To many customer experience (CX) practitioners, closing the loop refers solely to solving individual customer problems and making it clear that those concerns have not only been heard, but also addressed. The truth is that, while this process is obviously vital to the success of any organization, it is only the first step into a wider world of continuous improvement.

There are actually two loops that organizations need to close. The first, the inner loop (which you can read more about here), is what we just mentioned—interacting with customers one-on-one to listen to and act upon their feedback. Closing the outer loop, by contrast, refers to making customer centricity and continuous improvement the beating heart of any organization. The outer loop is a macro-level process that seeks to make systemic change. This change is based on a wide data set that includes, but is not limited to, the inner loop. Let’s talk about how to close the outer loop and why a CX program will never be world-class without outer loop successes.

Taking The Loop Company-Wide

Companies can’t have an outer loop process if they keep customer centricity confined to experience and service teams. Rather, organizations need to make enthusiasm for that centricity (and the continuous learning opportunities therein) a company-wide value. When every employee and department catches that enthusiasm, it creates organizational strength the likes of which can carry any brand to the top of its vertical. Employees who are engaged in an outer loop process will feel more connected and will strive for excellence.

This approach makes sense when you consider that customer feedback can be about almost any department or employee. An organization that channels learning opportunities toward a few teams instead of at a cross-company level risks failing to identify or address deep-seated problems. That’s precisely what closing the outer loop is about: identifying improvement opportunities for every facet of an organization and addressing a company’s most foundational issues.

Finally, organizations should close the outer loop for one of the same reasons that they should close the inner loop: the customers who drive a brand’s success deserve —and expect—to be heard if they have feedback. Indeed, a strong outer loop is built on multiple, successful inner-loop interactions.

How Can Organizations Close The Outer Loop?

Now that we’ve gone over a few key reasons for closing the outer loop, let’s talk about some ways that brands can actually pull it off. How can companies design and implement an outer loop process that is inclusive, sustainable, and transparent?  All three of these elements can be tied to employees.

If brands want to see continuous improvement (and foster an appetite for it) across their organization, they need to get their employees involved as major participants in  the outer loop program. Companies need to make it as simple as possible for employees—especially customer-facing ones—to share customer feedback with a centralized CX team. This team can then synthesize data, create priorities, and lobby for resources to make the macro-level changes that are the essence of the outer loop.

If you’re just starting your outer loop program, creating an incentive structure to get the process rolling is a practical step. Resist the urge to make this structure purely financial. Rather, make recognition unique and exclusive to gamify the program. 

If all else fails, feed the team! Lunch roundtables are a great way  to leverage inner loop learnings, introduce the outer loop process, and drive employee engagement.   Additionally, do not limit employee input to customer facing teams. No matter how far away an employee may be from the front lines, everyone’s work influences how companies relate to customers.

Finally, one of the key elements of the outer loop is transparency and communication. While the goal of an outer loop process is to implement systemic and sustained continuous improvement,  companies need to ensure they close the outer loop with employees and customers when a change is implemented as part of such a program. Every company will have a different approach to this vital step, but organizations can at least begin to tackle it by quickly transferring feedback to the appropriate stakeholders, enabling them to communicate effectively to their teams, and to communicate back to customers (if appropriate). 

Continuous Improvement

As any CX practitioner knows, there is no such thing as the “perfect” customer experience. There is always room to improve and become more efficient. True success in all customer experience endeavors, especially closing the loop, stems from not just continuously reacting to feedback, but also being on the lookout for new channels to glean it from.

To that end, successfully closing the outer loop means not only encouraging enthusiasm for continuous improvement, but also encouraging the proactivity that makes it possible to begin with. It also means remembering to reach back out to the employees and customers involved in the process to let them know that their effort and feedback, respectively, weren’t for nought. Companies that embrace this principle, and closing the outer loop as a whole, will be able to achieve meaningful improvement, outpace their competitors, and attain transformational success.

Building the outer loop is a critical piece of responding to customers and creating meaningful, transformative success, but there are other elements to that puzzle, too. Click here to learn more about the outer loop, its counterpart, the inner loop, and other principles of listening to and addressing feedback.

What exactly does the term “closing the loop” mean to you? Is it the part of an experience strategy that is only executed by the most mature customer experience (CX) organizations?  Does it refer to encouraging employees to personalize closing the loop with customers? Since any closed-loop process starts with handling the customer, it’s well worth discussing the inner loop and the importance of resolving individual feedback.

What is The Inner Loop?

The term “inner loop” refers to closing the loop at its most granular level: addressing and resolving feedback submitted by individual customers. The inner loop stands distinct from the outer loop, which denotes instilling a company-wide system of customer service excellence and a commitment to addressing criticism.

The outer loop is important, of course, but it’s built upon dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of one-on-one interactions between customer-facing employees and the individuals whose business sustains that brand. Organizations can’t execute a culture of great customer service if the interactions sustaining that culture are subpar. Because of this, it pays to commit to  closing the inner loop.

Why Close The Inner Loop?

Any company that hopes to maintain continued success (let alone transformational success), will take closing the inner loop seriously. Customers that take the time to voice a concern deserve and expect to be heard. No one enjoys listening to upset customers, but brands that take the time to hear their concerns and formulate solutions will see a surge in both loyalty and retention.

Closing the inner loop can also alert companies to problems and pain points that they were unaware of, giving them the chance to both retain a customer and create a  meaningful, permanent fix. Not every customer who encounters a problem will actually let a brand know, which is why it’s all the more important for organizations to listen to the individuals who do speak up.

Finally, addressing criticism and solving problems allows companies to build one-on-one relationships with individual customers who are questioning their relationship with that business. Like we mentioned earlier, customers will stick with a brand that they feel hears them out, which is perhaps the most crucial reason that firms should dedicate themselves to this process. In short, closing the inner loop boosts customer retention, lowers customer unhappiness, reveals potential problem areas, and provides continuous improvement opportunities.

How Can Companies Close The Inner Loop?

Companies that want to truly close the inner loop need to include their employees in the process. The inner loop consists entirely of employee-customer interactions, so encouraging workers to own their part of this process can vastly improve it. The more personalized an employee makes this experience (and the more passionate they are about it), the better a brand will be at closing the inner loop.

Lending an ear means a lot to customers, but companies need to act on their feedback to close the inner loop. Thus, brands need to create a system that allows them to meaningfully act on feedback. Nothing drives  customers away more than not being heard, so it’s key for organizations to create initiatives that address customer concerns. This is the natural progression from the inner to the outer loop.

Circling Back Around

Closing the inner loop doesn’t end with fixing whatever problem a customer complains about. Rather, companies only truly close the loop by circling back and letting their customers know what their feedback resulted in. Brands should always reach back out to customers, let them know that they were heard, and share how the problem they reached out about was addressed. This will tremendously boost both a customer’s opinion of that brand and their sense of connection to it.

It’s equally important that brands let the employees involved in feedback collection know about these developments. Customer-facing employees who are made aware of the changes that transpired as a result of their diligence will take more pride in their work, ultimately enriching that crucial personalization we talked about earlier. Companies can also incentivize employees who go above and beyond at closing the inner loop, but it doesn’t need to be financial. Creative recognition builds a more sustained cultural impact than a simple spot award.

Building The Outer Loop

Brands that take closing the inner loop seriously will have an easier time creating an effective outer loop process.  A successful outer loop drives a company-wide culture dedicated to solving problems and listening to customers. Both loop-closing processes also enable companies to become aware of pain points, fix them, and reap continued success. Thus, closing the inner loop is not only a vital function in and of itself, but also the foundational building block of organizational achievement.

Want to read the next chapter about how you can close the outer loop? Check out the full article, “The Value of Closing the Loop“!

A brand hasn’t won the battle once it’s acquired new customers. Far from it. Once a company has convinced a customer to buy with it, that brand needs to continually meet or exceed customer expectations (while striving to further develop that relationship) if it hopes for repeat business. 

This, of course, is the science of customer retention, and it can be challenging during the best of times—not to mention times of crisis. Fortunately, customer experience (CX) programs can help. Here’s how brands can use customer experience to retain customers and prove the effectiveness at doing so:

Taking Care of Business

CX programs enable brands to listen for what customers want. Companies can use CX listening tools to identify and react to the trends that might entice new customers, but they can also utilize this same suite of functions to listen to what their current customers are saying.

Of course, customer retention isn’t about trend-chasing. It’s also about building long-term relationships, closing the loop, and harnessing the power of service recovery. 70 percent of customers for whom companies satisfactorily address a problem will stay with that brand, so it’s well worth organizations’ time to invest in retaining those individuals.

Retention in Action

The Coffee Club, Australia’s largest homegrown coffee chain, was able to leverage customer experience to both retain customers and improve the artisanal experience it provides across hundreds of locations.

TCC was able to identify several customer pain points using an experience intelligence platform. When customers were dissatisfied with the brand of eco-friendly paper straws the company was using, TCC was able to process that feedback and make corrections quickly.

Armed with richer data, the brand made insight-driven menu updates and identified more than 30 at-risk customers each month, resulting in greater customer retention.

Clean-Burning CX

There’s another piece to the CX-driven customer retention equation: creating more effective internal processes. After companies collect insights from current customers via these tools, it’s important to craft initiatives that can actually make something of all that feedback. 

The benefits here are many—internal processes can become more streamlined, weak points in customer journeys can be fixed, and customers will be left impressed by the brand’s dedication to resolving their problems. The number-one reason customers leave brands is because they feel unappreciated—taking action on their feedback is a great way to show that companies do, in fact, appreciate them.

The True Benefit of Retention

The number of stats out there about how much cheaper retaining customers is than acquiring new ones is staggering. Closing the loop and retaining customers is important, but it’s also much cheaper than focusing solely on attracting new business. 

Companies can take retention even further by both constantly addressing customer issues and working to improve what draws those brands back to begin with. Businesses that use CX tools to close the inner and outer loops (fixing individual customers’ issues while also redesigning a larger, customer-facing process, respectively), will retain far more customers than firms that can’t be bothered to tackle either challenge. CX practitioners can then point to improved retention, NPS, or a host of other factors to prove their customer retention effort’s ROI.

Want to learn about other economic pillars that can support a successful CX program (and business)? Check out our new infographic “The Four Pillars of CX ROI,” or read more from Eric in his article on business value here!

Surveys are at an interesting crossroads in the modern experience landscape. On one hand, brands have traditionally relied on written questions to solicit feedback and suggestions from customers. However, as technology and social media continue to evolve, the idea of a long survey that’s packed with nothing but questions seems a bit antiquated. Some might even call that type of survey a sore thumb amid all the visual media swarming the internet.

Fortunately, brands don’t have to stick with sending out tomes of questions ad nauseum and hoping for a response. Survey design, like everything else having to do with customer experience (CX) has to stay as limber and ever-changing as the customers it aims to attract. There are many design elements to consider here, but multimedia feedback is arguably the most important.

Worth (60) Thousand Words

There’s a strong case for allowing customers to submit visual feedback instead of just written answers, and it’s that people process images about 60,000 times faster than text. Quite an order of magnitude. While brands shouldn’t necessarily do away with written questions altogether, customers’ propensity for pictures means that image and video upload options must be included in surveys.

Additionally, customers don’t just process images faster than text—they tend to attach more meaning to them, too. This means that if they have a chance to enclose the images and videos they care about in feedback, they’re more likely to find the entire experience more rewarding. Brands benefit from this cycle as well, because a piece of authentic visual media is much more powerful than a written response.

Uploading Meaning

There’s something to be said for the emotional power derived from an image, especially within the context of customer experience. Customers don’t “just” record themselves unboxing a product or take a selfie with one—they’re conveying their wider experience using a meaningful medium. This is the root of visual media’s feedback effectiveness.

Brands that allow customers to submit images or videos with their other survey feedback can tap into this emotional power as well. As previously mentioned, people process images much faster than text. Combine this heightened speed with the added meaning conveyed by an image, and the result is a piece of feedback that CX practitioners can process faster and act upon more meaningfully. Since more meaningful feedback is one of the hallmarks of any best-in-class CX program, it’s important to give customers the ability to express themselves through multimedia options.

Going Deeper

Once brands gather more meaningful feedback from multimedia surveys, they have an opportunity to enact truly meaningful change. These changes are also much more likely to reflect what customers are concerned about because images and videos are much more unequivocal than words.

Think about it—a written phrase like “the checkout process was muddled” is open to many interpretations. By contrast, a video of a customer interacting with an automated checkout machine is specific, impactful, and much more likely to let brands learn exactly what the problem is. 

Once brands learn precisely what customers love or what went wrong, they can take steps to enhance that offering or correct the process in question. In short, multimedia feedback enables everyone to win. Customers are more likely to provide feedback because they can communicate in ways they prefer, while companies glean much more specific and relevant feedback.

The Human Connection

Multimedia options enable brands to better experience a customer’s emotional connection to them. Reading written answers is one thing, but hearing stories through voice feedback, watching body language through video feedback, and seeing facial expressions in an image adds context that writing simply cannot convey. This type of feedback also shows the customer’s passion and emotional connection to the issues enabling CX leaders to help internal leaders connect with the customer.  Brands can turn that context into action, which adds another layer of meaning to customers’ images, videos, and recorded messages.

In short, multimedia feedback transforms feedback from mere questionnaires into human connections. It enables brands to better harness emotion, which in turn empowers them to enact far more meaningful change. That potential for meaningful change is the crux of multimedia feedback, which is why it’s key for any brand hoping to reap transformative success to include it.

Want to read more about how you can effectively listen to your customers, employees, and the greater market? Check out this InMoment Point of View, “How to Achieve Meaningful Listening Through Surveys” today!

With over 15 years of experience in the customer experience (CX) space, I have seen multiple companies employ training efforts to get their employees involved in new CX programs and initiatives. I have witnessed this process from the perspective of an Account Manager, Implementations Manager, a member of the Product Team, a Business Operations Manager, and now as the Director of Learning Services.

Throughout my experience, I’ve seen successes, but I’ve also seen teams fail to execute a training approach that actually engages employees. The theme across these failures is that their approach is time consuming, over complicated, and essentially inactionable. The truth is that while everyone knows training is important, it is easy for it to get lost in the list of day-to-day tasks—especially if the approach isn’t accessible. 

In order to set yourself—and your business—up for success, you need to avoid over-complicating things when it comes to rolling out employee training for your new program, but that’s easier said than done. To get you started, I’ve outlined 5 easy steps to help you craft an effective CX training approach for your business.

Step #1: Designate a Training Leader

As I started above, everyone knows that training is important. However, this understanding isn’t where most companies fall short; the failure is most often in the execution.

That is why it is so important to start your efforts by naming a project manager or leader to be directly responsible for your training efforts. This person can be the program champion, someone from your internal training team, or a representative from HR. 

Regardless of who this person is, it is their job to make sure that every employee participates in the training program. This means that they need to have the tools to track employee participation effectively—and to share results. 

How you track doesn’t need to be fancy, it could be as simple as an Excel or Google Sheet housed in a common area within the company, or it could be as complex as your work’s HR portal. By monitoring who has completed what, you’ll be able to keep the ball rolling for continuous success (and you’ll be all set up to execute step two).  

Step #2: Hold People Accountable

After finding your CX training owner, you need to create a way to hold employees accountable for completing their training. At the end of the day, we are all human and most of us need a carrot or a stick to be inspired to finish a task. 

Many businesses will create a goal or key performance indicator (KPI) directly related to training—this can be something as simple as a quarterly compliance record or something a little more involved. For example, one of our clients found a way to gamify their employee training by creating a board game for team members to play together. This way, the CX training was a fun team building exercise that also got employees actively engaged in the program.

No matter what your accountability method is, it will help employees know they are responsible for completing a set amount of CX training by a certain date. Deadlines are important drivers that everyone can understand, so use them!

Step #3: Make Training Easy to Complete

Now that you’ve designated your training leader and found a way to hold your team accountable, it’s time to make training easy to complete. When faced with a large task, people will be more likely to complete it if:

1. They know what needs to be done: Make a simple list of all required training and make this list accessible.  
2. They know when it has to be done: Send regular reminders via email or program notifications into your HR platform   
3. It is easy to find and complete: Locate training links in a place people often visit during their work day (like Slack, and internal sharing site, or learning management system.)

Remember: the easier you can make training to consume, the more likely your team will be to complete it. 

Step #4: Provide Opportunities for High Performers to Help

Now that you’ve set your learning program up for success, invite others in to join the party. As you curate your program, there will be folks who naturally rise up and quickly become subject matter experts. 

Successful training programs will make an effort to hold up those CX training rockstars as an ideal that the rest of the organization can aspire to. For example, if one region is doing exceptionally well, share their success with others to inspire them to step up to the plate as well. 

Encouraging your people to celebrate high performers and come up with their own creative ways to get their coworkers involved curates a team mentality and helps to foster a customer-centric culture.

Step #5: Celebrate!

Lastly, celebrate those wins! When people have successfully completed the assigned work, reward them. When you reward them, do it publically. Everyone likes to be recognized—plus, there is nothing like a little bit of healthy competition to motivate people. 

Post results in a place all can see—this can look like sending out a congratulatory email to the team that calls out those who have finished CX training, or putting a “congratulations” in via your internal rewards program. Again, it doesn’t have to be fancy—just remember to do it! 

If you follow these easy steps, you’ll be on your way to implementing a successful CX training program. Leadership, accountability, accessibility, team work, and rewards will pave the way to the desired result: a CX program that is both highly successful and fully utilized from top to bottom. 

If you’re looking for more content that will help you drive employee engagement, check out this piece on employee incentives. You’ll learn what’s wrong with traditional approaches and how you can create a system that actually works in “Considering Employee Incentives for CX Success? 5 Ideas for Better Engagement.” 

The Net Promoter Score® (NPS) and the wider ecosystem to which it belongs, the Net Promoter System®, have long been organizations’ preferred means of evaluating everything from employee and customer satisfaction to internal processes. The reasons for NPS’s popularity are many, but its most attractive features are its speed, ease of use, and its ability to distill the state of almost any experience, department or function into a single number.

NPS’s benefits have earned it plenty of acclaim since its 2003 debut, but the metric has faced skepticism in recent years from some CX experts. Some of these practitioners have gone so far as to proclaim that NPS is “dead” and that organizations should leave it behind. What follows is a quick, honest look at these claims and at NPS’s place in today’s experience landscape.

It’s All About the Numbers(?)

One reason some CX practitioners shy away from the Net Promoter Score is because it’s just a number. How, these experts contend, can a simple number tell organizations what changes to make or what initiatives to undertake in order to achieve transformational success, let alone improve their score?

It’s true that the Net Promoter Score is “just” a number, but companies that focus solely on the metric aren’t tapping its full potential to begin with. Instead, organizations need to look to the deeper movement behind that number: the Net Promoter System. The Net Promoter System promotes customer centricity, continuous improvement, and learning from customer feedback. These principles are hardly outdated in today’s experience landscape, especially since they espouse finding meaning beyond the metric.

The Perils of Scoreboard-Watching

Relying more on the Net Promoter System’s values than the Net Promoter Score may sound well and good, but it also raises a natural question: if the System promotes the principles that the modern experience landscape thrives on, what’s the point of using the score at all?

First, let’s take a step back to discuss the relationship between the Net Promoter Score and companies’ expectations of it. Far too many organizations expect change to come about as a result of merely observing their score. Frankly, this expectation is a cultural problem, not the fault of NPS. Change is no less difficult to attain within an organization than in any other arena of life or business, and as with those other arenas, the only thing organizations can do to affect change is to work hard. Once organizations labor to apply the Net Promoter System’s principles, the metric will take care of itself and finally become an accurate indicator of a company’s standing.

Additionally, while endeavoring to understand the relationship between NPS and a brand’s financial incomes, some organizations may find that another metric, such as OSAT or Likelihood to Repurchase, suits them better. That’s great, but the principles behind the Net Promoter System still apply and can be leveraged even in those other contexts.

NPS Lives

Organizations that shift their focus from the metric to the meaning that the Net Promoter System provides can execute NPS with modern, data-ingesting experience intelligence tools. After all, the Net Promoter System helped bring about the wider customer experience world to begin with (it’s no coincidence that CX began proliferating shortly after NPS’s introduction).

Organizations can use the Net Promoter System and data-ingesting platforms toward the same end: capturing the voice of the customer at its most relevant moments, analyzing sentiments, and delivering those insights to stakeholders that can turn them into action. Because of this, NPS is far from dead—the values and internal business practices it promulgates are relevant to any organization that seeks meaningful, transformational success.

Want to read more about the state of NPS in 2020? Read the full article for free today!