Feedback is everywhere these days. When customers have opinions about your product or service, they aren’t shy about letting the world know.
This may be through online reviews, social media mentions, word of mouth and more. But what is your organization doing with all this feedback? Are you using it to improve the customer experience?
If not, you should be.
Unsolicited customer feedback is a powerful tool for improving customer experience (CX). After all, this information is coming straight from the source — your customers.
Recently, Reputation’s Vice President of Customer Experience David Mingle and Solutions Engineer Andy Carpenter joined Megan Merrick, Associate Director of Innovation and Brand Experience at Freshly, for a webinar on how to grow your business by leveraging customer feedback. Their comments around feedback provide powerful insights into how to leverage customer opinions in real-time to improve experiences and customer expectations.
Choosing the Right CX Metrics For Your Business
CX metrics are only as good as the insights they provide and the actions they allow you to take. Metrics should also be organization-specific, focusing on outcomes such as improved customer retention, acquisition, or loyalty. The outcomes you hope to achieve will determine which metrics are necessary to improve your CX.
Seeing the right metrics and seeing how that data was applied fueled Freshly’s Voice of the Customer program.
“We streamlined the data across our feedback and across the touchpoints to be able to tell an all-encompassing story,” Merrick says. They gathered data from Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction surveys to identify where their CX was working, where it wasn’t, and any possible silos.
Silos have the potential to harm your business if different parts of the organization only measure customer experience through their own lens. The metrics and KPIs that define success may vary by department. But when silos all try to achieve their own version of success, it doesn’t make for a streamlined customer journey. While metrics should be business-specific, you also need an overarching vision of what success looks like for the whole company.
Connecting the Dots Between CX and ROI
A good ROI narrative must be holistic — ROI can’t be contained to one department or line of business. The narrative should connect CX metrics to operational metrics that matter to the rest of the organization.
Customer feedback will affect your bottom line, which should incentivize you to improve your customer experience.
“When somebody posts feedback about our business online, that becomes a part of another customer’s onboarding experience with us,” says Merrick. “This is why it’s so important to be a part of those conversations and help guide new customers.”
Online feedback is often the first thing any new customer sees when interacting with your business. What are existing consumers saying about your business over a period of time and how are you responding in order to promote customer loyalty?
There’s a real risk to not managing CX effectively. Research suggests that one in five potential customers go elsewhere after reading even a single negative review. Nearly three in four are more likely to recommend your brand to a friend or colleague when they’ve received positive social customer care. “If we don’t address feedback, our customers will dictate the conversation for us,” says Merrick.
Using Technology Platforms to Drive Your CX
Using tools to connect organization-specific customer experience metrics with key success indicators will help give a deeper understanding of the impact of your CX strategies. Being able to demonstrate the ROI of CX requires good data and dashboards that clearly communicate the effectiveness of your initiatives. Using a consolidated CX tool like Reputation means fewer tools to navigate and more consistent reporting. This ensures that insights can be understood and the tools are used.
Your technology tools should also go beyond surveys and take into account both structured and unstructured feedback.
“The ecosystem is changing,” says Carpenter. “In today’s landscape, surveys only make up 6% of the feedback that’s available to a brand. The rest live in other places and are often unsolicited.”
Conclusion
From social media to Google business listings and everything in between, customers are using the power of the internet to make their voices heard. For those current and potential customers, improving their experiences should be a focus at any organization.
Organizations that don’t know where to start should examine which CX metrics are necessary to achieving their business goals. From there, technology can help identify the correlation between CX and ROI, as well as provide clean reporting for executives. Simplifying this data into easily digestible insights lets you incorporate feedback into your customer experience strategy. This lets customers tell you their needs and pain points, allowing you to react accordingly.
Watch the webinar Leverage Customer Feedback and Insights To Grow Your Business now.
Jason Grier leads Reputation’s customer loyalty and growth initiatives as executive vice president and chief customer officer. Jason is a former senior vice president of Global Support Operations and chief customer officer at McAfee, where he spent more than 10 years.
