Can customer experience software help boost your sales? Absolutely. Is it a quick fix and a get-rich-quick scheme? Nope.
The insights provided by metrics like NPS can save you incredible amounts of time and money on your path to a stronger business. We’ve got the data to back that up.
But there’s another byproduct of tracking customer experience metrics that benefits your business in the long term. As one AskNicely client noted, "We realized it’s not about the number. NPS is a process to capture customer feedback and testimonials.”
That process shows teams a new way of seeing their customers, their daily tasks, and the connections in between.
In order to get the most out of that process, people turn to customer experience software. By actively collecting, securing, managing and analyzing data, a customer experience platform supports a business on the quest to better connect with the people it serves.
The best investment any business can make is in its customers. The following are some ways that investment is enhanced by the process of customer survey collection with a software platform.
When software segments data collection any number of ways – from demographics, to customer journey steps, to products and services – every member of your team can get feedback that is specific and pertinent to them.
As one AskNicely client noted, "I love it when I can share compliments from our customers with our engineering team. The engineers rarely get to hear feedback and it really raises their spirits and raises the bar on our product when we get good feedback."
Moments like that make the connection between a person’s labor and their customers feel more tangible. It also provides a common shorthand for different departments to talk about overall team performance. If everyone on staff knows that this year's NPS was 66, they can motivate each other with a shared goal for at least a 67 next year.
When a customer experience platform is active and collecting extensive data, companies can see themselves with new clarity – and it might point to details they never considered.
"The interesting thing we learned from our responses was that we had a problem we didn’t know about," said one client. "As we started to get consistent feedback, we were able to investigate and fix the problem.”
For example, maybe your call center keeps people on hold too long. You'll start to see that something is up when numeric ratings for customer support come back low.
Better yet, the open-text questions in a survey can highlight unexpected issues in detail. If people start saying the same thing over and over in their responses – mentioning 'being on hold' in the open-text portion of a low score – you've got a clear direction for what to improve.
“It’s important because we’re a small company — very small — with less than 10 employees,” said a client. “We came to understand that getting feedback as much as possible while we’re still small helps us to find out who we are and make proper adjustments.”
As long as dissatisfied customers exist, your brand still has room for improvement. Most customers aren’t going to call you with suggestions to improve. Many will suffer in silence. They may have an issue with the product or service, but the pain point isn’t high enough for them to pick up the phone.
These people have extremely valuable insights for your team – and it's your job to reach out and ask for their opinion. The more data you have, the better equipped you'll be to troubleshoot. And when you can identify individuals with grievances, you have a chance to make one more customer happy – which will keep them coming back.
But reaching out to every voice requires dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of surveys deployed every day, at just the right time. And then, you've got to send reminders, nudges, and incentives for people to actually fill out the surveys. Doing this competently at any scale requires automation that only software platforms can provide.
Getting feedback – positive or negative – isn't the end of the process. Successful businesses use survey responses as a conversation starter.
Customer experience management software creates profiles for each respondent. And if the platform is integrated with your CRM, you have a detailed understanding of who these people are and how you might reach out to them.
Negative reviews can be met with follow-up questions as to how your business might improve their experience next time, or how certain products might be re-engineered to a customer's satisfaction.
“Our customers give us really thoughtful feedback,” said one client. “It makes them more invested in our success when they understand we are listening."
Positive reviewers are also worth engaging – they might be encouraged to talk up your business to friends. By documenting each of these interactions, you can more effectively track customer relationships and tactics for improving customer experience.
But this level of outreach requires a lot of data – and that data needs to be stored in a way that is secure and easily navigated by your team. Spreadsheets alone can't manage it all, especially at scale.
A truly effective customer experience campaign has a lot of moving parts and simply more data than any one person has the time to seek, collect, and maintain.
When you know that the logistics are all being taken care of for you, you’re able to focus on learning from metrics, the analytics, and the individual words of your customers.
That focus creates a customer-centric culture that can transform a business’s performance. By seeing your customers in greater detail, from perspectives you’d never considered, and hearing from them in their own words, a business can connect with customers on a level previously unthinkable.
The result is more satisfying for everyone involved. It’s these relationships that build robust businesses. Reach out today to see how our platform empowers these relationships.
