Wootric + Intercom: Closing the Net Promoter Score Loop

Here at Wootric we're big fans of Intercom. We use it ourselves to have meaningful conversations with our customers. Not surprisingly, our customers also tend to share the same passion for reaching their own customers in product, in the experience.

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Here at Wootric we’re big fans of Intercom.   We are a customer feedback platform and we use Intercom ourselves to have meaningful conversations with our customers.   Not surprisingly, our customers also tend to share the same passion for reaching their own customers where they are most likely to respond.

We also believe that asking customers for feedback without proper follow-up is a cardinal sin in customer experience management.  When survey feedback, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS),  is coming in from your customers every day, it becomes something that you need to manage proactively.  We’ve taken steps to address that by making follow-up an integrated part of the Wootric dashboard.  But we also know that many of our customers manage their user conversations outside of Wootric.  Rather than re-invent the wheel, why not combine forces?

And so here we are, making the connection for Intercom users between measurement and proactive followup.

Wootric + Intercom = Customer Love

Here is how you can use Wootric in Intercom to make the most of Net Promoter Score feedback:

Note: This process is essentially the same for our Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys.

1) Wootric samples your user base to collect NPS score / feedback

2) Individual scores and responses get posted to your Intercom dashboard, and are also recorded as an event in the user record.

Intercom NPS
View a user’s recent NPS data (i.e. score, comment, date)

Wootric NPS Data Filters in Intercom
Filter users by NPS data, such as score and comment

3) Then the fun begins.  Some ideas:

  • Trigger Intercom messages to a user based on the score they provided.  Perhaps you’d like to ping your detractors (scores of 0-6) that chose not to leave you a detailed comment, asking for additional feedback.  Or maybe thank your promoters (scores of 9 or 10) and invite them to your referral program.  You set the rules to drive meaningful interactions!
  • Leverage NPS segments for future Intercom communication campaigns.   This could be something like releasing and communicating new features to your promoters first.  Or perhaps targeting specific passives with additional on-boarding to important features they might have missed.

Intercom Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Detractor auto message triggered off an NPS score

Ready to Get Started?

Here are two ways to implement:

  1. If you are an Intercom customer, simply click on this button to create a Wootric account (or sign in) and instantly connect it to your Intercom account.
    Intercom
  2. Use Zapier. With a free Zapier account, you can pass Wootric data to Intercom, or other applications, without touching code.

If you are doing other creative things with Wootric and Intercom we’d love to hear about it!

The Bottom Line:

Measuring your NPS is just the beginning of your journey.  Follow up in the ways that work best for your business, whether it’s through us, through Intercom, or another tool.  We are here to support you in connecting the dots.

Start measuring Net Promoter Score, CSAT or Customer Effort Score for free with InMoment

While many companies operate under the model of “If we build it, they will come,” the most successful companies know it’s essential to understand and actively engage with a targeted customer base.

At InMoment, we believe that no one owns the customer, but instead that everyone owns the experience. Both the customers and the company equally share in the brand experience, and both carry equal importance in decision making.

To develop strong customer relationships, brands must fully understand how and why their customers choose to interact with their company. In other words, they must learn to empathize.

Understanding Empathy

To begin, let’s explore what empathy actually is. Empathy is frequently confused with sympathy, when in reality, they can have greatly different outcomes when applied.

Both sympathy and empathy involve relating to and having concern for the feelings of other individuals. Sounds good, right? In most circumstances, either sympathy or empathy are appropriate responses. However, when developing a relationship with customers and clients, empathy always wins.

Sympathy is feeling compassion for another person. Sympathizing requires little emotional investment or intellectual effort and can often be misconstrued as pity. Empathy, in contrast, is the act of projecting one’s self into another person’s thoughts, feelings, personality, and circumstance to gain greater understanding—walking a mile in their shoes.

The Benefits of Empathy

So what does empathy have to do with your customer relationships? People want to build loyalty and relationships with brands. By knowing your ideal customer and understanding how to attract them—in other words, empathizing with their experience—you open the door to developing a great relationship.

With this relationship comes success. When you understand your target customer, you can fine-tune your brand experience to better meet their specific needs and wants. In turn, companies experience the following benefits:

  • Understanding what drives loyalty towards their brand
  • Learning how to turn negative feedback into an opportunity
  • Increasing customer referrals and brand advocacy
  • Maximizing the efficacy of InMoment’s customer feedback products

Actively listening and engaging with your customers’ perspectives—whether through one-on-one interviews, in-person observations, or through InMoment’s customer experience software—provides the highest ROI on your market research.

Creating an Empathy Map

What does this look like in practice? How do you actually get to know your customer? Copyblogger recently produced a comprehensive guide to understanding your customers’ worldview. Inspired by the user experience world, Copyblogger outlined the process of creating empathy maps for your ideal customers. These maps address four key areas in which customers interact with brands: thinking, seeing, feeling, and doing.

Copyblogger suggests gathering several key players to map out your brand experience, including stakeholders, customer support leads, vendors, product developers, and marketers. In this exercise, you’ll sit down together to discuss both experience and specific questions (What do our customers say or feel when they use your product? What are customers hearing from other people who use the product?), along with more personal, worldview questions (How do our customers think about their hopes and fears? How do our customers interact with family and loved ones?).

Some of these questions may seem fairly abstract in comparison to typical market research practices. This is what makes the approach such a success. By striving to understand your customers’ thoughts and feelings beyond the confines of your brand experience, you better understand your customer as a person, not just a source of revenue.

Dr. Frank Luntz describes the necessity of this abstraction in his book Words that Work. “The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself right into your listener’s shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart.” This “imaginative leap” will lead you to uncover the answers to questions that can truly revolutionize your business.

A Few Questions from the Imaginative Leap:

  • What drives my customer to spend their money at my business?
  • What pain points does my customer experience in their average day?
  • Can I resolve any of these pain points?
  • What pain points do customers experience with my brand?
  • In what unique way can I improve my customers’ lives?

InMoment’s technology is the perfect complement to these empathy exercises. We develop all of our products to capture the voices, feelings, and stories of your customers and understand them in our platform.

If it looks like text analytics, behaves like text analytics, and is called text analytics, it’s probably text analytics, right? Not necessarily.

A text analytics solution may identify keywords and phrases, but that does not ensure any level of comprehension or insight. Text analytics should help tell the customer story and empower your brand to make operational adjustments in an instant.

All technology is not created equal. Take a long hard look at your current text analytics solution and decide for yourself if it’s the real deal.

Industry-Tuned Models

A generic text analytics solution can be a powerful addition to your Voice of the Customer (VoC) program. A text analytics solution fine-tuned to the nuances of your industry, on the other hand, is invaluable. Many text analytics programs use the same classification model—regardless of industry. As a result, accuracy suffers and customer insights are potentially overlooked. Take our custom-built Monitor™ analytics for example, where we’re able to categorize incoming customer comments in real time, providing your brand with relevant and actionable insights the minute the data comes in.

Real-Time Analysis

Customer “moments of truth” are formed instantaneously. Your text analytics solution should be able to keep up with critical functions, which operate in real time, and allow for instant notifications on key issues, questionnaire branching changes, and management reporting. As management sees spikes or changes in customer issues, they can drill down with the touch of a button and view the individual comments fueling a customer experience trend.

Speech-to-Text

Speech-to-text technology allows customers to leave voice comments and have their words transcribed and analyzed in real time. This capability enables management to listen to the emotion conveyed by the customer and opens up additional—and less time-consuming—channels for customers to share their experiences.

Insight Accuracy

The average recall score—the percentage of relevant words or phrases retrieved by a text analytics model—of your standard solution is around 50%. That’s essentially the same odds as flipping a coin. Your chosen text analytics solution should have a recall score that clocks in around 90%. Those are good odds.

Comprehension over Computation

Many text analytics solutions employ a statistical model, which counts words. What they tend to be missing is the use of a linguistic model using a natural language processing (NLP) engine. InMoment’s NLP is powered by IBM’s Watson technology and enables our computers to read customer comments and uncover the customer story. Both solutions have their merits, but a linguistic model excels at uncovering experiential customer data.

The Customer Experience Intelligence Cloud™

Wondering what the Customer Experience Intelligence Cloud™ is? It’s the platform in which we gather loads of experiential customer information. Some of the most valuable data we collect comes in the form of unstructured customer comments. Because your brand should be able to mine insights from any feedback channel, we’ve embedded our text analytics inside of all our products and services.

3 Tips to be Customer-Centric for Growth: Reflections on GrowthBeat

I heard about Venture Beat's GrowthBeat conference a little last minute, and made the decision to attend. As a marketer and a founder of a tool often leveraged by marketers, I was interested to hear the latest on growth (who doesn't?) and connect up with other marketing minds in the tech community.

I heard about Venture Beat’s GrowthBeat conference a little last minute and made the decision to attend.  As a marketer and a founder of a platform often leveraged by marketers, I was interested to hear the latest on growth (who isn’t?) and connect up with other marketing minds in the tech community.

GrowthBeat brought together some excellent speakers and panels — great case studies of how companies that have been willing to push the boundaries, iterate quickly, and leverage new tools are learning and finding success.  But a few themes resonated for me at the higher-level–themes that spoke to the future of marketing, the future of organizations, and the role of the voice of the customer to drive growth.

Read More…

Recently I completed a customer satisfaction survey for United Airlines after a particularly bad experience even by airline standards.

I actually wanted to be contacted by the airline, but there is no place in their survey for a hot alert (request to be contacted). Instead at the end of their survey it says, “Comments or issues on a particular travel experience requiring a response or resolution should be submitted through the appropriate department as listed on our Contact Us page.”  Whoa! The survey is not being conducted to address any issues I might have had? Why am I doing this survey anyway?

All bad jokes aside, this is a very good question.

Customer satisfaction surveys are used for several different purposes, each of which is important to the company that wishes to continuously monitor and improve the customer experience they provide. Top objectives include:

  1. Fix any meaningful problems that have occurred for customers with the company’s products or service.
  2. Assess the performance of its customer-facing units (retail locations, call centers, digital care team, etc.) and staff (salespeople, call center reps, etc.).
  3. Improve its processes and standards for delivery.
  4. Understand customers’ needs as they use the company’s products or services so the company can help them have a better overall experience.

If you have read any recent blogs I’ve posted, you know that I’ve written a lot about Number 4 on the list, as it has been an area of customer experience that’s been largely ignored by customer experience management programs.  Increasingly, customers want companies to engage with them differently, treat them as individuals, and show they are valued throughout their journey.

Clearly, the United survey is not geared towards understanding my needs or helping me have a better overall experience with them, nor is it trying to fix meaningful customer problems, which in and of itself is pretty astounding. That said, I can clearly see in its construction that it’s likely geared toward Numbers 2 and 3, assessing performance and improving processes. Make no mistake, I am in no way saying that these objectives are not important. They are. As a customer, I’m glad that a company cares about coaching and training its people and fixing processes. However, I am a lot less glad if they aren’t dealing with my problems and don’t seem to care about me as a customer.

An effective customer experience program will address all four of these objectives. To do this, a company may need several different but integrated components. Effective measurement of processes and performance of people requires a focus on transactions and traditional measurement that uses a consistent and robust methodology, whereas a focus on customers as individuals requires a unique and individualized approach that follows a customer periodically throughout his or her tenure as a customer.

Any contact with a customer is an opportunity to identify any issues or problems that customers are experiencing and correct them.

Whichever kind of engagement the company is having with a customer, it should be clear why the customer should care and how it will return value to them. If United told me it was to improve performance and gave me examples of what they have done with survey results, I might better understand why they ask the questions they do and understand why I should continue to complete their survey each time I receive it.

Following customers throughout their journey and helping them prospectively is a new imperative. Traditional transactional satisfaction studies remain important but should be updated and integrated with this new and important objective.

Has your company adopted a comprehensive customer experience measurement and management approach? Tell me what you think.

By the way, has anyone been delayed 3 hours at a major hub when their pilot just didn’t show up even though he’d just landed there from another city? Just thought I’d ask.

Nan Russell, head of our Global Centre of Excellence, offers her expert advice to set your international customer experience management (CEM) programme on the right path and ensure your brand doesn’t get ‘lost in translation’.

The potential of going global with a brand is often an attractive prospect. Establishing an international customer base, favourable overseas economic conditions, and competitive cost of goods mean many companies seek to expand into new international markets. Their success depends on how well their brand offering is received by customers in each market, and a robust customer feedback programme is an essential foundational element to shape a brand’s development. But international consumer engagement is beset with pitfalls for the ill-prepared, as several well-publicised cases have highlighted.

We’ve all heard of some infamous international brand faux pas. Vauxhall had to relaunch its Nova model as the Corsa in Spain upon discovering the literal translation of ‘Nova’ in Spanish is ‘it won’t go’. Similarly, when fast food giant Kentucky Fried Chicken opened its first restaurant in Beijing, its famous slogan ‘Finger-lickin’ good’ was translated to ‘We’ll eat your fingers off’! In fact, numerous world-famous companies have stumbled when expanding into new markets, risking damage to their brand reputation and sales.

These days, social media quickly amplifies such mistakes around the globe, meaning those responsible for brand reputation have to work even harder to avoid the ‘bad translation’ (and resulting schadenfreude) at every stage of the customer journey. While it is essential for brands to engage customers in the language of the location, achieving this across borders and during every customer interaction poses a number of major challenges.

Don’t just translate the right words; use the right tone

It’s certainly not as easy as simply translating an invitation or survey from one language to another. Brands seeking to communicate their own brand values overseas must also consider local cultural values, rules of conduct, tone, and linguistic nuances such as humour and slang. Does the formal use of honorifics such as ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ set the right tone for your brand in Japan, where their use is often mandatory? Or is your brand casual and breezy, and would your customers be more comfortable with a less formal approach?

Measure on the right scales

The cultural impact on market research scoring patterns is one of subtle complexity. On a 5-point scale—with 5 being the best score—does a 4 mean the same thing in Germany and Japan and Mexico? German schools use a rating system in which 1 is the best score and 5 would be near failing. Knowing the correct scoring scales to use in each market is crucial.

Use the right interpretation

Market and cultural differences in relative ‘hard’ or ‘easy’ grading complicate the use of American-designed indices, such as the Net Promoter Score. Customers in some markets would be shocked that their scores of an 8 (on a 10-point scale) are not considered Promoters. There is wide variance in how customers in different markets rate great service; it is important not to assign meanings that they did not intend.

Set the right targets

Once you’re using the right scales, how do you drive improvement? Many businesses want to set a single, global target. For example, every market is expected to achieve 70% on Overall Satisfaction. But the reality is that goal may be simply out of reach for markets that are ‘hard raters’; an Overall Satisfaction score of 65% may be much harder to attain in Germany than a 75% is in Italy.

The meaningful comparison typically is not the score but the improvement ratio. By targeting a level of improvement (for example, all markets are expected to improve six percentage points in the next fiscal year), each market can identify ways to drive their improvement within the relevant context.

Provide the right support

As part of that drive for consistent improvement, it is not enough to report scores; it is essential to support in-market teams with action planning tools. Location managers are often fluent in languages other than those spoken by the corporate executives. Reporting and action planning must be delivered in the language of the people driving the business on the ground.

Feedback: Bagels and the Art of Real-time Customer Listening

Feedback is a powerful concept. The word itself sets you up for improvement—even success. And, so, for your online business (as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider with customers, a blogger with an audience, or an e-commerce product with a market), you want to solicit—heart-in-hand—feedback.

Feedback is a powerful concept.  The word itself sets you up for improvement—even success.  And, so, for your online business (as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider with customers, a blogger with an audience, or an e-commerce product with a market), you want to solicit—heart-in-hand—feedback.

Getting Enough Responses

You are looking for feedback in any form:

Great, small, lean, prolific.

Negative, positive, optional, specific.

Feedback from fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins.

Feedback by tens and dozens.

Use a feedback tool that increases the likelihood that your audience will respond.   That is, for your SaaS app, blog, or e-commerce site, don’t use email surveys—ask for feedback inside your product.  Email surveys can hope for open rates of 20% and even lower response rates.  In-app surveys regularly achieve response rates of over 40%.

Context is Everything

In-app NPS Wootric
In-app NPS Wootric Survey

Feedback is nothing without context.  Read More…

The inexorable rise of mobile technology continues to shape the way we shop, dine out and use our leisure time. According to the latest figures from e-tail industry body IMRG and advisory firm Capgemini, while total online sales rose 18% year-on-year in December to £11.1bn, sales via mobile devices doubled to £3bn. Indeed, mobiles and tablet computers are now used for nearly 6% of all retail sales as Brits embrace shopping anytime, anywhere.

This trend presents both a challenge and an opportunity for brands in the eating and drinking out sector. With consumers increasingly carrying the technology around in their pockets, brands also have the opportunity to communicate with customers more frequently, and savvy brands are using technology to improve their guests’ experience.

Tablets are a driving force behind innovations in the front-end restaurant customer experience, whether in a quick service or a fast casual establishment. As more and more restaurants embrace tablet technology, there are several ways that they are revolutionizing the restaurant experience for brands and consumers.

1. Seamless Dining Experiences

Inspired by the ease of exceptional online buying events, guests value restaurants that provide seamless, hassle-free experiences from the moment they are seated through to the moment they pay. In many cases, restaurants are using tablets to offer table-side payment or other activities that streamline and improve the guest’s dining experience.

2. Cut the Queues

Fast food restaurants are using tablets to speed up the food ordering process and cut down on waiting time for customers. Orders can be taken from queuing customers on a wireless tablet to be ready for quick collection and payment at the counter, thus creating a positive brand experience.

3. Enhanced Interaction

Opportunities for enhanced interaction are prime targets for restaurants interested in improving customer experiences with tablet technology. Restaurants on the leading edge of tablet deployments have installed tablets at tables, allowing guests to interact with menus, place orders, pay bills and perform a range of other self-serve functions. Similarly, restaurants are exploring the use of promotional content or pay-as-you-go games that provide entertainment or customer engagement opportunities while guests wait for their food to arrive. These kinds of activities drive bottom-line improvements by leveraging customer experiences to increase loyalty.

4. “On the Fly” Data Insights

Tablets offer a non-threatening and engaging resource that restaurants can use to capture customer insights. While many guests are hesitant to provide personal information when they pay their bills or at the request of their servers, they are less resistant to providing data on their own terms, especially if the submission of data is tied to a discount or contest. Multi-site restaurants can leverage tablets to capture data insights at the local level, helping them tailor the customer experience to the desires and preferences of local consumers.

5. Guest Reviews

A great time to capture guest reviews is before they leave the restaurant, while details of the experience are top of mind. Willingness to provide feedback is also much greater with this immediacy, since even the most satisfied guests often don’t feel compelled to rate their experience later. In the restaurant industry, reviews are a key element in customer acquisition, and table-side tablets offer a ready-made resource for encouraging guests to share feedback about service, cuisine or other aspects of their experience. Reviews captured via tablets can then be used to build brand reputation and modify the customer experience based on guests’ suggestions.

6. Multichannel Feedback

Consumers use many different touch points to connect with the restaurant brands that are important to them. Surveys and other tools delivered on tablet devices create feedback that can be shared across all available channels, increasing the impact of brand advocacy and positive mentions. In particular, restaurants need to prioritize the use of tablets to capture feedback that can be distributed via social channels.

7. Enhanced Employee Engagement

One of the largest challenges with customer feedback is how to use the results when they arrive. Tablets can help to reshape this challenge by bringing results to life in a meaningful way to customer facing staff. Data visualization capabilities on tablets are extensive, but again the challenge is more than simply presenting guest feedback in a “pretty” way; it’s presenting it in a meaningful way that motivates staff and will drive guest experience improvement.

The real innovation in the use of tablet technology is that it enables restaurant brands to forge meaningful, direct connections among guests, restaurant managers and their staff. The deployment of table-side tablets gives guests more immediate options, inviting them to participate in activities that strengthen their relationship with the brand.

Just as importantly, tablets can significantly improve a restaurant’s ability to capture feedback and provide local guest insights—important factors in the brand’s ability to create and deliver enhanced customer experiences.

We are now on Part Three in this four-part series on VoC success. Check out the first two keys now if you missed them earlier: 1. Get full executive sponsorship and 2. Go beyond surveys to build an ongoing customer connection. These two keys will drive your third key to VoC success.

Key to Success #3: Make Customer Feedback Data Actionable at the Location Level

Every location manager brings a unique skill set and level of maturity to their job. This creates slight variations in the leadership approach at each location and even each shift. These variations in leadership aren’t a problem in and of themselves—but when regular communication of key deliverables is lacking, it can lead to significant straying from the brand promise.

With clear communication of location-level deliverables, however, a wide variety of management styles can be equally successful in engaging employees and creating a great customer experience. The real problem, then, is that most traditional enterprise feedback management (EFM) reporting does not communicate the right things well, if at all.

Some reports may address only generic companywide talking points that don’t specifically apply to a single location. Others get down to local data but never make the figures understandable to those of us without a PhD in statistical analysis. Location managers simply don’t have the time or training to wade through piles of data tables and reports to get the answers they need.

Simplicity Is Quick, and Quick Is Empowering

The key is to empower location managers with tools that will help them to quickly identify local, branded needs, so they can take the necessary actions (in their own management style) to implement positive changes in the customer experience.

Take our Coach Local Dashboard for example. It was designed specifically for location managers to take the complexity out of customer feedback data, helping them to deliver consistent and memorable customer experiences. Through interactive visual cues, the dashboard eliminates the need to search through complex reports in search of customer experience improvement insights and leverages prescriptive reporting technology to set focus areas.

As a result, location managers can create, edit and execute action plans that address these challenges, as well as monitor and track progress against their goals toward encouraging return visits and increasing your brand strength.

The dashboard also facilitates social sharing of community-sourced content, giving location managers insight into a living best practices library of what’s working for the top-performing locations and how it could be applied to their team.


Just one more key to go in this series on VoC success! Stay tuned for the final installment, where I will discuss the fourth and final key to VoC success: Use research and analysis to adapt to evolving program needs.

In part one of this four-part blog series, I discussed the first key to VoC success: Get full executive sponsorship. Today, I will focus on the second key.

Key to Success #2: Go beyond surveys to build an ongoing customer connection

Great VoC programs begin with your customers. The conversations you build with them help you better understand their experience with your brand. Because an experience is something that happens internally, conversation is currently the only way to gain insight into customer expectations—and how well you’re doing at meeting those expectations.

Listening to customers regularly and conversationally helps to identify the systemic trends and issues needing to be addressed to keep customers coming back. It can also help drive referrals and advocacy within customers’ circle of friends and followers.

The most common approach today for starting this customer conversation is sending out customer surveys through the devices and technology customers use, and in a language customers understand. This is a critical element to any successful VoC program; however, there is a rapidly growing source of untapped feedback circulating amongst consumers today that brands have yet to fully leverage:

Social media and online review sites

These channels are quickly becoming the preferred method for customers to voice opinions about their brand experiences. As a result, brands are presented with the challenge of continuously improving and delivering positive consumer experiences.

As a brand, you can only drive exceptional customer experiences through a deep understanding of the overall experience customers encounter at your locations. This means listening to customer feedback from any source available, and using it to drive improvements. Companies are using VoC solutions to gain the power and insight into their customer experiences through a combined “multichannel” feedback approach. This not only paints a more comprehensive picture of the customer experience; it can save time by eliminating the need to jumping from, and dig through, multiple reports.

With these solutions, all sources of customer comments—customer surveys, social media, online review sites, and other applicable feedback channels—are all aggregated into a single view giving brands the right information, at the right time, to drive the right changes to enhance the customer experience.

This previously untapped combination of actionable insights can identify the steps needed to deliver the experiences customers have come to expect in today’s world, resulting in increased return visits, improved brand loyalty, and active advocacy.

Stay tuned for the third part of this blog series—Make customer feedback data actionable at the location level—to learn how location managers can take the complexity out of customer feedback data to deliver consistent and memorable customer experiences at their restaurants, retail locations, grocery stores, and banks.

You’ve probably heard some version of Benjamin Franklin’s famous words, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” I propose an addendum to this list: negative customer feedback.

As much as we’d like to please every customer all of the time, it’s just not a realistic expectation. Negative feedback is inevitable. And that’s a good thing.

Every time a customer leaves negative feedback, they’re providing your brand with an opportunity to improve the customer experience and potentially earn their business for life. Brands that adopt this positive outlook on customer feedback will find success. Brands that do not will likely find themselves in a costly uphill battle with customer loyalty.

Cultivating lasting relationships with your customers can be a daunting proposition, but it’s a practice that your brand would be remiss not to do. Here are four tips for converting brand detractors into brand advocates:

1. Listen & Respond Publicly

Take time to listen to and understand negative customer reviews. Once you have a grasp of the issue at hand, respond publicly so the customer—and other customers—know that you are taking the issue seriously and making an effort to right the wrong. Customers value transparency.

2. Address Negative Comments Quickly

Time really is money when it comes to customer retention. Don’t let a customer issue fester. Resolve the problem as quickly as possible, “wow” the customer, and create a potential brand advocate for life.

3. Rectify the Situation (Even if It’s Not Your Fault)

Identify the type of customer you’re dealing with and interact with them accordingly. The customer is not always right, but by offering a sincere apology and reaching an amicable solution to the problem, your brand can win back at-risk customers.

4. Follow Up

See the resolution of the customer’s negative experience all the way to completion. Thank the customer for their feedback and ensure that they leave—and return—completely satisfied with your brand.

As much as it can feel like negative feedback is all your customers leave, the situation is not that bleak. In reality, customers are mostly positive in their brand sentiment. One study found that customers share positive brand experiences eight times more often than they do negative experiences.

Negative feedback can be a valuable resource for brands working toward delivering a greater customer experience. It’s less fatal than death, and it’s generally cheaper than taxes.

Developing and launching a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program is no small feat. In fact, it’s a massive undertaking requiring a lot of thought. To do it, you and your team will have to figure out how to help your entire organization adopt and execute fundamental changes to improve the customer experience at every touchpoint, increase return visits, and create active brand advocates. This means investing serious time, money, and people in the right places.

Launching a program doesn’t guarantee much. To ensure you and your program see success, I recommend following the four key elements below:

1. Get full executive sponsorship
2. Go beyond surveys to build an ongoing customer connection
3. Make customer feedback data actionable at the location level
4. Use research and analysis to adapt to evolving program needs

I’ll cover the first key in this article, and the next three will follow in upcoming blog posts. So stay tuned.

Key to Success #1: Get Full Executive Sponsorship

With any organization-wide VoC program rollout, the most important aspect to its success is having committed executive sponsorship behind it. The rollout typically happens at the employee level, and ground-level employee engagement is much more likely when staff can see the excitement and benefit reinforced at the top of the organization.

What Executives Must Do to Effectively Sponsor and Support Your VoC Program

Create the VoC Program Vision

VoC programs have a lot of moving parts, and as the pace of the project speeds up, it’s easy for things to go astray. To keep people and departments synchronized in their efforts, the executive sponsor must clearly and regularly articulate (1) the reasons your organization is implementing the program, (2) what the end state will look like, and (3) the ways success will be defined.
If everyone has the same answers to these three questions, you will be able to more easily resolve inter-team conflicts, enable project activities prioritization, and ensure that everyone is working toward the same objective. If the executive sponsor doesn’t create a shared vision, each person will create their own—leading to program inconsistency and potential for failure.

Be a Vocal and Visible Champion

An executive VoC program sponsor who isn’t regularly seen or heard from is not really a sponsor at all. Sending the occasional email from the office or on the road is simply not enough; your program’s executive sponsor needs to be present for all levels of the organization and be seen as the number one supporter of the initiative.
On top of explaining benefits of the program to employees, your key executive must continuously reminding fellow executives why it is important to dedicate budget and people to the VoC program’s rollout and continued maintenance.

Remove Roadblocks

No matter how well-planned the project or how dedicated the team members, roadblocks will arise. It’s the sponsor’s job to spot and remove the roadblocks the team can’t remove for themselves. This can include freeing up time from an essential subject matter expert, working to resolve issues with a vendor, or helping to ensure the project team has the resources it needs. By removing roadblocks, the sponsor allows the project team to stay focused on their day-to-day project activities and deliver a successful VoC program.

Empower Decision Making

When launching and maintaining your VoC program, every team member should be empowered to make the decisions they regularly face. Enabling frontline decisions to be made at the appropriate employee level frees up time for ascending levels of the organization to focus on their strategic activities. Filtering every decision through the executive sponsor will quickly consume his or her day, cause distraction from supporting the project’s success, and will ultimately create a backlog and slow down the program rollout.

In the end, if your VoC program is supported from the top down and employees can see it, they will embrace it, which is the best insurance against program failure.

Watch for Part 2 in this four-part blog series where I discuss the second key to success: Go beyond surveys to build an ongoing customer connection.

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