Acting on customer experience feedback gives you a competitive advantage. No other enterprise has access to the information you can gather from your customers. No one else gets to have a personal conversation with the very people your product is designed to serve.
When you listen to what your customers tell you and incorporate their feedback, you encourage loyalty in your existing customers and create a customer experience that will attract others to your product.
Customer experience is going to become the key battlefield in this consumer-dominated, subscription-driven market. According to Gartner, 81% of marketing leaders believe their enterprises will mostly or completely compete based on customer experience as the next decade dawns. As such, making the most of customer experience feedback is critical to your enterprise’s success.
What is Customer Experience Feedback?
Customer experience feedback is any information from your customer about their use of your product and their satisfaction with your service. It can take many forms but will generally fit into one of three broad categories:
- Customer Initiated Feedback: Escalations, or comments given during high-touch customer engagements. Organizations should collect all feedback, positive or negative.
- Enterprise Initiated Feedback: Responses to NPS and CES scores, response to direct-action campaigns and marketing collateral, response to training modules, seminars, and other high-contact engagements.
- Customer Monitoring Feedback: Metrics and goal-based assessments of product use and effectiveness taken from data-driven customer monitoring.
All three of these avenues provide opportunities to improve the customer experience. This can be achieved by identifying and removing negative product impediments or by gaining a comprehensive customer understanding that lets you anticipate future needs and proactively deliver added value.
Why Customer Experience Feedback is Important
You need to do more than simply collecting customer feedback and thanking them for their time. Customers feel their contribution has been valued when they see it lead to action and change.
- Use customer feedback to improve your product.
- Tracking a customer can help you identify bottlenecks in your process.
- Customers that have a positive experience can become your best advocate.
This is the dual advantage of acting on customer experience feedback. It helps instill loyalty in existing customers while simultaneously helping you to refine product and service offerings.
If, for example, a customer in onboarding says the information about a specific product feature is unclear or insufficient, you gain an opportunity to improve their experience. The issue should be carefully considered to see if it is part of a larger trend. Based on this information, you may refine the standardized onboarding process moving forward or even make adjustments to the product. By keeping the customer informed of this process and ultimately delivering a solution, you improve the customer experience and demonstrate your commitment to their satisfaction.
But you shouldn’t just wait for customer complaints in order to identify opportunities for improvement.
Taking Proactive Action Based on Customer Experience Feedback
It is crucial that you effectively and quickly solve a customer’s problem whenever they make a request, but it is far better to provide them with potential solutions before they have to ask. By monitoring behavior throughout the customer journey, you can get an accurate picture of the customer experience at any point in time. Such metrics show you how well the customer is adopting the product and exactly how they are using it or can help identify any bottlenecks in your process. It can be used to generate goals-based engagements that improve the value customers derive from your service.
For instance, if your metrics reveal that a customer is not accessing a feature you know to be of great benefit to their business, you can initiate a personalized campaign to educate them on its advantages. Rather than waiting for the customer to complain that they are having trouble, say, evaluating the conversion of free trials to subscriptions, you can reach out with messaging that this feature is great at doing just such a task.
When doing this, remember that creating a positive customer experience is everyone’s responsibility. The customer information gathered from every touchpoint with your enterprise should be collected within and accessible from a single source. This greatly expands the nature of your customer understanding and allows you to surround the customer with informed, personalized service at every turn.
Since every member of your organization has the same data, this will save the customer from having to repeat themselves as they pass through different stages of the customer journey. As the customer travels through the stages, track their NPS score to monitor their satisfaction with your organization. If they give a high score, recommend them to marketing as a possible reference, or if it is low, ask a manager to follow up. In any situation, customers will receive consistent, value-driven engagements no matter who they interact with.
Using Software to Make the Most of Customer Experience Feedback
We’ve established the importance of gathering, analyzing, sharing, and responding to customer experience feedback. But what’s the best way to keep track of everything? Rather than attempting to tackle this task manually, it’s wise to turn to a customer success platform. With the right customer success platform, data on product access, feature usage, license utilization, and business-related outcomes can be transformed into customer experience metrics.
A CS platform makes it easy to monitor relevant metrics over time and measure them against established benchmarks to create actionable engagements that encourage renewal and stave off churn. Link these evolving outcomes to automated alerts that notify you whenever a customer approaches a positive or negative threshold and provides standard next steps.
By empowering your entire enterprise to collect and monitor customer information and by translating this data into goal-driven processes, you can drive retention and reduce churn. With each customer interaction, you should be refining your product to generate customer lifetime value that sustains a mutually beneficial partnership.
Remember, no one else has access to your customers, so you are in a perfect position to refine your product and service by listening to customer experience feedback. Don’t miss out on this valuable opportunity to learn from your customers.
Totango is here to help you achieve your customer success goals. If you explore Spark, you’ll discover its customizable methods of collecting, sorting, and analyzing customer information help you turn raw data into successful customer engagements. Request a demo today to start providing a better customer experience.
