When you look at the customer-service revolution, putting the changes into perspective lets you see how far we have come in the past 20 years. Just 20 years ago, we were still using the trusty old comment or suggestion box. There was a time where the only way to give a business a piece of your mind was to leave a note in a box and hope someday it might get read. You might remember seeing these when you were a kid, tucked away in a corner, alone and forgotten. It is hard to imagine a worse way to show your customers you are listening.
Do Something With Your Data
Of course, with the advent of the internet, data became a hot commodity. And customer data? Well, it doesn’t get much better than that. Companies began to recognize the value that better understanding their customers and what they have to say could improve customer satisfaction and drive sales. Now we have NPS (Net Promoter Score), CES (Customer Effort Score), and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction). However, just like an old comment box, a data pool full of unread comments is pretty useless. Until we do something with the information we get from our customers, there is little to be gained.
On its face, taking action on responses seems pretty simple. Receive feedback, act on it, and share it throughout the organization. More often, companies collect feedback, compile it, and share the aggregated data. At this point, it is very difficult to respond to each customer because they are now just a data point that is often a month old.
The secret is to act on individual responses first, then aggregate and address larger trends, using the systems and processes that are already in place. This is the foundation of operationalizing feedback.
How We Turned Feedback into Action at Survey Gizmo
You will hear a lot about operationalizing feedback in 2020, but what does that mean? Operationalizing feedback means putting responses into the hands of employees who can take action through the systems and processes they use every day.
For example, our Customer Success team used Alchemer’s open architecture to have NPS responses immediately trigger messages to the most appropriate people. Now NPS responses go directly into our support queue just like any other support email, and a message is sent to the account manager, both of whom can act on what customers are telling us.
When our Customer Success looked at their NPS process, they realized that much more was possible. Using the open architecture and low-code capabilities, the team created a solution that integrates with Alchemer’s existing enterprise software and processes. Now a passive or detractor score triggers a Slack message to the Account team as well as a support ticket within Service Cloud. The result is that a low NPS score is treated as a supportable event – tickets are created, support reaches out to the respondent, and the customer feels heard – all in real-time.
Becoming a Customer-Centric Organization
“You need to leverage customer feedback to make customers core to your business,” said Ryan Tamminga, VP of Customer Success at Alchemer. “This is how you become a truly customer-centric organization.
To become a customer-centric organization, invest in these five priorities:
- Have or put a system in place to track and prioritize feedback;
- Empower people on the front lines, working with customers, to do the right thing to keep a customer happy;
- Get the feedback into the right hands so the people who can make a difference can address the issue in real-time;
- Respond to every piece of feedback individually before aggregating the data;
- Always close the loop and let your customers know they’ve been heard.
To learn more about putting NPS to work for you, check out our latest webinar here. In the webinar, our Customer Success team explains how Alchemer used our own tools to operationalize customer feedback, and ensure that the right people can act quickly on what our customers are telling us. To learn more about making NPS, CES, and CSAT work for you, click here.