Our Machine Learning Journey: From Zero to Customer Value in 12 months

PART 1

At Wootric we collect hundreds of thousands of NPS, CSAT and CES  survey responses every week. We do this across different industries and product categories. Our customers then use our various integrations such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Slack to route this feedback to relevant teams. Some of these customers like DocuSign and Grubhub have huge user base. This means even with a conservative sampling strategy they get hundreds of pieces of feedback daily.

The Challenge of Analyzing Qualitative Feedback

The quantitative aspects of feedback — NPS, CSAT scores, for example — are relatively easy to aggregate and analyze. It is the qualitative comments that provide rich insight into customer experience, but analysis of unstructured feedback is hard. Someone could read each piece of feedback one by one, but having a human read each comment obviously does not scale. If you can’t or don’t review what customers are telling you, then why have CX program to begin with? This is where machine learning saves the day.

Here is a concrete example of problem we needed to solve:
CXI-classification of customer feedback using ML

We set out to solve this multi-label classification and  topic sentiment analysis problem for our customers. We knew that doing it at scale would require some sort of automation using machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP).  Machine learning requires lots of training data — in our case it meant we needed thousands of survey responses manually labeled into different categories. Luckily our customers have had the ability to manually categorize survey responses in our dashboard.  In the last 3+ years, they have categorized thousands and thousands of comments. Fortuitous, but sometimes we would like to think we saw it coming. 😉 At this point, we have significant volume of training data, now we just needed to find the right machine learning algorithms to take a stab at the problem.

Sentiment Analysis

To get our feet wet in machine learning ecosystem, we thought we would start with sentiment analysis because there has been tons of research on this problem over last few years and there are several open source solutions claiming to solve this. We started with Stanford NLP library because it was and is still actively worked on and lots of great research papers have come out of this group. It took us about a week to get our heads around concepts of Tokenization, Lemmatization, Named Entity Recognition (NER), PoS tagging, Dependency parsing, Coreference Resolution, word embeddings and finally to embed the library into a REST API framework. The results were okay but not great for our use case.  We **think** it’s because feedback comments belong to different domain — these are responses to questions as opposed to news article, blogs and tweets. Most of feedback is short, ranging from a couple of words to couple of sentences. This does not give enough “context” for algorithms to find the sentiment. An alternative solution would have been to train our own model using Stanford NLP library but we did not have engineering resources and bandwidth at that point in time. But we had something working. It was a baby step, but a step in the right direction.

Categorizing Feedback Comments

For feedback categorization, we also first looked into a hosted service and open source libraries. The most compelling, trainable and easy to get started solution at that point in time (mid 2016) was Google Cloud Prediction API where you upload a CSV of training data and in few minutes you get a model and REST API to make a prediction. This sounded like a tailor-made solution for us. After all, we had lots of training data that our customers had manually labeled. We were able to quickly format our responses and training labels in order to meet the Prediction API requirements, and saw some initial results.

Results were better for some sets of feedback but horrible for other sets. Dissecting further we realized that the customer feedback set where prediction was more accurate belonged to DevOps, Data Analytics and similar developer centric and data analytics.  There was less success with feedback from e-commerce or other consumer-centric SaaS products. This made sense because most of our customers who spent their time manually labeling feedback had offerings catered to developers — such as New Relic, Docker etc. The bigger downside of Prediction API was that it was a black box so we did not have any ability to tune algorithms. Ironically, Google decided to deprecate Prediction API in favor of their Cloud ML Engine, driving us to improve our internal, customizable prediction methods instead.

Our experiments with Stanford NLP libraries and Google Prediction API gave us a good understanding of the complexity of problem we were tackling, provided more awareness of the ML ecosystem — people and research labs to follow, research papers to read — and finally helped us better understand the nuances of building machine learning models. It’s not as simple as having some training data, copy pasting some code from open source libraries and voila you have a ML solution. There are lots of hype and noise around what ML can do and how to go about doing it right.

At this point, we concluded that there was no shortcut and that we had to invest time focusing on high quality training data, going through various research papers, trying the algorithms in research papers using our training data and have nobs ( i.e. hyperparameters) tuned for our use case.

Delivering insights to customers

In April 2018, after six months in beta, we launched v1 of our product CXInsight™. The platform enables our customers to import and analyze customer feedback from any source. To date, we have analyzed 200,000+ comments pertaining to a wide spectrum of product categories and types of feedback — PaaS, SaaS, E-commerce, Mobile App reviews, employee reviews, social media, etc.

Of note, most of the data we’ve analyzed so far was originally collected using our competitors’ survey platforms. This is sweet validation of our goal: Regardless of how and where you collect customer feedback, Wootric gives you the best analysis.   

In our next series of blog articles, we will talk about how we have used and are using:

  • Bag of Words with Naive Bayes and SGD Classifier (Part II)
  • word2vec with PCA, Logistic Regression, SVM and SGD Classifier
  • Bidirectional LSTM
  • CNN
  • Custom word embeddings
  • Productizing — DevOps around ML
  • UX and UI
  • Online learning and Human in the loop

Our goal has never been to build a generic text categorization tool. Rather, our focus is to build the best customer feedback analysis platform. We are also aware that our system is never going to be 100% correct so we have made it easy for our customers and our own team to be human in the loop.

I would be remiss not to thank Stanford NLP, Richard Socher, Lukas Biewald, Sebastian Ruder , Google ML research whose research papers, blogs, tutorials, videos and guidance have directly or indirectly helped us build CXInsight product.

Please stay tuned to our Engineering Blog for next series of articles on this topic.  The Hacker News discussion is here.

Build vs Buy Customer Feedback Software: Making the Best Decision for a Survey Tool

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 off of best practices. There is a reason why customer feedback is a whole industry, and that is because rigorous methodology is paramount to actionable insight.

Get the ebook, The Net Promoter Score Software Buyer’s Guide.

8 essential questions to find the perfect technology for your organization

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.

Sampling Page

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.

insight with tagging & segmentation

Different customer segments will have different needs and therefore different feedback. The segmentation feature in software platforms like Wootric enables you to analyze CX metrics 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.

Learn all about use cases for connecting platforms with webhooks here.

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.

Customer Success Analyst: When to Hire Someone Dedicated to the Data

The Customer Success Analyst has evolved to be the go-to person for all the data – or as Marketo put it in their Linkedin job ad, “the primary deliverable of the Customer Success Decision Analyst is to convert our Customer Success operation at Marketo into a highly data-driven business where we can measure, analyze and optimize every aspect of our engagement with our customers.”

This includes data like:

  • Feature usage patterns
  • Maturity scores
  • NPS results
  • Voice of customer qualitative feedback
  • Customer journey mapping
  • Customer experience metrics
  • Capacity models

Among all of the hats that CSM’s wear, the number-crunching, data-heavy, quantitative analyst hat is one of the most time-consuming. But because of the data-savviness this role demands, CS analysts also hold the keys to unlocking incredible potential when your business is scaling up.

The CS analyst role isn’t *just* about collecting data for dashboards and reports (and basing recommendations on that data) though. It complements the Success Operations role, which builds new tools and processes to scale CSM’s everyday activities. As the person navigating multiple platforms for data on a day-to-day business, CS Analysts know how information flows and who needs what information.

For one of Wootric’s customers, Chorus.ai, CS Analysts also take ownership of the technical onboarding process for new or upgrading customers, ensuring “a smooth implementation, including initial and ongoing training for customers.”

It’s a prime position from which to watch for opportunities to make big impacts on the success of customers – and the success of the company. That’s the subtextual expectation: By being in charge of the data, the CS Analyst knows how to use it to find untapped value.

What does a CS Analyst need to know?

Experience working with large amounts of data (SQL, Python or R) and with survey and analysis tools (Wootric, Tableau, etc.) are must-haves, but the most important qualification is having taken that data and used it to produce actionable insights.

Analysts are data story-tellers. They work with the numbers and provide context for them, creating reports to recommend strategic options and solutions. A listing for a CS Analyst position at Salesforce described one of the responsibilities as “assist in developing and delivering presentations for senior executives”, which requires strong public speaking and presentation skills.

If a company struggles with data silos, CS Analysts must bridge the gap between teams. Not only must analysts overcome the technical issues of compatibility, but they need to possess strong internal communication skills to overcome any organizational walls that may be contributing to the data isolation.

While CS Analysts own the quantitative facet of Success, a customer-centric mindset and empathy for the humans behind the numbers distinguish a great analyst from a good one. These soft skills help analysts frame their analysis to produce long-term, customer-centric solutions that support CSMs to retain customers.

What does this role look like in real life?

For some companies, the CS Analyst position can be a foot-in-the-door to Customer Success.

Anthony Enrico, VP of Customer Success at Emailage, created the Analyst position because his “CSMs were being asked to spend enormous amounts of time compiling reports and the opportunity cost of spending time deepening relationships and loyalty with customers was too great.” As a leader within the organization, Anthony was also doing a lot of work with these reports, when his time was clearly better spent working on strategy, escalations with his CSMs, and focusing on new business opportunities with the company.

So Anthony hired Bryan Mehrmann, now a CSM at Emailage. Bryan was originally brought on as the first CS Analyst to support the CSM team. Bryan compiled and sent out daily reports on customer usage trends to identify and correct anomalies as early as possible. He took detailed revenue projection reports and distilled them for the C-suite for their weekly use. Bryan took on more responsibilities as time went on.

Working together, Anthony and Bryan shaped the role as it is today. As for how the position fits into the CS team, Analysts can be promoted to full CSMs after they’ve achieved a comprehensive understanding of the product, metric drivers, and relationships with Emailage’s customers.

On the other hand, CSMs may choose to specialize in VoC data analysis like Customer Success Analyst Tim Dressel at Qualer. For him, there’s the usual collection and analysis of customer data in spreadsheets, but also a lot of room for innovation and collaboration. If he sees a red flag in the metrics, he leads investigations into those customer issues, working with his cross-functional team (and collaborating, at times, with Qualer’s Head of Technology) to make sure customers’ needs make it into the software they develop.

How do you know if you need a Customer Success Analyst on your team?

Customer Success Managers are often being pulled in five different directions at once, and when that happens, they sacrifice time on one task for another. Not only does Customer Success provides data and insight crucial to their own day-to-day, but they are the go-to team for reports for the C-suite.

Customer Success needs data. Data is at its core. So if your Customer Success team doesn’t have time to live and breathe data, you may be at the tipping point to bring in an analyst who can parse the numbers for you. This is especially important for scaling processes when anecdotal experiences have to give way to metrics.

For some companies, bringing on an Analyst to Customer Success may happen by incorporating a company-wide business analyst into the team and transitioning them into a full-time Success Analyst. Depending on the company, Customer Success may not need an Analyst until their team is four or five CSMs.

The most common theme among companies looking to hire a CS Analyst is major growth.

For example, a Wootric customer that recently started trading publicly, DocuSign, decided to add the Customer Success Analyst position as they accelerated their growth.

Analysts (& their data) are a CSM’s best friend

For Customer Success, the best way to prove value, whether it’s to senior management or to a customer, is with numbers and context. Having a role dedicated to creating robust reports to highlight value and propose inventive, data-backed solutions is an excellent way to help your current CSMs be the best that they can be at scale.

Automatically send customer feedback to Salesforce, Gainsight and Slack for quick action. Learn about InMoment’s integrations.

VIDEO: 3 Ways Machine Learning Will Transform Your VoC Strategy

Jessica Pfeifer, co-founder and Chief Customer Officer at Wootric, spoke at Totango’s Customer Success Summit on March 6, 2018 about how the Customer Experience landscape is evolving and how companies need to adapt to the rapid changes with the help of machine learning.

Her talk covers the ways customers are changing, how companies can fail to recognize these changes, and how machine learning empowers companies to adapt quickly to the new customer mindset.

Machine learning makes it easy to break down customer feedback data silos within organizations, giving Customer Experience champions a holistic view of the Voice of the Customer and a competitive advantage on companies that do not take advantage of new VoC technologies.

Learn more about getting insight from qualitative data with InMoment CXInsight™.

Customer Success Operations Manager: Does Your Team Need One?

Customer Success teams are expanding – not just in size, but in scope. New roles are emerging as CS is maturing as a specialty, specifically roles like Customer Success Operations (CS Ops).

At early-stage startups, Customer Success Managers will find themselves covering this function, but as the company grows, it can be extremely valuable to separate this function into a dedicated role within CS to help scale up.

What does a Success Operations Manager do?

Think of “Success Operations” as a product that promises to optimize processes for its customers, i.e. the Customer Success Managers.

CS Ops managers establish a baseline of productivity using metrics like net MMR churn and how difficult it is to learn about new product features. They talk to CSMs to learn what pain points they face in their day-to-day responsibilities and observe how processes currently work.

They segment the current customer base to distribute the workload effectively among CSMs. CS Ops managers look for consistent issues across the whole Success team, break the issues down into manageable components, and create solutions with measurable results.

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” – Peter F. Drucker

Using the information they’ve gathered, CS Ops managers may build tools like custom dashboards, or establish automatic workflows among software platforms to make the CSM’s job easier and help them be more productive.

A CS Ops manager will “onboard” CSMs, teaching them how to use the new tools at their disposal, and check in frequently with their “customers”. In this sense, they are CSMs to the CSMs.

In short, Customer Success Operations managers are responsible for providing tactical support to the rest of the Success team, helping them improve their KPIs and their efficiency.

What does a CS Operations Manager need to know?

Customer Success Operations Managers should be familiar with:

  • Customer Relationship Management Software (e.g. Salesforce, Gainsight, Totango)
  • In-app messaging Software (e.g. Intercom)
  • Support platforms (e.g. Zendesk, FreshService)
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Customer Success

Each company will have a unique suite of different platforms that it uses, and CS Ops managers need to be quick to become fluent in most, if not all of them. This is crucial for the role since data silos are a major hindrance to organizational efficiency and detract from your customers’ experience.

Additionally, Success Operations Managers will need many of the same ‘soft skills’ that CSMs use. For example, CS Ops managers need to be able to actively listen to the struggles of the CSMs to come up with valuable solutions.

What does this role look like in real life?

For Feedvisor Customer Success Operations Manager Shachar Avrahami, he came into the company as the first “Professional Services team member.” As the team grew from a one-man operation to a multi-person team (and the company scaled up), Shachar’s manager asked him to create his own role – Customer Success Operations Manager, “and I became the first person to assume this new position and help define it.”

He says, “I am the owner of our team’s processes on a macro level, making sure all teams are aligned with the strategy for each part of the customer’s journey.”

How do you know if you need a Success Operations Manager?

Giving a concrete number at which you need to hire a CS Ops manager is difficult. It depends on the capacity of your current CSM team. As a rule of thumb, you will want to look into hiring a Success Operations manager after you’ve hired your fourth or fifth CSM.

For some organizations, the new role may be an internal promotion of a CSM. For other companies, it may be wise to bring in an individual with experience in a ‘project manager’-like position to help streamline Customer Success processes, aligning everyone under the common vision that is handed down from the C-suite and creating a more consistent experience for customers.

Like Robert S. Kaplan, co-creator of The Balanced Scorecard, says, “consistent alignment of capabilities and internal processes with the customer value proposition is the core of any strategy execution.”

How do you advocate for a CS Operations Manager role?

Understand that a CS Operations Manager’s responsibilities are nearly the same as those of a Sales Operations Manager. The justifications for the CS Ops role are similar.

The operations role increases the productivity of your customer-facing Success team members, who carry the weight of recurring revenue on their shoulders. Not only does this mean management can hire fewer individuals for the customer-facing roles, but each CSM’s key performance indicators will improve at rates that were impossible before this specialized role.

Having a CS Ops role also improves visibility into the Success team’s business outcomes, places for improvement, and what projects need to be prioritized for Customer Success.

For an excellent breakdown and comparison of the Sales and CS Ops positions, click here.

Operations For Smooth Scaling

There will always be growing pains as a start-up matures and finds success. Operations experts specialize in finding technical solutions for when people are stretched beyond their limits. Creating a Customer Success Operations position is an effective way to proactively combat capacity issues for the Success team and deliver a consistently positive experience for your customers.

Access Voice of the Customer insight in your system of record with InMoment’s native integrations, including Salesforce, Gainsight, & Totango.

Soft Skills are Real Skills – In CX, You Need These 10

“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?

Be the customer experience champion at your company. Sign up today for free Net Promoter Score, CSAT or Customer Effort Score feedback with InMoment.

Automatically Analyze Qualitative Customer Feedback with Auto-tagging

Customer experience professionals live in a world overflowing with data. Sitting on that wealth of information is frustrating when you know it has incredible potential.

If you are tracking CX metrics, like NPS or CSAT, the numbers help you quantify customer loyalty and satisfaction. But it’s the customer comments that come with those surveys, all of that rich qualitative data, that give you invaluable context for why customers feel the way they do.

Until now, it’s been difficult to analyze qualitative data because it is so unstructured.

This is where tagging comes in.

Using software to analyze qualitative data

Modern customer feedback software comes with the ability to tag customer comments. Tagging feedback has two functional goals: Routing and Insight.

Routing:

Creating a tag for specific stakeholders, e.g. “product”, quickly sorts feedback to be routed to the correct teams for follow-up. Product teams can simply click a button to see verbatim comments regarding feature requests and support teams can be more proactive by checking for comments under a “bug” tag.

Insight:

Tagging comments by relation to product, website, or customer experience helps themes emerge. For example, you may see that most of your detractors are tagged with “shipping” or “price”. This will help you prioritize and address issues in real-time.

Tagging comments manually doesn’t scale, however.

If you are receiving less than 100 comments a month, manually tagging comments can work. But customer comments can pile up just like emails in your inbox. Constant monitoring results in little else getting done. When you find yourself drowning in responses, CX feedback can feel overwhelming — just like your inbox.

This is where using software to auto-tag customer comments saves the day.

Auto-tagging gives you real-time categorization of large quantities text feedback

Auto-tagging automatically sorts qualitative comments for you using AI-powered text analysis, and it happens in real-time. This helps you surface themes and see trends that the human brain has trouble processing on its own.

For example, you may find that pricing issues are mentioned in 80% of your detractor comments in the past couple months, or a new feature is mentioned in 65% of your promoter comments since it launched.

Auto-tagging serves as a dynamic tool to quickly sort massive amounts of feedback for routing to the appropriate teams for insight and immediate follow-up.

We’ve provided the first steps and some suggestions to start auto-tagging in real-time.

Using machine learning to auto-tag

When you’re drowning in feedback, we recommend using natural language processing to auto-categorize feedback. Customer feedback software, like Wootric, can tag and surface themes in your feedback based on what’s important in your industry.

Automatic text classification is the ultimate time saver when it comes to comment feedback. While this isn’t a necessary step, for large amounts of feedback, it is an incredibly powerful tool for true automation in your tagging system.

How to set up text-match Auto-tags

The time you save by setting up an auto-tagging system can be spent taking action based on the insight lifted out of your survey feedback.

If you aren’t using machine learning software, here are the steps to take in planning your text-match auto-tagging system and some suggestions to get you started.

First, Some Questions to Ask Yourself

When you start to tag your feedback, read every comment you receive in a period of time, perhaps a week or a month, and consider the following:

  • What topics/features/issues stand out in your comments?

For example, you may see that many of your customers talk about your Support team’s response time, or the value your product/service has brought to them. These general themes will serve as jumping off points for brainstorming tags and keywords.

  • Is there industry or business specific vocabulary or jargon that you might want to track?

For SaaS companies, you may want to include terms like “dashboard”, “widget”, or “in-app” as tags or as text-match keywords. Oftentimes, these terms will be abbreviated, like UI for “user interface”. 

You can even choose to create tags for team members to alert them whenever they are mentioned by name. This might be helpful for a customer support agent who wants to see what customers are saying about their interactions.

As you read through your sample of comments, make a note of the words and phrases you spot customers using. They may be using different terms than the language you and your colleagues use as professionals in your industry.

  • Which teams will you be sending customer feedback to and what terms are relevant to them?

You want to be routing comments to the right teams. For example, a product development team will be interested in comments about user interface, integrations, or feature requests while your support or success team may be more concerned with bugs or implementation.

Nested Tags or Parent-Child Tags for Tag Hierarchy (SaaS example)

Once you’ve answered these questions, start grouping specific terms under broader terms. This is going to help you create hierarchy within your tags, also called nested tags.

Nested tags are labels associated by a hierarchy. The ‘sub-tag’ or ‘child tag’ is a tag that is more specific and can be categorized under a ‘parent tag’.

When any of the ‘child-tags’ are text-matched to a comment, feedback platforms will also tag that comment with the corresponding ‘parent tag’. Comments tagged with only the ‘parent tag’ do not include any of the words associated with any of the ‘child-tags’.

This allows you to pull comments that mention any of the specific integrations through the child-tags. At the same time, the broader “integrations” tag pulls comments that mention integrations in general, e.g. suggested integrations from our customers.

Choosing Text-Match Keywords or Keyphrases

For auto-tagging, it is important to choose the right words or phrases to match the tag to the comment. Text-match tags use an “exact match” rule for automation.

This is where having read through some of your current open-ended feedback is useful. You’ve seen the specific words that your customers tend to use when writing about different issues. It may also be helpful to use a thesaurus to come up with synonyms for the words or phrases you choose to match on.

Remember that text-match is very literal, so you will need to include variations on the words and phrases you choose. For example, an “implementation” tag should match on “implement”, “implemented”, “implementation”, and “setup”, as well as “set-up”.

Suggestions

We’ve compiled a list of auto-tags that are commonly used by SaaS businesses. You may be able to use some of these in other industries as well.

As you start to receive feedback you should refine your tags to be more specific to your business needs.

Here’s a list of common tags for SaaS companies to start with:

Tag name: Matches on:
“Product” parent tag Terms specific to your product like the name, or terminology for features, e.g. “Amazon”
“Product A” child tag Name of one of your more specific products or services if you have more than 1, e.g. “Prime Music”
“Product B” child tag Name of another product or service if you have more than 2, e.g. “Prime Shipping”
“Bug” “issue, issues, crash, crashes, bug, bugs, buggy, error, errors”
“Competition” Names of your competitors
“Documentation” “docs, documentation, article, articles, help article, FAQ, FAQs”
“Feature request” “wish, add, would like”
“Implementation” “implement, implemented, implementation, setup, set-up”
“Integrations” parent tag “integration, integrate, integrates”
“Integration 1” child tag Words specific to one integration, change the tag label to the specific integration, e.g. “Slack”
“Integration 2” child tag Words specific to another integration, with the corresponding label, e.g. “Salesforce”
“Performance” “speed, slow, fast, uptime, downtime, 404”
“Price” “cheap, expensive, promo, promotion, deal, price, price tag”
“Support” “support, onboarding, on-boarding, issue, broken, assistance, service, tech support, help, helps, helping”

Human Review: Manually Tagging for Refinement

Monitor your feedback for a couple weeks after you set up your auto-tagging system. If a comment should be tagged, but isn’t, add more keywords to the text-match tag. Manually tag any comments that are difficult to text-match.

A good example would be a comment like “I tried to connect your software to my CRM but it didn’t work.” This comment is clearly related to integration, but text-matching wouldn’t catch this. After manually tagging this comment, you can then add “connect your software” as a keyphrase to the integration tag.

Human review becomes a tool for refining your existing auto-tags, instead of the main workhorse. As time passes, you’ll spend your time scanning for edge cases and new issues or topics that require a new auto-tag.

Do this check periodically to ensure your insight is accurate. Maintaining your valuable tagging system will save you time in the future.

If you are using machine learning, use manual tags to train the AI to be more accurate in the future. In case you spot an inappropriate tag, the AI also learns each time you remove a tag that it generated.

Feedback Routing & Driving Action

Surveying customers is the first phase in your transformation into a more customer-centric company, but you will plateau if you sit on the feedback. Setting up an auto-tagging system means feedback is sent to relevant teams in your organization in real-time. Trends are lifted more easily from qualitative feedback, and your customer-centric organization will be empowered to actively pursue customer happiness.

Measure and improve customer experience.

Get auto-tagging with Wootric customer feedback software. Sign up for a free trial.

Communication Tips & Tools for Customer Success Managers

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.

Retain more customers. Sign up today for free Net Promoter Score feedback with InMoment.

Why You Should Abandon Long Customer Surveys (and Use Always-On Microsurveys Instead)

When was the last time you completed the long survey you ask your customers to fill out? This is a painfully obvious (and obviously painful) exercise you can do to assess the customer experience of your surveys.  If the survey is long, you will probably find it a boring, tedious task to parse and answer the questions. Impatience grows as you face a seemingly endless list of attributes to assess. 

Elaine eyeroll

If this is what you are subjecting your customers to, know that you aren’t alone. Many companies are content with the status quo of traditional, bi-annual, 10+ question surveys, or they simply aren’t aware of alternatives.

But times have changed — and your customers aren’t having it.

Traditional, long surveys are a lose-lose situation

Not only do multi-question surveys have the potential to irritate customers, they have disadvantages for business as well.

 You are not hearing from enough customers.  Completion rates are abysmal. Studies show that the longer a survey is, the higher the chance of decreased, delayed, hasty or slapdash responses. So, the information you are getting from customers who are willing to run this gauntlet may not be thoughtful.  

Not hearing from customers often enough. Surveying once or twice a year means you can only react to feedback once or twice a year! In a quickly changing market, this is unacceptable. More agile competitors are going to leave you in the dust.

What can you do to solve this lose-lose situation? Modernize your feedback methodology with microsurveys.

What is a microsurvey?

Microsurveys take a well established, standardized question and use it as the first in a two-step survey. This first question can be used to measure Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction Score, and Customer Effort Score, providing you with quantitative feedback. The second step then provides a way for respondents to give open-ended feedback explaining their score.

Here is an example using an NPS microsurvey shown to a customer who is logged into a SaaS application. A similar microsurvey can also be delivered via email, mobile, or SMS.

Two-step Net Promoter Score survey from Wootric

Your first reaction might be “How can I possibly get all the information I need with such a short, open-ended survey?  And, how can I make sense of all of the qualitative responses?

Let us walk you through how you can get what you need — and more.

Advantages of always-on microsurveys 

Microsurvey design looks at feedback collection from the customer’s point of view — it should be easy, fast, and relevant. The results are a significantly improved customer experience. Microsurveys provide three key benefits to you:

  • Real-time trends
  • High response rates
  • Better insights

Real time so you never miss a trend:

With support of a customer experience software platform, it becomes easy to survey customers throughout the customer journey.  You can forgo your annual survey campaign and get a on-going pulse of real-time feedback on journey points.  Shortening your surveys allows you to ask customers for feedback more often. By asking the right question at the right time, you increase the chance that an individual will respond to your surveys. Deploying microsurveys across the entire customer journey will bring you both a bird’s eye view of the health of your account and detailed, actionable insights at each touchpoint.

High response rates means you hear from more customers:

Response rates can be as high as 60% for microsurveys, and typically exceed 25%. These numbers can seem miraculous compared to the significantly lower rates that long-form surveys attain. By asking a single question in the right channel at the right time, customer are more willing to give feedback.

Better insights:

Microsurvey responses will reflect what is important and relevant to your customers. Because you are no longer leading the respondent, you will learn things you wouldn’t otherwise learn. The qualitative feedback you receive is rich with context and potential to drive your business priorities.

Now, all of this may sound good but there are still barriers to making the switch, right?

Reasons why you are still using long form surveys

I can’t aggregate survey results when feedback is open-ended!

The advantage of endless Likert scale questions is that responses on a wide range of topics and attributes can be tallied and metricized.   This makes things easier for you on the back end. However, every time a customer must chose a response from a range of values, you are putting the onus of quantification on him or her. You risk asking them to evaluate something they do not know or care about.  Response quality, completion rates, and customer experience all suffer.

A modern approach is to save your scale questions for established CX metric questions like Net Promoter Score, “How likely are you to recommend [business] to friends and colleagues?”, and take the support of machine learning technology to quantify opened survey responses.   

Today, you can take the burden of quantification off of customers and place it squarely on machine learning software. In the past, getting insights from large quantities of qualitative data has been hard, if not impossible. Technology is now available to auto-categorize all of that rich, qualitative feedback. Auto-tagging and sentiment analysis have come a long way!

For example, this dashboard screenshot shows an analysis of auto-categorized NPS feedback. Auto-tagging reveals themes in qualitative comments so you can know what promoters, passives and detractors are talking about in real time.  

Wootric Dashboard
Wootric Dashboard – Auto-categorization of qualitative feedback

I need to ask a series of questions to get important information from our customers.

Every question you add is less likely to be answered with your respondent’s full attention and engagement. Asking a single scale question and an open ended question captures high quality data that is both qualitative and quantitative.

It feels counterintuitive to open up feedback to be a free-for-all; however, customers want to tell you what’s on their mind at the time you survey them. Asking exclusively about what is important to you is frustrating for the customer. Like the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

Getting the information you want is less obtrusive if you send customers a short survey at the right time. For example, you can send an microsurvey asking about how easy a transaction was to complete or how easy a feature was to use. Customers no longer have to reach into the depths of their memory to retrieve their impressions because they just completed the task you are asking about.

Asking for feedback at touch points over time, in the right context, creates a story of your customers’ journey and allows you to see trends, just like how thousands of photos can be combined to create beautiful stop-motion animation.

Beware of using incentives to make up for poor response rates, you will find a higher percentage of “satisficers”, or respondents who select answer options quickly and thoughtlessly to get to the incentive you promised them for “completing” their survey.

Of course, there is a time and place for long surveys.

There is nothing wrong with using a lengthy survey when you really need to — and there will be times when an in-depth questionnaire is appropriate. Here are two examples:

Annual “Brand” survey. Our customers use microsurveys to keep a finger on the pulse of their entire customer base throughout the year for customer journey feedback. Some also use an annual brand survey that supplements by asking many in-depth questions. Even though response rates for this survey may be low, they know they will hear from their most engaged customers on a variety of topics. And, with their microsurvey program,  they still get feedback from everyone else.

User interviews. Product teams may conduct focus groups or interviews to get more sophisticated feedback on feature use, build out an understanding of use cases, and create detailed personas. Microsurveys such as NPS help narrow down who should be included in these focus groups and who would be open to being interviewed.

How to start? Shift your Net Promoter Score program to microsurveys.

If you want to try real-time microsurveys as a baby step towards modernizing your feedback program, use always-on NPS microsurveys as one component of your feedback strategy. You’ll still send out your long, in-depth survey to decision makers like you always have, but now with an early warning system to help you proactively keep your most important accounts.

Entelo was able to double their survey response rate with this method, using NPS microsurveys for a better understanding of customer health. The real-time feedback also meant fewer surprises and easier prioritization when it came to addressing customers’ problems.

Get the ebook, The Modern Guide to Winning Customers with Net Promoter Score. Learn how to modernize your feedback program for growth and higher loyalty.

The Joy of Net Promoter Score: Sharing Customer Praise

Gathering Net Promoter Score feedback isn’t just about receiving critique and feature requests. An important growth component of an NPS customer feedback program is identifying your promoters, then engaging and activating them for upsell, referral or advocacy. But there is another benefit to identifying promoters — the feelings you get from their verbatim comments–gratification, inspiration, motivation, and satisfaction!

Promoters that are finding value in your brand can give some incredibly uplifting compliments that boost morale and provide a sense of pride for employees.

We’ve gathered some example comments from SaaS companies that use Wootric software to measure Net Promoter Score, analyze trends, and close the loop with their customers. Each company provided a screenshot of a favorite promoter comment from their InMoment dashboard.

Imagine how the team at presentation software Slidebean felt when this NPS survey response appeared:Slidebean NPS Promoter Comment

The stellar customer service at point-of-sale software Revel Systems is what got this promoter excited:

The team at video coaching platform Sibme was stoked when they read this:

This NPS response gives mortgage software company Maxwell props for their customer-centric culture:
Maxwell NPS promoter response

This kind of feedback contributes to feelings of accomplishment and meaning for employees, leading to more engagement and a happier work environment. Research done for the UK government showed that companies with a highly engaged workforce see a 19.2 % growth in operating income over a 12-month period. Additionally, companies with an engaged workforce grow profits up to 3X faster than their competitors.

With this comment, the whole team at e-signature software Signable can see the value they are creating for their customers:

Make sharing customer comments part of your NPS program

To get the most out of your NPS program, share your NPS along with select verbatim feedback across your entire organization. This provides context to your metric. Sharing customer requests and frustrations is a great way to create urgency around service and product improvement. It makes the problem less abstract and gives employees an emotional connection to the work that needs to be done.

In the same way that you would share constructive critique, make it a habit to share promoter comments. This provides you and your employees with the opportunity to celebrate the things you’re doing right and makes it real. When specific teams or individuals get mentioned, reach out to them and share. It is a great way to let them know they did an awesome job! It’s always great to feel appreciated and acknowledged.

Make sharing promoter comments easy by:

  1. Sharing it on a Slack channel – with Wootric’s free integration with Slack, you’ve got an easy way to spread the joy from reading promoter comments. Tag folks who were involved with different steps that culminated in the customer’s compliment and give them a pat on the back!
  2. Gathering the superstar comments to share at an all-hands meeting or Board meetings, along with your NPS score. This not only gives people the numbers they want to see, but also provides the story behind the number.
  3. Featuring promoter comments in your newsletter – whether it’s an employee newsletter or a customer newsletter.  Sharing positivity from customers makes everyone feel listened to and appreciated.

Having comments feed into Slack here at Wootric has helped us to monitor customer sentiment in real-time and keep everyone in the company close to our customers’ experience. Any issues are dealt with quickly, and promoter comments like these get everyone excited.

Promoter comments are a win for everyone

The Net Promoter Score system is a proven way to drive growth, and it is a delight when you get comments like the ones above. It is a positive feedback loop that creates more value and positive experiences for customers and a supportive, enjoyable work environment that encourages engagement for employees.

And to our own customers, know that we truly appreciate the time and thought that goes into every survey response you give us! We are listening. 

Build an army of promoters.
Sign up for free in-app NPS with InMoment.

Time Management for Customer Success Managers

How many times have you wished for another pair of hands or a couple more hours in the day to get through your work as a Customer Success Manager?

Between onboarding clients, liaising for customer support, and negotiating an upsell, CSMs juggle many essential functions.

We’ve gathered some tips and tools to help you be more productive with less stress.

Tips:

  • Create a calendar-prep sandwich

Having some quiet time before the day starts to strategize and prioritize will allow you to go through your day with less need to juggle. This time at the beginning of the day can be a time to review events from the previous day, catch up on emails, or prep for your meetings, but most importantly, set aside about 15 minutes to prep your calendar and to-do list for the day and look ahead to the rest of the week.

Set aside another 15 minutes at the end of your day for another calendar and to-do list prep session, during which you can update everything based on your notes from calls and meetings you had. Making this prep-session sandwich a habit will improve your organization and help you transition between meetings and calls more confidently.

  • Schedule “buffer” time between meetings/calls

As you schedule your meetings and calls, be sure to include a buffer zone of time in case something takes longer than you had anticipated. Include travel time between meetings if you have to physically be somewhere else and add some time for traffic or delays. Even if everything goes according to schedule, having that buffer gives you time to take down notes on the call, expand on any thoughts you had, as well as create and schedule tasks based on your prior meeting or call.

  • Prioritize ruthlessly, batch related tasks together

A large part of managing your time is mercilessly prioritizing your tasks and following through on the important tasks first, rather than the easily completed ones. Be sure to take on projects that will pay dividends in time-saved and customer retention in the future, like mapping the customer journey, or periodically reviewing the onboarding process. These are tasks that you have got to schedule with high priority or else they won’t get done.

Once you’ve prioritized, group together tasks that are related, whether they are for the same client, or they are on the same web application. This will allow you to complete more tasks without having to break your workflow to switch gears too often.

“Do not try and make every customer happy all the time. Prioritize programs that generate tangible business outcomes for their team. When you focus on making the customer successful with your product or service, things like retention and renewal become an easy conversation.”

– Omer Gotlieb, Co-Founder & Chief Customer Officer, Totango

  • Micro-breaks: Do something to clear your mind between meetings or tasks

Once you’ve completed a set of tasks, get ready to switch gears to another set of tasks by doing something quick to clear your mind, preparing your brain to use a whole new set of neural connections. For you, that might mean getting up to walk around the office, having a little stretch, or meditating at your desk. Check out this website for some more mind-clearing methods for between batches of tasks.

For a more comprehensive guide to time management check out this article!

Tools:

ToDoist:

ToDoist is a to-do list application available on nearly every platform or device you can think of. It uses natural language processing to make entering tasks incredibly fast. Advanced users will appreciate paid features like custom labels and filters, location-based reminders, templates for recurring projects, as well as the ability to collaborate with co-workers. Even if you use this app for its most basic functions, it is straightforward and clean to use for task organization.

Google Calendar:

You’ve heard of this one, and may even be using it already for your time management. But are you using all of Google Calendar’s features to their fullest extent? For example, you can create an event and ask Google calendar to “find a time” or give you “suggested times”. Before you use either, be sure you have added everyone who needs to attend the event. Then click the “suggested times” below all of your names and a pop-up will show you some options for times you can meet.

While you are at it, calendar your 15 minute prep sandwich as a recurring event and schedule buffer time you need between major calls.

For more features you may not be using in Google Calendar, click here.

SmartDay:

SmartDay is a hybrid calendar and to-do list. You can add events, tasks, and notes, and then share them with others. SmartDay’s prime value is its focus on collaboration. Comments can be added to any shared event or task, and tasks can be delegated to different team members, which automatically schedules them in the individual’s calendar. The star feature is SmartDay’s automatic task scheduling. When you add tasks for your various projects into your list, SmartDay places them on your calendar in the free time between your appointments.

RescueTime:

RescueTime is an app that tracks the time you spend on applications and websites during your day. It informs you both when and how you are productive or distracted. RescueTime helps you be aware of where your time goes and more intentional with how you use your time.

Retain more customers. Sign up today for free Net Promoter Score feedback with InMoment.

How to Use Webhooks to Turn Your Software Platforms into a Digital Relay Team

Bang!

The starter pistol has fired for the relay race and you’re sprinting to get the baton to the next runner. As soon as you pass them the baton, they’re off to the next runner, and then the next, until the last runner crosses the finish line.

Using webhooks is like a digital relay race, with a trigger in one web application starting a sequence of events that passes data from one platform to the next, optionally triggering an event in each as the baton gets passed through the relay sequence.

You’ve got a team of software platforms that you use, like Zendesk or Intercom for support requests, Wootric for customer feedback, Salesforce as your system of record for Sales & Customer Success, and Tableau for analytics. With webhooks, you can create a digital relay of data. Once these systems are passing info to each other you can accomplish all kinds of workflows that streamline data collection, analysis and action. 

To skip the technical definition to get to the uses of webhooks, click here!

What Exactly are Webhooks?

Webhooks are “user defined” notifications that allow a web application — a.k.a. a cloud-based software platform or software system — to provide or receive real-time information to or from another web application about an event’s completion.

Webhooks can be incoming, i.e. the app is getting notified when something happens along with context around that event, or they can be outbound, i.e. the app is sending notifications out to other apps about events that occur within its services, along with context around that event.

It is inefficient to constantly request data from another network (a.k.a. polling for new data at regular time intervals in engineer-speak) and many internet browsers cannot support having an open connection between two web applications. Webhooks are an efficient, flexible, and convenient way to bring up-to-date data into the web applications you use regularly.

Compared to hiring a developer to create a native integration of one application on another, webhooks are a tech-lite method to sync data and trigger workflows across multiple applications. This also has the benefit of letting you work mainly on the software systems that you are most familiar with.

What are Webhooks Used For?

Webhooks’ capabilities allow you to:

  • Know that a specified event took place — e.g. a support ticket closed, a payment method was added, a survey was completed (a.k.a an incoming webhook)
  • Let another software platform know that the event took place (a.k.a. an outbound webhook)
  • Ensure that data is synced across all platforms
  • Set off an automatic relay of data and workflow for a network of software platforms

All of these can be combined to create “relays” for insight in a customer feedback program. Here are a couple of common use cases:

Improving Customer Support

Use Case: Zendesk Support Ticket Closure Triggers Email Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Survey

One prevalent use case for webhooks is triggering a survey after the closure of a support ticket in Zendesk or a customer conversation in Intercom.

Let’s take the support ticket example. Zendesk tickets are loaded with information, like ticket ID # and ticket requester email, that can be sent via a webhook to Wootric to trigger a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey.

This additional information, or properties, allow you to customize the title and body of the email survey that gets sent to your customer.

Having CSAT feedback after support cases are closed can help inform the training and organization of your support teams. You’ll have a better understanding of your customer’s expectations of interactions with the Support team. CSAT feedback at this journey point can help you identify any gaps in your support experience.

Keep the Relay Going: Follow-up with Dissatisfied Customers

Use Case: Salesforce Workflows or Zapier webhook triggers a new case open or follow-up task

Using Salesforce workflows and our outbound webhook, you can close the loop with unhappy customers by triggering a new case to open for Support or Success when a poor CSAT score comes in, or assign a task of follow up to specific individuals. This will show your customers that you are actively listening to their feedback and value it, making it more likely for them to stick with you. It can also clear up any potential miscommunication that may have occurred during the original interaction.

As you plan out your webhooks, be wary of survey fatigue. Wootric has built in protection from sending surveys too frequently to customers so you don’t have to worry about accidentally bombarding customer inboxes.

Take Action or Test a New Strategy with One Segment of Customers

Use Case: Mixpanel Event in Specific Segment Triggers an In-App Customer Survey

Another useful way to use webhooks is to have Mixpanel events, such as a customer creating their first report with your app or completing their first order, trigger a survey for specific segments of users.

Let’s say you are a meal kit delivery app, like Blue Apron or HelloFresh, and you want to test a new dinner party kit.

You can use a webhook to survey the dinner party kit customers the next time they log in your meal kit app. That survey might be a Customer Effort Score (CES) survey (” How easy was it for you to cook your dinner party meal?”), or it might be a CSAT survey, depending on what kind of feedback you are looking for.

This feedback would identify improvements that need to be made to the new dinner party meal kit. It will also identify people who love it. Another webhook can trigger a task be assigned to a marketing team member to reach out to those promoters for testimonials or a potential interview.

Incorporate CX Metrics into Business Analytics

Use Case: Send Wootric Net Promoter Score Survey Data into Tableau or Chartio

Compiling all of your data from multiple web applications for correlating analysis can be tedious and frustrating. Sometimes it can feel like your data is trapped in one app or another with no way of importing that data in real time.

Webhooks allow you to bring data from multiple sources for consolidated, holistic reporting. This helps you create beautiful reports, rich with context, and connect all of your various analyses to guide organizational action.

If you’ve already been surveying customers with Wootric, our dashboard has been helping you manage your customer feedback program. We often see our customers’ business analysts use webhooks to report customer experience metrics, like Net Promoter Score, alongside other KPIs, such as churn or expansion revenue.

Webhooks allow you to take all of the raw data from Wootric and send it to interactive data visualization applications like Tableau, Chart.io, or Looker as the feedback comes in, in real time. The information reflected in charts is updated every time new survey feedback comes in.

Tableau Example
Example of real-time data visualization in Tableau

Create a Holistic View of Account Health
Use case: Send Wootric CX Data to Salesforce or other CRM

Gathering customer feedback to understand the health of your organization often relies on both relationship monitoring through drip/cadence Net Promoter Score (NPS) and journey point monitoring through transactional CSAT/CES surveys.

Example of Account Level CX data in Salesforce

Using all three of these CX surveys at appropriate journey points can provide a bird’s eye view of your customers’ journey, with each survey score reflecting different parts of the entire journey. Wootric offers a native integration to accomplish this in Salesforce, but you can use a webhook service like Zapier to move Wootric data to any CRM. 

Custom Insight Through Creative Webhook Use

Webhooks enable you to customize the segments you survey, the events that trigger a survey, as well as the title and survey question itself. With some creativity and planning, webhooks and CX surveys can get the exact information you want into your preferred web application for insight and analysis.  

Measure and improve customer experience. Sign up today for free Net Promoter Score, CSAT or Customer Effort Score feedback with InMoment.

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