Over the past several years customer preferences have changed dramatically. From an increase in online shopping amounting to 2.3 trillion U.S. dollars to the desire for a more tailored experience, customers are now dictating the buying journey with significant expectations from brands.
As a strategy to accommodate this new wave of customer demands, businesses have flocked to feedback solutions as a way to better understand customer needs and create a more tailored experience in-line with their values. Through the use of traditional survey solutions like Survey Monkey, Medallia and Surveygizmo alike, businesses have been able to gain valuable insights. However, although the insights gathered from these solutions has its benefits, standard feedback platforms like the ones mentioned above tend to lack qualities to help optimize the data gathered and provide a competitive edge needed to survive in an ever-evolving marketplace.
Below, we break down how a Customer Experience Management platform used alongside your survey solution can help your business build loyalty and stand out from competitors.
Instantly Follow-Up With Customers.
As we all know, customer feedback surveys are a great way to understand your business from the customers perspective. A survey will allow you to examine the customer experience while also providing insights into team member performance. Having this data is valuable in that it can help correct unwanted team behaviour and elevate customer service in the long run.
With customer feedback solutions like Survey Monkey or Medallia, receiving customer insight in a timely manner is a common feature. But, what happens when you receive less than great feedback from a customer and, in order to retain them, need to follow up in real-time? For most customers, simply obtaining their feedback via a traditional solution and possibly taking action, later on, isn’t enough. In fact, according to Amex, consumers are willing to wait a maximum of 12 minutes to receive customer service help. Especially in such a fast-paced and technologically advancing world. Today’s customers expect you to resolve issues immediately, to converse and show them in-the-moment that you’re willing to do something about an ongoing issue.
Although your traditional feedback solution will give you visibility, a CEM will go further by providing access to messaging features that let you recover the at-risk customer. With a Customer Experience Management platform, you can chat with the customer in real-time on the channel of their choice, to ensure they don’t leave the premises upset or venting on social.
What’s more, a CEM platform streamlines the conversation process. Whether it be a customer inquiry, comment, piece of feedback or request, they immediately get routed to the correct department into a real-time unified inbox. From the inbox, team members can see in real-time the customer’s message along with their sentiment – so any issues can be resolved right then and there. What’s more, all customer conversations become consolidated, which means regardless of the medium they chose you’ll see feedback from multiple channels in one place without having to toggle through a number of platforms.
For most customers, tending to their needs in-the-moment is a monumental element of earning their loyalty. With a CEM platform, you gain that competitive advantage and can act on feedback in real-time.
Escalate Select Surveys.
When it comes to customer feedback, making sure the appropriate department is dealing with the feedback that pertains to them is critical. It not only streamlines operations but it also ensures the customer is tended to in a timely manner.
With a traditional customer feedback solution, inbound responses are generally forwarded to one specific department. Whether it be your marketing or customer experience team, these responses are sent and left for them to monitor, analyze and forward to who they think should resolve the issue.
Although this makes for great visibility, it isn’t exactly the most efficient way of dealing with customer feedback. In one instance, a customer could be upset with a specific aspect of your service and your marketing team might not know which department it correlates to, in order to send the inquiry. The time it will take the marketing or customer experience teams to understand the issue, find the right department, and forward to the right individual is time-consuming, especially when you consider the number of surveys they receive.
With the addition of a dedicated Customer Experience Management platform, the whole feedback process becomes streamlined through automation. An ideal CEM will analyze each survey for you and showcase the customer’s sentiment – eliminating the need for marketing to sift through them. If a customer has a sentiment that is less than satisfactory the survey will be automatically forwarded to the department manager that it correlates with, so it’s dealt with immediately.
Having a solution that can streamline the process and escalate when necessary can save your team time and resources. Not to mention, customers will appreciate being able to get the answers they need in a more timely manner.
Motivate Teams
One of the biggest areas in which standard feedback solutions fall short is their lack of visibility to customer-facing team members. As mentioned earlier, with a standard survey platform, customer feedback is generally directed to marketing or management teams in real-time, at the end of the day, or on a shift basis.
As part of the management team, these insights can be helpful for long-term planning but for front-of-line team members, having visibility into their performance well after the customer has left won’t be as helpful or engaging.
It means that for on-site teams if they’re doing something they shouldn’t be, they won’t hear about it till well after the customer has left – making it hard to pinpoint what exactly they did wrong and how to improve. Not to mention, hearing about it well after won’t be as engaging, which can affect your bottom line. By providing less timely data you’re risking a less impactful outcome than if they were to be notified in-the-moment.
With the addition of a Customer Experience Management platform to your survey strategy, you can have feedback displayed in real-time for teams to see. With real-time ratings being displayed, team members can see exactly where they excelled and where they could use improvement with each customer, so they’re continuously providing great service. With that, you not only give team members real-time visibility into performance but also engage them for a better overall workplace culture.
Conclusion
Having a feedback solution in place is a great first step to building a successful business, however, it is important to consider the ways in which you can optimize your feedback to gain a competitive edge. With a Customer Experience Management platform, you can optimize performance by immediately following up with upset customers, escalate feedback to specific departments, and motivate your teams through real-time results to provide great service. By having the ability to take action on feedback you better your overall service, leading to greater customer retention and revenues.
