Auto-Analyzing Sentiment in Survey Feedback using NLP

Wootric (now InMoment) uses CX metrics—Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction and Customer Effort Score—to monitor customer experience for high-growth companies. We take a customer-centric approach to survey design. For example, our modern 2-question Net Promoter Score survey invites customers to elaborate freely on the reason for their score. We deliver millions of surveys that achieve response rates of 30-40%, generating thousands of pieces of unstructured customer survey feedback each week.

Why Is Survey Feedback Important?

Because when you communicate directly with your customers, they can identify exactly what works, what doesn’t work, and where the pain points are that may be detracting from their experience. Honest feedback gives you the insights you need to make improved business decisions and optimize the customer experience. As such, the right customer survey can play a significant role in increasing customer retention and helping your organization reach its goals.

Two Step in-app NPS Survey to collect survey feedback

Customer feedback comments are a treasure trove of information that can help a company shape their product and service for success. Until now it has been difficult for a Customer Insights Manager or customer experience management (CXM) teams to mine and aggregate qualitative data for insights that can guide business decisions.  

Auto-Tagging with Sentiment Analysis

We recently announced early access to a new product feature: auto-tagging. For auto-tagging, we use our homegrown machine learning system along with Google Cloud Natural Language API to automatically categorize open-ended customer-survey feedback that our customers get as part of their NPS, CSAT and CES programs. The goal is to help companies put some structure to all of this qualitative data. We have a long list of customers eagerly waiting to get their hands on this feature. It’s a good problem to have.

In addition, we are developing the ability to identify the sentiment of the feedback. The goal is to determine not only what the customer was talking about, but to say whether the feedback is positive, neutral or negative. It is particularly complex to decipher multiple “sentiments” within a single comment.  

Here is an example feedback comment that we received in response to a Net Promoter Score survey on our own production application (we practice what we preach):

“Setup guide for customizing social sharing on iOS SDK was confusing. Diego reached out with sample code which helped a lot.”

Wootric (now InMoment) is a SaaS product, so our auto-tagger uses a SaaS data training model and applies three tags to this survey response (Documentation, SDK, People), and assigns a NEUTRAL sentiment for the feedback as a whole. This obviously is pretty good, but we want to do more.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could dig deeper into survey feedback and apply sentiment for each tag as well? In the above example, the customer was not happy with the SDK Set-up Guide, but was pleased with Diego’s assistance.  This nuance is buried under the overall NEUTRAL sentiment. Ideally, the Documentation and SDK tags would be identified as having negative sentiment, while the People tag would be positive.  

We Can Identify Sentiment Associated with People, Team, Organization or Location

Buried survey feedback is not a trivial problem to solve. However, using Google Cloud Natural Language API’s latest feature called “entity sentiment analysis” we have made progress. We can already get sentiment for entities referenced in feedback where an entity is defined as People, Team, Organization and Location. In this case, Diego is an entity of type People and positive sentiment is correctly attached to it.

Example of Auto-tagging an InMoment NPS Survey Response

CUSTOMER LANGUAGEAUTO-TAGSSENTIMENT
“Setup guide for customizing social sharing on iOS SDK was confusing. Diego reached out with sample code which helped a lot.” NEUTRAL
“Setup guide” Documentation    future
“iOS SDK”SDK    future
“Diego”PeoplePOSITIVE

A Business Use Case

Our customers often trigger a CSAT survey using our incoming webhooks and workflows when a support case is closed in their CRM system like Salesforce or Zendesk.



We notice that survey-feedback responses often reference a team or specific person that the customer has engaged with. Auto-tagging this feedback as “People” with applicable sentiment will provide these companies with an easy way to measure and track how customers are feeling about the people aspect of a company’s Customer Success or Support program.

Retain more customers. Start getting CX survey feedback today with InMoment.

Net Promoter Score is the go-to CX metric for companies that want to measure and improve customer loyalty, a harbinger of growth. Thousands of companies use NPS, from the start-ups of  Silicon Valley to the Fortune 500.  One reason for this popularity is that Net Promoter Score programs have evolved in response to technology and the changing landscape of customer expectations. 

The core tenets of Net Promoter Score have stayed the same since NPS was created in 2003 by Bain & Company. “How likely are you to recommend this product or service to colleagues?” is the NPS survey question, and it is followed by an ask for open-ended feedback. Customers respond on a scale of 0-10 and are bucketed into promoters, passives and detractors based on their response. The formula for calculating the NPS metric is straightforward.

NPS Calculation

However, the world of customer experience management, or CXM, has changed dramatically. A few macro things have happened.

  1. Social media has empowered our customers with a voice — the conversation is no longer expected to be only one way, and negative word of mouth can be amplified quickly. Every voice counts.
  1. We as businesses have to work harder than ever to retain customers — customer experience is increasingly a differentiator and a battleground with more competition and low switching costs.
  1. Companies have many more touchpoints to engage with customers than it did back in 2003.We now have sophisticated mobile devices, web platforms, customer facing point of sale systems. Meanwhile, our customer’s email boxes are overstressed with newsletters and promotions all vying for their attention.

When I ran NPS campaigns back in 2003, I was sending long form surveys to my customers in quarterly batches. Emails with links to long form surveys were considered the ‘innovative’ way to get feedback. Response rates were dismal. Sadly, I still receive some of those today!

This, of course, still is a valid way to collect NPS feedback — you will get some of your customers to go through the effort — but it doesn’t take advantage of any of the macro trends I mentioned above. And honestly, customers are getting smarter and less patient with spammy surveys.

Launching or revamping an NPS program? Get the ebook, The Modern Guide to Winning Customers with Net Promoter Score. Leverage customer feedback and drive growth with a real-time approach to NPS.

How Net Promoter Score has evolved

Modern NPS leverages technology, closes the loop with customers and engages the whole company.  Here is what you should expect:

  • Timely, ongoing feedback. You can keep a real-time pulse on your business. This alone is magical. Reading, sharing and responding to customer feedback as it happens — talk about raising the profile of the customer’s voice inside a company!
  • Modern NPS survey is short and to the point — just the NPS rating and open-ended feedback. A 10 or even 5 question survey? No way.  Survey fatigue is a real issue. Keep it short and you will get many more customers to tell you what’s most important to them.
  • Reaching customers where they want to give feedback, in a low-friction and lightweight way. For example, in-app surveys that take seconds to complete may a better experience for SaaS customers than dealing with another email survey in a crowded in-box. E-commerce companies may use a combination of in-app, email, or SMS to reach their customers depending on where they are in their journey.Tow Step in-app NPS Survey by Wootric
  • High response rates — your expectations should jump up from single digits to 30-40%. Customers are willing to give you feedback cycle after cycle because it’s easy. 
  • Leverages intelligent NPS software. Software that is designed to get your business to action faster. It’s giving you analytics. It’s helping you comb through open-ended text and sentiment. And it’s making the process of closing the loop with customers easy and turnkey.
  • Customer feedback is shared internally. It doesn’t get buried in spreadsheets and left unaddressed. It is shared in Slack, it is routed automatically to departments to take action in their systems of record such as Intercom, ZenDesk or Salesforce.

Net Promoter Score has come a long way, and the end result is better outcomes for companies and their customers.

Start getting free Net Promoter Score feedback today. Signup for InMoment.

Most customer success articles you’ll read talk about helping customers reach their ideal outcomes – ideal outcomes are the most important thing, the very job description of customer success. But there’s another job that comes before ideal outcomes, one which, if done poorly, will result in churn even if ideal outcomes are achieved.

Setting expectations.

Let’s begin with a cautionary tale – a true story – of a SaaS app that failed to set expectations that matched what the app did.

It’s a fitness app which shall remain nameless, but it’s much like its primary competitor, MyFitnessPal. Unlike MyFitnessPal, it offered a sleek, integrated user interface that seamlessly brought together exercise tracking via pedometer and nutrition tracking, but it also offered something more: A personal fitness coach. (I should also mention that this particular fitness app is one of the most expensive currently on the market – but for such personal attention? Totally worth it.)

Except.

While on the website copy and in the app itself, this company promised a customized approach to getting fit, complete with a personal wellness coach who would be accessible via private chat to offer encouragement at times of crisis and temptation, it didn’t deliver as described.

Within a few days, it became apparent that the “personal coach” is really only accessible via group chat. In fact, if you try to contact the coach via the in-app private chat box (which even has the coach’s picture on it), the coach will never actually see your message – you’ll get an automated reply from a bot.

When all of this was revealed – in the group chat room – every participant was taken aback, and several initiated their free trial cancellations within days.

Even though they liked the app.

Even though they were already seeing the results they’d hoped for.

Yes, even when customers were achieving their ideal outcomes, because of the mismatch between their expectations and the services delivered, they left.

But not before sending feedback – which went unanswered.

It was a customer success failure of a magnitude we don’t, frankly, see very often. And it’s almost painful when you realize that nearly all of their churn was completely, 100% avoidable.

If only they had matched customer expectations to what they were actually prepared to deliver.

What it felt like was a bait and switch.

Setting expectations is a foundational element of customer success

“There are three key tasks that challenge every Customer Success team in its initial phase of development. The first is to appropriately set and manage perceptions and expectations, both of the customers and of the rest of the company. The second is to establish a clear and necessary connection to significant revenue streams and profitability. The third is to gather, analyze and use the right data to fulfill the group’s mission.”Mikael Blaisdell ED, Customer Success Association

The fitness app example above is a classic case of sales and marketing not being aligned with product development, customer service, and customer success. Clearly, none of these departments were speaking with each other, or customer service could have told marketing that customers were complaining about being misled. Or marketing could have spoken with produce development to see how they could better deliver on the promise that was bringing people in the doors.

None of these things happened, but an empowered customer success team could have bridged these gaps.

Customer success, of any department, has the power to bring people together. Because, at the end of the day, we’re all working for the customers’ success. We’re all trying to create a product and experience that works.

If you find yourself spending time trying to “adjust” customer expectations, check in with sales. Check with marketing. Check with customer service. See where the disconnects are, and what you can do to address them and bridge those gaps.

7 Rules to Set Customers up for Success with Expectation Management

Rule #1: Communicate

The key to setting expectations – and setting customers up for a successful experience – is really communication. Not only do you have to communicate clearly and accurately with the customers themselves, you also have to keep lines of communication open with all of the other departments who have a hand in creating the customer experience.

Rule #2: Don’t overpromise (and under-deliver)

That fitness app made promises it clearly never intended to keep – maybe that was intentional (a real bait and switch!), or maybe it was the unhappy result of teams failing to communicate what was possible to deliver. Either way, they committed the cardinal sin of expectation management – they created a high expectation and failed to reach it.

Rule #3: Know what you can and can’t do

To avoid overpromising, you have to know what you can afford to do for customers. Often, this isn’t easy because management and customers expect that you can do more than is realistically possible, which means you have to manage expectations on both sides. If it’s a time issue, start tracking how much time it takes you to do certain tasks, or to serve each customer. If it’s a funding issue, keep tabs on what it costs to deliver everything that is expected. Then you can build a case for getting more funding, or pairing down services.

Rule #4: Talk through obstacles

When working with customers to define their ideal outcomes and success benchmarks, discuss potential obstacles from the start. Discussing potential issues before they arise prevents  customers from getting nasty surprises, and prepares them to work with you to overcome these roadblocks.

Rule #5: Value your customers’ trust

Nothing upsets customers more than feeling like they’ve been duped – that you’ve violated their trust. Trust is easy to lose, and nearly impossible to win back. And once a customer stops trusting you, they stop being customers and become detractors, telling everyone who will listen their story about how you let them down. Customer loyalty, lifetime value and retention are rooted in trust. And without them, your SaaS business can’t survive.

Rule #6: Track user behavior & sentiment

It sounds like SaaS 101, but clearly not all SaaS companies are tracking when and why users are bailing out of the onboarding process. If you don’t have a system in place to send “red flag” notifications when users are exhibiting signs of distress, you’re losing customers and probably don’t even know why. It’s well worth the investment to purchase a good user survey system to keep your finger on the pulse of CX metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) for customer loyalty, or Customer Effort Score (CES) to keep tabs on how onboarding is going. 

Setting up a customer feedback program? Start getting in-app NPS feedback or CES feedback for free with Wootric

Rule #7: Let them know when you’ve exceeded expectations

Okay, now for the fun one: When you’ve exceeded expectations (or when they’ve reached a milestone faster than expected), make sure they KNOW it! Celebrate with them. Point out their successes and you’ll help to reaffirm their high opinion of you.

Customer success teams are uniquely positioned to understand the whys behind the whats of user behavior. But if you keep all of your insights to yourself, without sharing them with other departments, you’ll continue having to “manage” mis-aligned expectations. Set yourself up for success (and your customers too), by addressing expectations early.

Are you meeting customer expectations? Get started with free in-app customer feedback with InMoment.

Wootric’s text analytics platform analyzes survey responses using Natural Language Processing (NLP.) Learn More

The challenge of open-ended feedback

Qualitative feedback in survey responses: Marketing, Product, Customer Insights, and Customer Success teams love it! There is nothing quite like hearing authentic, open-ended comments about your product or service directly from customers in their own words. Nothing is more powerful than hearing from the customer first hand: It drives action.

Individual anecdotes tell a story that can provide color and context to business metrics like Net Promoter Score, but how do you make it actionable? How do you aggregate qualitative data to see trends and get insights that can drive business decisions?  To a certain extent, this has always been an issue for voice of the customer feedback programs. However, two broad trends are driving an increase in qualitative data and creating more urgency. As a result, the problem of “metricizing” open-ended feedback is now more acute.

Customer experience survey trends that are driving the need for NLP

First trend: The shift to customer-centric surveys.

It has become more and more difficult to persuade customers to respond to traditional company-centric surveys — the multi-question monstrosities that ask customers to rate attribute after attribute on a 5 or 7 point scale.  Long, boring, tedious — and frustrating. Response rates in the single digits are common.

I recently visited the website of a major department store and was prompted to fill out a pop-up survey with over 30 (!) questions. I thought I’d get an opportunity to tell the retailer what was important to me — how much I loved their shoe selection and that I’d had a disappointing experience in one of their stores. I didn’t finish the survey.

In an effort to improve response rates, many companies are now thinking about the survey experience from the customer’s perspective. A Net Promoter Score survey that asks one question and lets a customer provide open-ended feedback is a better user experience — and customers are more likely to respond.

Wootric is modern customer feedback management software that allows businesses to gauge and quantify customer loyalty through proven feedback metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES). We are firm believers in the customer centric approach.

For example, here’s an NPS survey that Wootric presents in-app (we also support mobile, email and SMS) that usually takes a user less than 30 seconds to complete.

Two-Step-in-app-NPS-Survey

Second trend: Hearing from as many customers as possible.

Traditionally, customer research efforts were satisfied with feedback from a statistically significant sample of customers. Now that any customer has the potential to influence the trajectory of a business — whether taking their complaints public on Twitter or writing a glowing review on Yelp or G2Crowd — more companies are proactively asking all customers for feedback. This instantly opens a direct communication channel, and gives companies the opportunity to build, monitor and leverage  relationships with any and every customer.

These trends put the onus on companies to make sense of a firehose of open-ended feedback, and that is tough to do.  Dedicating resources to tagging and sorting hundreds, even thousands, of comments is expensive and just doesn’t scale.

Natural Language Processing to the rescue

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a type of machine learning that enables computers to understand human language. You can read how Wootric applies NLP to customer feedback like NPS and CSAT survey responses in this article.  And here are three familiar examples of NLP at work:

  • Machine translation like Google Translate.
  • Sentiment analysis — sifting through all those Twitter posts to analyze how people feel about the latest iPhone, for example.
  • Chatbots — the customer support “agents” that have become the first line of interaction when you reach out for tech support online.

Unlocking the power of open-ended feedback

NLP is solving the unique challenges in the field of customer feedback management using text and sentiment analysis. Being on the forefront of this innovation means Wootric customers are seeing those benefits now. We work to free our customers from the time and expense required to manage this data. We use text and sentiment analysis to surface and aggregate insights for our customers, helping them to prioritize resources and route responses for follow up action. Read more about what we are up to here on the Google Cloud Platform blog.

Learn more about CXInsight™, Wootric’s text analytics platform for customer feedback.

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

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

 

Want early access to InMoment’s analysis of survey responses using NLP? Contact Us

Customer success teams measure and track many key metrics. From SaaS platform usage to NPS, they are always analyzing data to maintain a pulse of customer health and happiness. Many of these stats will also go into an overall account metric known as Customer Health Score.

Wootric recently hosted the San Francisco Customer Success Meetup and the focus of the evening was Customer Health Score (CHS). Three experts shared their techniques for constructing and measuring this metric.  Loni Brown from Entelo, Jeff Johnson from Splunk, and Jon Turri from Raise.me offered several tips and insights to setting up a Customer Health Score program and the intricacies involved.

Interested in viewing the whole Customer Health Score panel session? Watch the video here

What is Customer Health Score (CHS)?

Customer Health Score is a metric designed to predict a customer’s likelihood to stay a customer  – or churn. Loni started by providing her explanation of what CHS is, “a metric that provides insight into what is happening in your customer accounts early enough that you can be proactive.” Formulations of CHS can be simple, but are often complex.

That description works well, but there isn’t an industry standard for Customer Health Score, which may be confusing and overwhelming for some customer success teams. The panel agreed that variables and the weighting formula for CHS vary based on the company and industry. It depends on what is indicative of success for your customers.

What Goes Into a Customer Health Score?

Each of the panelists has had to identify and gather the metrics available to them, then single out the most indicative numbers to create a formula for their score. This means the first iterations are often messy and need regular adjustment until the method produces results that are consistent with how CSMs see their accounts.

When creating your score, it’s good to isolate 4-6 indicators for CHS. Loni mentioned that the Entelo CHS score card includes eight different numbers, though she allowed that her formula is very comprehensive. Among other things, the Entelo CHS includes Net Promoter Score (NPS), the number of support tickets per user, usage of the tools on her platform, and success milestones. Entelo is a recruiting platform so in their case, success milestones include personnel hires their clients have been with the help of Entelo.

Jeff added, “Support cases are important, but they don’t always mean something is wrong” so you’ll want to keep that in mind if you add them to your formula.

The panelists discussed the subjective components of their CSH formula, suggesting that only 1-2 of your included metrics should be subjective, but that they can be quite important. For instance, Jon adds “Relationship strength is the highest weighted metric for us.”

After initially setting up your Customer Health Score formula, it’s important to give it 6-10 months without changes, or you won’t be able to track it accurately over time.

Tracking Customer Health Scores

A favorite tool for tracking CHS is Gainsight, used by 2 of the panelists. It imports metrics you’ve indicated as important and allows you to weight each parameter, culminating in a unique formula for your each customer’s CHS.

In Gainsight, you’ll see accounts that are Green, indicating good health. They could be an opportunity for an upsell or additional revenue. Yellow, which are accounts that might be experiencing a problem. Red accounts are in poor health and are at risk of churning.

Loni uses Wootric to track Net Promoter Score. She imports this NPS data into Gainsight via Salesforce for the benefit of her success team and her CHS calculation. (Having her NPS data in Salesforce benefits the sales team, too. For instance, if a client could be a potential advocate, exporting that to account and contact records in Salesforce makes it easily accessible to the client’s sales manager.)

Setting up your NPS program? Get the ebook, The Modern Guide to Winning Customers with Net Promoter Score. Learn eight ways SaaS companies are leveraging Net Promoter Score for customer loyalty and growth.

A good indicator that your formula is working is to check positive and negative accounts and be sure the metric matches what is happening with the client. For instance, if a customer hasn’t taken training, submits multiple support tickets, and hasn’t been successful with your product it makes sense they would be in poor standing.

Optimizing your CHS can be great for revenue opportunities. Loni stated “Sales can come to me and say ‘we are trying to make quota, do you have any accounts for us?’ and I can print out of a list of green accounts and hand them over knowing they are good prospects for upsells.”

When our host was asked by an audience member what impact panelists had seen on churn and expansion revenue, Jeff answered, “You’ll see an immediate impact when taking immediate action.”

Set Up Customer Health Alerts

Once you’ve chosen the metrics for your score, you’ll want to add alerts to your system that notify you if and when something happens. Jeff says “If anything should be a fire alarm, build it into your logic in Gainsight. Think about what those fire alarms are.”

Jon cautioned, “The CHS Scorecard won’t give you everything….you have to have an escalation process in place.”

For example, if your NPS for a particular account goes from promoter to detractor you’ll want to have a CSM address the account. This means the overall scorecard could be showing a positive account when there is a problem, so it’s still important to look at every metric on a client’s card to make sure it is in good standing.

Taking Action on Customer Health Scores

The next step after setting up your CHS alerts is to create playbooks to work from when there is an alert or an account drops from green to yellow or red. This gives CSMs valuable information to work through any problems and put the account in good standing when possible.

Jeff suggested that you focus efforts on getting yellow accounts to green. A healthy account is six times more likely to rebuy or upsell than one that is “okay, ” he says. The effort you put into getting an unhealthy red account to an “okay” yellow account may not be worth it.

As the company grows, your CHS program should as well. At Raise.me there are thousands of customers/students who use the program. Because of this Jon has learned to use segmentation. He tracks a CHS for new customers going through onboarding and a CHS for long term customers.

In one last bit of advice, Loni’s recommends to “Make sure the team and company are bought into the score or people won’t act on behalf of it.”

Thanks to our panelists, it’s clear how valuable and productive Customer Health Score can be for Customer Success teams. It can take effort to determine the right metric for your company, but the result can be an excellent program that decreases churn.

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

As a Product Manager, you develop user flows to chart how customers move from signup to successfully using your SaaS product. Your colleagues in Customer Success are doing the same thing — mapping a flow of customer milestones to success.

But “success” can mean different things to PMs and CSMs. And, while both teams employ user flows (or customer journeys), what they put on them are very different, reflecting their very different goals.

You are responsible for making the product functionally work, with enough awesome UX so it’s relatively intuitive for the customer to use. For your team, “success” often means that the product works. It does what it says it will do, and does it well.

Customer Success is responsible for helping customers use the product to achieve their desired outcome. Most of the time, that desired outcome isn’t in the product – it’s outside of it. For example, if I purchase a budgeting app, my desired outcome is to save enough money to sun myself on a Caribbean beach, with a good-looking server to bring me fruity drinks with umbrellas in them. The Customer Success manager’s job is to get me there.

You might say it’s a conflict between focusing on the world inside the product and the wide, wide world outside of it.

And that conflict can bring about a deep divide between Product and Customer Success.

Yet, we’re all working towards the same goal: Creating a product people love, need and want more of.

What if you were to bring both user flows together, so the functionality inside the product meets the desired outcomes outside of the product?

The Customer Success Perspective

This is a basic Customer Success User Flow, riffing off of Lincoln Murphy’s mockup. This type of user flow shows how customers get to each successive Milestone – or the parts of the product that will take them to the next step towards reaching their Desired Outcome.

But this chart doesn’t show the most important part for the CSM: The success gaps between signup and that Desired Outcome.

It’s in these spaces that Customer Success does most of its work.

Success gaps are what stand between product functionality and success milestones or desired outcomes. My budgeting app might help me save money, but will it help me have an amazing Caribbean vacation? Of course not – the product isn’t designed for that.

But Customer Success content is designed for that. In e-books, blog posts, or social media ‘quick tips,’ Customer Success can tell me everything I need to know to successfully budget for my dream Caribbean getaway. This content can tell me things like “Don’t forget to include hotel taxes and airline fees in your budget,” or “When budgeting for vacation, experts suggest planning on spending $140 a day for food for two.”

Let’s take another example: Hubspot.

HubSpot’s product is an impressively integrated website, social media management, marketing, CRM and Sales platform. Their customer’s desired outcome is to build a successful online business. So, HubSpot’s Customer Success team created a Sales blog for salespeople, a Marketing blog for marketers, and the Hubspot Academy with certification courses in inbound marketing, email marketing, inbound sales, content marketing, sales software, marketing software, design for web and marketing agencies, contextual marketing, and HubSpot design.

They’ve created everything you could possibly need to succeed, in the real world, using their product.

HubSpot is an extreme example – most businesses don’t have the resources for anything so comprehensive. But the principle behind it is something we can all employ.

Give your customers the tools and information they need to do what they need to do.

And this is where Product comes in.

The Product Management Perspective

When you think of user flows, it is typically about what you want users to do next in the product – the functional completion of getting from A-Z.

In your user flows, you’ll see interactions within the product, with options for different paths users can take within the product.

And, once again, success gaps are between every single action.

This is often where you will insert in-app tutorials to cover the usability success gaps, but it’s not the PM’s job alone to think outside the product. That’s what Customer Success is for.

This is what I’ve been recommending to my clients

My clients often have user flows, ready-made, from their Product teams. They may or may not have user flows from their Customer Success teams – and if they don’t, I tell them to create one.

You have to, have to, HAVE TO know where your success gaps are!

Lately, however, I’ve recommended a new way to create user flows: By bringing Product Management and Customer Success to co-create a user flow together.

A user flow that shows what functionally needs to happen…

  • Onboarding/Acquisition/Retention stages
  • Success Milestones
  • Where to move from Freemium to Paid subscription
  • When to ask for Advocacy
  • When to Upsell
  • Markers indicating success gaps
  • Where customers will find their first value, next values, and desired outcomes

It’s a user flow that brings together success inside the product with success outside of the product. And, it opens the door to getting Product’s ideas on ways to close the success gaps from within the product, and Customer Success’s ideas on how to improve UX.

What does this look like?

Something like this:

Product + Success Perspective on Customer User Flow

Clearly, this is a greatly simplified version of a user flow. But do you see the two sides coming together? Do you see the potential within those success gaps for Product + Success brainstorming?

And, most importantly, do you see how this user flow can actually get the user – from a Product and CS perspective – to their Desired Outcome?

Think of it this way: Every success gap presents an opportunity for Customer Success and Product to design a solution to bridge it. Sometimes that solution will be entirely on CS’s shoulders, like creating informative content, how-to’s, or videos. Other times, that solution will require your expertise to create an in-app pop-up tip, milestone celebration, or alert – and, when the success gap is a little too wide for a quick fix, a new feature or expansion.

By mapping both perspectives at the same time, you’re building the customer’s success into your process from the beginning.

The bottom line is…

If you and your Product team are only talking about the functional completion of the product, then it’s time to add a few more chairs to the conference room table – and invite Customer Success in.  Your product will be stickier when the functionality inside the product helps customers achieve their desired outcomes outside of the product.

Start getting free in-app feedback on your product today. Signup for InMoment.

There is a thriving Meetup group of Customer Success professionals here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Customer Success is a new and evolving field, so each monthly gathering is packed with Customer Success Managers from SaaS (Software as Service) companies around San Francisco who want to learn the latest insights from experienced Customer Success leaders. (Note: If you don’t live in the SF Bay Area, you can still benefit from the expertise shared at these monthly meetups.  Whenever possible, Junan Pang and the other organizers post a video of the event on their meetup page. )

In January, the group met up at Rainforest QA to explore a topic that is a big part of every Customer Success organization but may not always get the right level of focus…Net Promoter Score (NPS)!

Running an NPS survey program is easier than ever. No more annual NPS email survey campaigns or analyzing data in spreadsheets. A modern Net Promoter Score platform will survey your customers in real-time, start collecting data, and do the analysis for you.

Can’t get much simpler than that, right?

Actually…

There’s a lot more to NPS than what you see on the surface and every CSM knows it.

Maranda Ann Dziekonski, VP Customer Operations at HelloSign  and Jennifer Ruth, Sr Director of Customer Success at Optimizely shared how they approach Net Promoter Score and tips for getting the most from this metric including whether it should be anonymous, how to improve it, and how an enterprise company should handle feedback.

For starters, the experts shared what NPS is and how to calculate your score. While most tools will automatically calculate it for you, it’s good to know what goes into this important number because it has such a significant impact on your company.

Setting up an NPS program? Get the ebook, The Modern Guide to Winning Customers with Net Promoter Score. Leverage customer feedback and drive growth with a real-time approach to NPS.

What is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

NPS is a one- question survey that asks: “How likely are you to recommend our product to friends of colleagues?” It is generally followed by a single, open-ended question, like “Care to tell us why?” that gives your customer an opportunity to elaborate on the reason behind their score.

Two Step in-app NPS Survey by WootricNPS delivers a board-level metric and the “one number you need to grow.” The survey “metricizes” customer loyalty. It is the most important baseline metric for driving improvement in customer experience. NPS stands above CSAT (customer satisfaction) and customer health scores because it is meaningful and understood across all departments. Your NPS indicates precisely how happy your users are with your product/service, so it holds everyone accountable for customer centricity.

Why does Customer Success use NPS?

One reason Customer Success departments in particular pay close attention to Net Promoter Score is because a low NPS can be an indication of potential churn.

How is NPS calculated?

Customers rate their likelihood of recommending your company on a scale of 0-10. Survey answers 9 & 10 are considered promoters, 7 & 8 are passive, and 0-6 are detractors. You take the percentage of detractors and subtract it from the percentage of promoters to get your score. Here is more on the concept and formula.

NPS scale

NPS = % Promoters – % Detractors

What is an average NPS?

Everyone wants to know — how does my NPS measure up to the competition? In the tech industry, Maranda Dziekonski suggests that a score of 25-50 is average.

Why use the NPS survey?

One reason is that the non-intrusive one-question NPS survey is customer friendly, especially when compared to the user experience of traditional “This will only take 10 minutes” multi-question surveys. As a result, NPS surveys garner much higher response rates. And you want to be hearing from as many customers as possible because, as Dziekonski of HelloSign says, “80% of your detractors are tweeting complaints on social media, 80% of your promoters are those who will contribute to expansion revenue.” Knowing how they feel can help you engage with them in the right way. 

Who should own NPS in your company?

Both experts agreed that the NPS point person should be customer-facing. For example, the NPS champion should be on the customer success or support team. In their experience, other departments such as marketing are less likely to take the key step of closing the loop with the survey respondents. CSMs, on the other hand, will reach out and learn how they can keep the customer as a promoter.

What about Net Promoter Score within enterprise businesses?

Marketing, Product, Sales, Education, Service/Support, and the C-Suite are all stakeholders in the Net Promoter Score program you create. All of them benefit from NPS data. While every department should get the information, only one should own it and drive motivation for improvement. That department should also regularly track what is being done to impact and improve NPS by all departments.

How often should you ask your customers the Net Promoter Score question?

Both experts agree that no customer should be asked more frequently than every six months. However, that doesn’t mean you only execute the survey every six months. For example, if you survey a new user after she completes the on-boarding process and then survey her again every six months, you will have a constant pulse of NPS data coming in all the time from various users. However, you’ll have to decide how often works best for your company.

In-app or Email NPS Surveys?

“I get more responses from in-app users. Where with email, it gets lost in the shuffle. However, if your customers or stakeholders don’t log in to your SaaS product, then in-app won’t work and email is the way to go,” said Maranda Dziekonski.

How often should you run other surveys?

The experts agreed that CSAT should run after every contact with support. However, it’s important to schedule out how often a person will be targeted for feedback; you don’t want to over-survey customers and risk annoying them.

In addition to NPS and CSAT, HelloSign does an annual marketing survey.  Jennifer Ruth said that when she was at Adobe, they sequenced NPS with other surveys and supplemented that data with Customer Advisory Board feedback.

Therefore, it’s important for companies to have one person or function create a centralized customer feedback plan. When other departments need feedback, they can do it through that point person. There is nothing worse that overwhelming customers with too many surveys, and having a gatekeeper and a plan ensures that doesn’t happen.  “Come up with an approach that minimizes customer burden,” said Jennifer Ruth.

On Choosing the Right NPS Platform

You’ll want one that can quickly scale as you grow. Multichannel NPS tool is best. It should be easy to reach customers on your website or in your SaaS, in your mobile app, and through email.

Your NPS platform should handle sampling for you and help you analyze the data for deeper insight. For instance, you can run in-app surveys in your SaaS product and have your NPS platform automatically resend the survey to customers every six months. You might want to analyze data by certain groups — Enterprise versus SMB users, for example — and the right NPS platform will help you do this.

It is also important that your tool integrates with other platforms like Mixpanel, Intercom or Salesforce, so you can easily automate sending the survey based on customer “events” such as use of a particular feature, or a support conversation. Integrations also mean the feedback can be pushed to platforms that you and the other departments are in regularly. For example, when NPS scores and feedback are pushed into Salesforce, account managers can have more informed conversations with customers. They will know before the call if the account might be primed for upsell or need some TLC.

Should NPS surveys be anonymous?

Jennifer Ruth of Optimizely shared that at one company she worked at, the company did maintain customer anonymity. The thinking was that customers would be more honest if they knew they were not identifiable.

Most companies, however, feel that it is critical to know who the survey response is coming from. This is for two reasons. First, and most importantly, it  allows you to respond directly to the customer. You can thank them for their feedback and hopefully addressing any concerns they have. You can also invite happy customers to advocate for your brand. When customers know that their input is valued, they are more likely to respond to future surveys.

Second, knowing who responded enables deeper analysis of NPS data.  Companies often segment responses by persona, plan or other properties for deeper insight into the “Why?” behind the score.

How do you improve NPS?

Several ways to improve NPS were discussed.

The first, and the easiest way to do it, says Jennifer Ruth, is by reading through the open-ended feedback given, identifying the customer’s issues, notifying and working with the departments involved to address the issues of individual customers.

Another approach involves segmenting data –deeper research to understand which cohorts are happy or unhappy, and specifically working on strategies to respond to their input and improve their loyalty. HelloSign segments their NPS data by salesperson, CSM, and product line to thoroughly understand any trends and where there are issues with customer happiness. Since their feedback scores are not anonymous, they can also have CSMs connect with those who are detractors (0-6) to find out why their score is low and help them be more successful with the product.

Improving response rates

Everyone wants to hear from as many customers as possible. HelloSign uses this approach: Before they send an NPS survey via email, they reach out before hand and let users know how important the NPS survey is. Their users know their responses will be reviewed. They also reach out after the survey is sent to remind and encourage response.

Including a deadline for the survey has also helped encourage feedback. They found that getting the email addresses of the people who use the product — not just the person who installed it — and surveying them was critical to getting relevant responses. (In the past, HelloSign noticed that engineers who regularly install their product don’t respond to the survey requests.) 

How do you follow up with Passives and Detractors? 

The good news is that if Detractors responded, they are engaged. Do your research — look at all tickets, analytics before you reach out to the customer. Be direct and be human. People will respond to that authenticity and will give you feedback and tell you how you can help.  Make sure the customer feels empowered.

The NPS survey system is a powerful, yet streamlined way for customer success teams and companies to metricize customer loyalty and work to improve it. A Net Promoter Score program can help you keep customers happy, prevent churn, and improve your product.  

Retain more customers. Sign up today and get started with free Net Promoter Score feedback with InMoment.

Wootric, the Net Promoter Score platform for boosting customer happiness, has launched the Wootric Net Promoter Customer Feedback survey application on the Salesforce AppExchange. Designed to bring the full power of Net Promoter Score (NPS) data to Salesforce users, the integration was created with input from Salesforce customers and NPS power-users like Zoom.us, Entelo and Percolate.  

Download the Wootric-Salesforce integration from the listing on the AppExchange.

With the Wootric-Salesforce integration, day-to-day users of Salesforce —  customer success, sales, marketing and service/support — can improve retention, upsells and customer experience from within Salesforce. The application enriches contact and account records with the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric and Voice of the Customer (VOC) feedback comments in any language. Surveys can also be triggered from within Salesforce.

Highlights of the Wootric Net Promoter Score integration on the AppExchange

Features of the integration today include:

  • Net Promoter Scores and feedback in Contact Records
  • Account level Net Promoter Score and feedback roll-up
  • Seven (7) Net Promoter Score Reports that auto-populate the Wootric Dashboard in Salesforce
  • Ability to trigger NPS surveys from within Salesforce using workflows
  • Direct install that takes minimal developer resources to configure.

Future plans include a similar integration for Wootric’s new Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys.

Account level Net Promoter Score (NPS) data in Salesforce
Account Level Net Promoter Score (NPS) Data in Salesforce

See more Screenshots on Wootric’s AppExchange listing.

Easy Installation, the Right Features

“As I spoke with customers about the features they wanted in a Wootric-Salesforce application, I quickly learned that it is a challenge for Salesforce users to find a customer feedback app that is genuinely easy to install and use,“ said Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer at Wootric. “So we took time to build an integration that is both useful and painless to install.”

Wootric customers are already benefiting from sharing Wootric NPS data across the company through Salesforce. “The Wootric integration came with out-of-the-box reports that are great. Because the fields exist within Salesforce objects, we were able to setup automated alerts to account owners for easy follow-up. We’re able to view average scores at any scale: across company, industry, account size, etc,” said Caitlyn McCormick, Marketing Manager at Percolate. “If you’re looking for scalable NPS reporting and transparency across your organization, I recommend Wootric’s Salesforce integration.”

The real impact of customer feedback in Salesforce

When critical Voice of the Customer data collected by Wootric is accessible in Salesforce, it can align teams around boosting customer happiness.

Customer-centricity improves when customer experience data is available to Salesforce users

This year, 89% of marketers expect customer experience to be their primary differentiator. Now that CMOs are spending as much money on technology as CIOs, companies that use Salesforce are looking for the technology stack that will help them win on the customer experience battlefield.

Wootric’s sophisticated yet light-weight approach to customer experience feedback management is the choice of companies in over 70 countries around the globe. Now, by integrating Wootric with Salesforce, marketers can share customer insights and feedback across functions to improve customer experience.

An easy win for Sales & Success teams: Knowing exactly what the customer is thinking today

With the Wootric-Salesforce integration, Net Promoter Score data sits at the end-user record, buyer record and account level, so it is visible to sales and success teams that are having onboarding, upsell and renewal conversations. Did a user just rave about your new product, or are they disgruntled? How has account NPS been trending since the last call with the buyer? Business intelligence transforms the sales conversation.

Improve customer service and onboarding with triggered surveys

Asking for feedback after a support interaction or at a key journey point is now possible by triggering Wootric surveys based on events in Salesforce. This enables Customer Support or CX teams to assess and improve interactions with people and product.

Zapier vs. Salesforce Integration

Some Wootric customers currently utilize Zapier to move NPS data into Salesforce.  The advantages of using Wootric’s Salesforce integration instead of Zapier include: out of box VisualForce pages for Contacts and Accounts, Account level roll up of NPS, out of box reports and dashboard, workflow and survey triggers, and  historical data migration (which can be costly and difficult with Zapier.)  Using Zapier will continue to be a cost-effective option for companies that do not need these features.

For a more information and a free trial of the Salesforce integration, please contact sales to learn more

Start measuring Net Promoter Score with InMoment

Shot of a group of young business people having a brainstorming session in a modern office

“Our conclusion: superior CX drives superior revenue growth.”
Harley Manning, Forrester

“Customers who had the best past experiences spend 140% more compared to those who had the poorest past experiences”
Peter Kriss, Harvard Business Review

There is a lot of chatter happening in business circles about customer experience (CX) as a growth engine. It’s almost intuitive – you and I both understand how having a great experience affects us as customers. We all have businesses we love, products we’ll follow to the ends of the earth (in hopes they’ll finally go on sale), and websites we follow with almost religious fervor.

As CMO, VP of Success, or Head of Customer Support, you are constantly advocating for customer experience within your company. After all, from the very first moment the second blacksmith’s shop appeared in the village, creating competition for the first blacksmith’s shop, customer experience has been a deciding vote for who gets the business – just as much as price and quality. But as a business owner, or a professional marketer, you can’t afford to go with your gut. To win resources you need data to back up your argument that CX is the future (you know it is).

There is a correlation between CX and revenue growth, and we’ve compiled the research to back it up.

Why the effects of CX have been tricky to track

Customer experience has been treated as a ‘soft’ discipline, and I have a theory as to why. 

We’ve grown up with it. Whether watching Santa send Macy’s store shoppers to competitors in Miracle on 34th Street, or walking into Nordstrom’s shoe department to be followed around by suited young men carrying piles of boxes to the nearest padded chair. We recognize great CX when we experience it ourselves.

However, it’s inherently subjective. Subjective issues – anything based on opinion or emotion – tend to be hard to track. One person’s “helpful” is another person’s “pushy.” Your “attentive,” might be my “stalker.”

Modern tools now quantify CX

But online buyers’ journeys are different than the sales experiences most of us grew up with. With modern tracking and customer surveys, you can tell (often in real-time) whether your efforts are coming off as too much, or too little. You can identify problems and preferences, which allows you to fine tune the end experience for your target customer.

Most importantly, for the first time in human history, we have the tools to track the actual, absolute effect that positive customer experience has on a business’s bottom line. This is transforming the discipline of customer service into the science of CX.

The science of CX starts with measurement. Read the article, A Primer on the 3 Most Important CX Metrics – NPS, CSAT and CES, and start measuring CX today.

It’s no longer just “the right thing to do,” it’s an engine for measurable growth.

“CX is no longer just a discipline; it is the basic ingredient for growth”
Winning on the Battleground of CX, Forrester

Data that ties CX to Revenue

Transaction-based v. Subscription-based CX

“What we found: not only is it possible to quantify the impact of customer experience – but the effects are huge.” – “The Value of Customer Experience, Quantified,” Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review looked at the revenue data from two global $1B+ businesses – one was a transaction-based business, the other was a relationship-based subscription business.

We looked at two companies with different revenue models — one transactional, the other subscription-based — using two common elements that are relevant to all industries: customer feedback, and future spending by individual customers. To see the effect of experience on future spending, we looked at experience data from individual customers at a point in time, and then looked at those individual customers’ spending behaviors over the subsequent year.”

Transactional business models rely on frequency of customer return and how much they spend per visit. Modcloth would be a good example – they want you to come back every day and buy (or at least Save to Wishlist), and come up with ingenious ways to incentivize that behavior.

Subscription-based businesses include Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), or even those recipe kits from Blue Apron. No matter what they’re selling, the model is the same. It relies on retention, cross-sells and upsells.

The results?

After controlling for other factors that drive repeat purchases…

  • Transaction-based: Customers with the best past experiences spend140% more than those with the poorest past experiences.
  • Subscription-based: Customers with the best past experiences have a 74% chance of remaining a member for at least another year; customers with the worst experiences have a 43% chance of being a member one year later. In fact, those who gave the highest CX scores were likely to remain members for another six years.

CX Effects Across Multiple Industries

On Harley Manning’s Blog at Forrester, Manning (Forrester VP and research director) discusses two studies, conducted one year apart, that compared five pairs of publicly traded companies “where one company in each of the pairs had a significantly higher score than the other in Forrester’s Customer Experience Index during the period 2010 to 2015.”

The Customer Experience Index measures each brand on a scale from “Very Poor” to “Excellent” in these six categories:

  • Effectiveness
  • Ease of use
  • Emotion
  • Retention
  • Enrichment
  • Advocacy

Then, Forrester looked at the businesses’ revenue data and built models to calculate the compound annual growth rates for each of the ten companies over those five years.

The results:

The publicly traded companies studied ran the gamut of industry types, from cable to retail to airlines. But in terms of the CX effect, industry didn’t seem to matter as much as the reported CX scores each company received.

In two industries, cable and retail, leaders outperformed laggards by 24 percentage and 26 percentage points, respectively. Even in the industry with the smallest spread, airlines, the CX leader enjoyed a healthy 5 percentage point advantage in global revenue. And when we compared the total growth rate of all CX leaders to that of all CX laggards we saw that the leaders collectively had a 14 percentage point advantage.” – Harley Manning, Forrester

Unlike the Harvard Business Review’s study, Forrester did not control for outside influences that could have driven revenue growth. But, they did conclusively determine that “customers who have a better experience with a company say they’re less likely to stop doing business with the company and more likely to recommend it.” They also observed that companies with superior CX saw increased growth in customers.

And, as Harley Manning points out, “Both of those factors should drive increased growth in customers and, in turn, increased growth of customer revenue.”

Essentially, as CX rises, so does revenue growth.

But there’s another interesting correlation that Forrester’s Customer Experience Index research uncovered. The top performing brands, including USAA, Barnes & Noble, Etsy, QVC and Zappos.com, “achieved a 17% compound average growth between 2010 and 2015 – which is no small feat with many of them already in the top revenue percentiles in their respective industries.” (Salemove.com)

Compared with the brands at the bottom, who only saw a compound average growth of 3%, that is a very wide gap.

To put a possible dollar amount on this, consider: “a one-point score improvement in the CX Index can lead to an increase of $65 million in revenue in the upscale hotel industry,” according to Forrester’s Harley Manning.  

CX spending is on the rise

You may think companies still seem to feel more comfortable spending money on things that do not have a direct impact on customer experience, or that Support and Customer Success teams can still be the last area to receive investment. Think again. Per Forrester research, 71% of business and technology decision-makers reported that improving CX will be a high priority for spending in the next year.

Ready to join the CX revolution?

Now with modern survey platforms, companies of all sizes can measure and improve customer experience at scale.  Forrester’s CX Index measured six attributes of experience and probably took months to collect, analyze and report. However, a lightweight approach to CX improvement using metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) can get you 90% of the way there and not break the bank. 

The key is to start small. Determine your “north star” metric. Get customer feedback, take action, repeat.  Consistently repeat this process. As your company’s customer experience improves, so will your bottomline. 

Start measuring Net Promoter Score for free with InMoment

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

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

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

The fact that understanding and influencing emotion is a vital ingredient for business success is not surprising — it has been the heart and soul of brand efforts. It is also the foundation of the emotion-recognition techniques (measuring physiological responses) currently in pilot for some retailers and old-school ethnographic research. – Forrester 2017 Predictions: Dynamics That Will Shape The Future In The Age Of The Customer

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

Bad things are worse than good things are better

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

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

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

How does this translate to CX?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emotions lead to loyalty – the key to growing SaaS businesses

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive Emotions that drive behavior
Source: Forrester

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

Emotions that weaken customer loyalty
Source: Forrester

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

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

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

How to Measure Emotion in Customer Experience

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

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

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

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

Prove the value of emotion to yourself first

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

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

Win customers for life. Start getting Net Promoter feedback today with InMoment.

Omni-Channel Customer Feedback

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

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

Why take advantage of multiple feedback channels

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

Fight survey fatigue

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

Reach more stakeholders, in the right context

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

Which Customer Feedback Survey Channel is “Best”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scenarios Where Using More than One Customer Feedback Channel Makes Sense

1. Targeting Distinct Stakeholder Groups with Different Survey Channels.

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

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

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

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

2. Reaching Customers Throughout their Journey

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

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

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

3. Surveying Customers Across All Lines of Business

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

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

4. Improving Response Rates among Low Engagement Customers

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

5. Evolve to Reach Your Customers Where They Are

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

You’ve Got Choices

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

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

Start measuring Net Promoter Score in multiple channels with InMoment

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