Let’s start by stating the obvious: To ensure customer excellence, we need to understand our customers and their needs.
While this is the basis for every customer excellence program, it does bear repeating. Oftentimes, it’s easy to get caught up in what we think is the proper angle, method or campaign to please customers and completely pass up the analytics or comments that prove otherwise.
In previous blog post we’ve discussed the importance of measuring customer satisfaction. However, once you have feedback, analytics and insight, what’s next? Here are a few simple ideas to feed back to your product and marketing teams to ensure you are making informed and successful decisions.
Track App and Website Trends to Perfect Your User Experience
In-app (or in-website) marketing is an ideal way to keep users informed through push notifications, direct messages, chat bots, and more. However, it can also be used to monitor trends and user behavior.
Heat mapping and simple Google analytics can track page visits or clicks. Alternatively, you can use an integrated solution to alert customer experience teams to certain customer behaviors. For example, numerous visits to a certain product page could result in a direct chat pop-up, asking if they need more information. In this example, in-app behavior tracking is ideal for understanding where customers have questions about product features, usage, or technical troubleshooting.
Whether the marketing team or the customer experience team is tracking user behavior, there should certainly be a regular cadence of reporting that details page visit trends and in-app trends, as well as text analytics that aggregate common questions and customer usage friction points. Beyond pure numbers, reports should provide interpretations of the data and detail a list of action items to consider or implement immediately.
Use Social Listening & Customer Satisfaction Surveys to Let Customers Know They Have Been Heard
While you can infer customer satisfaction from analytics, it’s best to get feedback directly from the source. This can be through customer surveys or social media listening. Social media monitoring is a great way to track feedback, as not all customers will want to partake in surveys or give direct feedback.
While these layers of feedback should be reported and discussed internally, it’s also important to let customers know that they’ve been heard. You probably are quite familiar with app updates on your phone, and chances are you update them without thinking too much of it. However, what if that app sent out a tweet, email or push notification letting you know that they’ve heard your feedback and have made changes to a few features. Simple things like this can go a long way toward helping customers feel engaged with your brand.
Openly Discuss Your Findings Internally
Chances are, the marketing team wants one thing, the customer experience team has a differing view, and the product team has alternate solutions based on feasibility of updates. This is common. However, it’s healthy to have these discussions as a team, to implement proper solutions. The marketing team needs to align with the customer experience team to analyze feedback, and the product team needs to offer solutions that are effective and, of course, feasible.
While more meetings is rarely the answer, a monthly 15 minute call, or even a monthly sync on Slack can do wonders for collaboration, cooperation and ultimately, customer success. Further, a closed-loop process of customer feedback, remedial action and follow-up analysis demonstrating the effectiveness of the action, will reinforce the importance of addressing customer concerns through product changes.
