According to a recent PWC study, 32 percent of customers said they’ll stop doing business with a brand they love after a single bad experience.
In addition, complaining on social media about poor customer experience is the norm for 44 percent of consumers.
For businesses today, it can be daunting to keep up with customer preferences and avoiding negative sentiment online.
But, what if there was a simple solution to help you deter customers from venting online?
Or better yet, a way for you to recover the customer experience as a whole.
Aside from collecting feedback which is a great first step in understanding customers, recovering the experience or creating a memorable experience, comes from closing the loop with the customer.
In this blog post, we’re taking a look at “closed-loop feedback”; A fundamental tactic to engaging customers and ensuring that all comments and concerns are addressed in order to increase sentiment. In addition to shedding light on what this tactic is, we’ll also share key best practices and how to execute “closing the loop” with ease.
First, let’s start off with a simple definition.
What Does It Mean To Close The Loop?
Closing the loop refers to when a business responds to, or acts on, feedback provided by the customer. It can be as simple as thanking them for their feedback or following up for more details. Regardless, closing the loop enables businesses to continue the cycle of great service, recover any negative sentiment and collect key insight on business performance.
It can be argued then, that closing the loop is an essential part of the customer journey, whereby a customer can feel validated and a business can build relationships for improved loyalty. Whether the customer feedback is positive or negative, by closing the loop, a customer can feel appreciated and tended to.
Humanizing The Closed-Loop Approach
Providing feedback often puts the customer in a vulnerable position. Not many people enjoy taking time out of their day to write about a business, but in most cases, it can feel like an obligation if the experience was substandard. Think of it from a customer’s point of view, at some point in the experience, they didn’t feel valued. Your job then becomes, to ensure they’re heard and validated.
Closing the loop does this, however, it also means the person closing the loop should be as personal and understanding as possible. Although automation can help make things run more efficiently (we’ll touch on this later), a human approach should be taken with conversations and any type of action.
This means validating the customer’s feelings, sympathizing, using personal touches (like referencing their name or the product they purchased), and lastly offering your help and service should the customer want to return. Automation should be used simply to assist the process and reduce further error.
Closing The Loop With Loop
As we briefly touched on, opting for technology to help you close the loop can streamline operations and make responses more tailored to the customer. For instance, The Loop Experience Platform is equipped with a number of capabilities, like auto-routing, to ensure only the teams equipped with the knowledge to respond, respond.
In this next section, we’ll look at some of the top qualities of the Loop Experience Platform, to ensure your closing the feedback loop effectively.
Real-Time Insight
Responding to insight is most effective when it’s in the moment. This is because customers won’t have an extended period of time to dwell on the situation and you can make immediate adjustments to improve employee performance.
With Loop, all feedback is routed to team members in real-time. Management can read feedback as the customer is on-site, make adjustments accordingly, and close the loop right then and there. Furthermore, Loop offers a scoreboard that you can showcase to employees on-site. This has tremendous benefits for not only improving the customer experience but also deterring teams from adopting bad habits.
With immediate visibility, your entire team possesses greater urgency to recover customers and get the job done right. This can further gamify work functionalities, improve motivation and create greater enthusiasm.
Auto-Route Feedback
When closing the loop, it’s important that there is little room for error and concerns are met within a timely manner.
Thankfully, the Loop Experience Platform is armed with tools to help.
Using Natural Language Processing, customer issues can be routed to the right department and the right seniority level, in real-time. This ensures that customer concerns are addressed with the team member who has the knowledge to answer the question with the least amount of uplift. This also reduces time to resolve, if the person suited to answer the question, receives it immediately – without a middle man.
For example, if a customer is visiting your hotel and is upset about the quality of food, Loop can tag the conversation as “low satisfaction”, “restaurant”, and “food quality”. Management at the restaurant is then notified and they can strike up a conversation with the customer to get more details, offer a discount, and close the loop. This makes the process super simple, in contrast to other platforms that may direct every inquiry to reception, who then has to relay information.
Data-Driven Decisions
Responding to customers is important but measuring the impact of your responses, the time it took you to respond and the overall customer satisfaction is even more imperative.
Why?
Because having the knowledge of your closed-loop feedback program success can help you run your business more efficiently in the future.
In addition to sending regular surveys with Loop, you obtain real-time insight and reporting on critical metrics, within a time range that suits your business’s best interest. How many customers did you recover? Has your rating on the popular feedback sites gone up? What are common trends found within feedback?
With Loop, you can get the answer to all of these questions, in an easy to digest format that suits your learning style. Whether it be sentiment analysis in a conversation, heat maps that show active trends, location comparisons, or daily dashboard summaries, using the Loop Platform you can better understand the feedback you receive and the success when closing the loop.
