traditionally had with their customers, the human interactions that do happen are coming under more scrutiny.

In Top Customer Service Trends for 2018 by Kate Leggett, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, Kate points out the repercussions of increasing AI and self-service in customer service.

“With customers increasingly using self-service, there are fewer opportunities for engagement with agents who can lend a human touch.”

That means three things: Those fewer opportunities are under more pressure to produce positive results, human-to-human interactions will be reserved for bigger problems that AI can’t handle, and those complex issues will require both accurate diagnoses and empathy.

“These organizations will focus on the quality of interactions as measured by customer retention and lifetime value. Agents will need to be more highly skilled and better compensated. Old management principles that focused on efficiency must be relaxed. Ultimately, technologies such as quality monitoring should be replaced by customer feedback.”

As companies race to differentiate themselves based on customer experience, these interactions become vitally important.

“Forget about your company’s historical point of differentiation. Customer Experience reigns supreme today and you will either be rewarded or punished for how you are treating your customers.”

– Bill Carmody, founder & CEO of Trepoint, “Customer Experience is Your ONLY Differentiator. You’re About To Be Rewarded or Punished”, Inc.

With hundreds of “soft skills” listed, it might seem like a lifetime’s worth of study for anyone who isn’t confident in their natural gifts of gab. Yes, you can learn people skills. You can certainly improve them. And to really make an impact on CX, you and your customer support or customer success team may have to. So let’s concentrate on the skills that make the most impact.

The 10 People Skills You Need Most for CX

1. A genuine willingness to help – Not only does a genuine willingness to help make customer support agents shine and customer success managers effective, this instinct to solve problems and make positive impacts bleeds into other areas as well. For example, a customer success agent who becomes aware of a problem through customer feedback can patch the issue – or the agent can investigate the problem and actively work with other teams to bridge that success gap for everyone, strengthening the product or service and the company as a whole.
2. Empathy – Customer support professionals are often trained to “show empathy” by repeating phrases that come off as insincere at best: “I understand that this can be frustrating.” Empathy phrases can be incredible tools (this is a very good list), but only when used with discretion (so it doesn’t sound like you’re reading off of a card). But empathy is about more than the words you use. It’s the desire to really understand where someone else is coming from and what they need to thrive. That’s Customer Success 101, right there: Taking the time to learn about your customer’s business and challenges so you can understand your product from their perspective.
3. Communication – Communication skills, the ability to listen carefully, explain clearly and treat kindly are must-haves in the People Skills toolkit, but there’s another type of communication customer service and success teams should have: Cross-communication. You’re at the nexus between your customers and your business which puts you in a unique position to gather data customer sentiment, use, and engagement that everyone else in your business needs. Make sure they get that info.
4. Emotional Intelligence – Connected to empathy in that you’re aware of other people’s emotions, Emotional Intelligence also means you’re aware of your own. It’s self and social awareness of mood, emotional strengths and weaknesses, and potential underlying motivations behind behavior. In practice, this means knowing when to praise team members and how to constructively criticize. With customers, often it’s about understanding how your actions and responses can positively affect their moods to create memorable experiences.
5. Integrity – Managing expectations by honestly telling customers what they can and can’t expect builds a tremendous amount of trust and sets customers up to have positive experiences when businesses don’t overpromise. Being able to set expectations also builds trust with internal teams.
6. Problem-Solving – The best problem-solvers are the ones who jump in as soon as they see a rough patch arise and have enough confidence to figure it out if a solution doesn’t immediately present itself. Really, it’s all in the attitude. You don’t have to know the answer to everything to help. You just have to be willing to figure out the answer that’s needed.
7. Stress Management – Dealing with people, even lovely coworkers and customers – is inherently stressful to most humans. The ability to manage that stress and not take it out on those around you is one of the best ‘People Skills’ you can cultivate. One bad day can lose a lot of clients when you think in terms of not just the client you’re speaking to, but all of the future clients they can bring in with recommendations.
8. Listening Skills – This is one everyone in the company, from the Founder on down, needs to have, because listening to your customers effectively, focusing on their needs and desires (instead of your needs), is how great products and companies are built. More than that, though, is the willingness to listen internally as well – to people from different departments who often have valuable insights to add.
9. Leadership – Once you uncover a good idea or customer feedback that requires action, it’s a real skill to be able to inspire others to follow your lead (especially if those others are above you). This becomes easier when you work from the mentality that your role is to make those you lead wildly successful. Everyone wants to follow a leader who gives them what they need to do their best work and get the best results.
10. Team Building – Team building across departments brings leadership to a whole new level. Reaching out and forming relationships with people in other departments is something anyone can initiate. And when you approach your co-workers with an open willingness to help and collaborate, you won’t get turned down.

What “soft skills” – or People Skills – do you see the most need for in CX?

In Customer Success, communication with accounts can make or break the job. Upping your skills—and having the right tools to make the back and forth efficient—can help you win customers for life.  

Wootric has gathered some tips and tools to help you communicate with your customers at scale.

In the first part of this three-part series, we gave you tips and tools to help with time management. Use the time you saved to improve your customer relationships and communication processes.

Communicating with Customers

Tips:

• Nail down specific measurable criteria/objectives in onboarding

When you start building a relationship with the client, the most important part of ensuring client success is establishing what success means to them. Oftentimes, clients come to you with large, lofty, general goals like “improve customer experience”. Create SMART goals with your customers during onboarding and establish a baseline so that you can prove to them, objectively, that your company is delivering value.

“You can focus on adoption, retention, expansion, or advocacy; or you can focus on the customers’ Desired Outcome and get all of those things.” Lincoln Murphy, co-author of Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue

• Master telling a client “no” with grace

Nobody likes to hear “no”, not toddlers, not teenagers, and especially not adults. When you are dealing with customers, you will inevitably run into requests that you cannot and should not fulfill. It’s an unpleasant part of the job.

You can deal with this situation in a multitude of ways, and prior experience with your customer can guide you to the best method. It might be suggesting the closest alternative, or it might be providing a detailed explanation. Regardless of how you choose to tell them no, it is key to maintain your relationship with them, and maintain your position on their team, as their advocate, the whole time.

• Listen for the “silently churning”

All too often CSMs default to listening to the clients who shout the loudest. This is a natural human response, but leaves you vulnerable to neglecting your clients who are less vocal. Just because someone isn’t complaining to you in an email or over the phone, doesn’t mean they’ll renew when the contract is up.

Maintain a pulse on your client portfolio with the help of metrics like NPS, CES, and CSAT. Surveying customers after interactions and a couple times a year will provide invaluable insight into the health of your accounts. Survey feedback and analysis helps focus on the “silently churning”, the customers who are simply disengaging instead of yelling, and helps to narrow down what actually drives their lack of enthusiasm.

Tools:

Boomerang:

Boomerang is a free email extension that lets you schedule emails to be sent, remind yourself if you don’t hear back, and take messages out of your inbox until you actually need them. Boomerang will archive your message, then bring it back to your inbox at a time you choose, marked unread, starred or at the top of your message list. You can use Boomerang as an automation tool for following up or checking in with clients, especially when you don’t hear back from them.

Text expansion apps like Text Expander:

Text expansion applications use a few basic mechanisms to make typing faster. Abbreviate blocks of text that you use often and the app will replace it with the full block of text that you assign to the abbreviation. For example, you could have the app insert “Customer Success Manager” everytime you type “csm”.

Grammarly:

Grammarly uses AI to detect grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice, and style mistakes in your writing, offering you alternatives in real-time. Grammarly has recently been detecting micro-aggression and intent in emails, offering alternatives to help maintain professional relationships. It can also offer vocabulary enhancement suggestions for people using English as a second or third language.

Note: if you regularly use the Google suite of software, like Documents or Slides, you’ll have to stick with their autocorrect algorithms or take the extra step to upload documents into Grammarly’s own dashboard for corrections.

Doodle:

Doodle is a straightforward scheduler that helps you coordinate a time for meetings. You suggest a few dates and times for your participants. Doodle then creates a polling calendar that can be sent to them for feedback. As each person selects the dates and times they are free, Doodle aggregates the responses to tell you which option works best for everyone.

Calendly:

Calendly is also a scheduler that helps you schedule meetings without the back-and-forth emails. It has many more integrations and features than Doodle, which means it takes more getting used to, but is much more robust. Calendly takes time zones into account for each invitee and even allows you to request payments via Paypal and Stripe.