Customer Experience Insights and Actions

A CX Program with Feedback Reasons and Customer Pulse

Introduction

This document is designed for organizations seeking to maximize value from their customer experience survey program. It offers inspiration on how to implement and drive an operational, value based CX program grounded in real insights, prioritized actions, and transformation.

The best practices and recommendations are based on years of experience from organizations running NPS based CX programs implemented by nps.today .

This document is part of a series that describes nps.today 's, detailed solutions, best practices, and recommendations, following the nps.today Playbook for Operational CX. If you have not read that yet, we recommend that you do so before reading this article. Please find it here: Playbook for Operational CX.pdf

A few words about nps.today

nps.today makes it easy to measure, understand, and act on customer experience, to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. The unique plug-in solution for your existing IT systems makes it simple to implement a fully automated and operational CX solution. Measure experience and loyalty in all touchpoints, analyze results, and take actions inside your existing IT systems.

Short Recap on NPS

The NPS method is simple, effective, and easy to adopt. With the 0 – 10 rating of customer experience (NPS, CSAT and CES) and the rating-based follow-up question, it is easy for customers to share their feedback. The response is easy to understand – it’s a rating and a reason, and with the free-text reply to the follow up question, customers will share the reason that they find most important.

Instead of just asking something like “Please comment”, you will improve the quality of the free text response with a follow-up question based on the rating. Here are examples:

In average, about 70% of respondents will add a comment based on the specific experience you are asking them to rate, or their overall experience with your company, if you are asking for that (the original NPS question).

Reason Mapping

You now have a 0 – 10 rating, and perhaps also a reason explained in free text. This may be fine in low volume use-cases, where your employees will just read through the reasons and take corrective actions. But in many cases, and with higher response volume, you will need more data to understand how to prioritize your actions and transformation.??

And what if the customer does not add a reason in free text?

This is where Reason Mapping will help you gain deeper insights into areas where you are performing well and where you need to improve.

Reason Mapping can be performed manually, by having someone in your organization reading and mapping free text into categories. However, this is a time consuming and costly way to map reasons. You can also use AI to analyze the free text, with the precision and quality possible with available AI tools. But if no free text reason is provided, it will not be possible to determine the reason behind the rating.

The easiest and most accurate method for Reason Mapping is to have the customer click a button that indicates the main reason for their rating. This can also be sufficient if the customer does not wish to add additional information in the comment field.

About 80% of rating respondents will select a rating reason. This means, that even if a customer did not leave a free text reason, you will still understand the primary reason behind their rating 80% of the time.

You could consider the option of selecting multiple reasons or adding sub-reasons. However, asking for a single reason simplifies the program, eases the customers response, and helps maintain the focus in creating follow-up actions.

Some organizations struggle to make customer feedback actionable. This is often caused by information overload. If you ask too many questions, get too many answers, or add multiple reasons, the main reason driver might not get the necessary attention. Good Reason Mapping and a sufficient response volume will usually eliminate the need to ask additional questions. As you see from the illustration, you have obtained a satisfaction score on each of the 5 categories, without asking 5 additional questions.

Turning your insights into actions

For most responses, you will receive a 0-10 rating and a reason, in both text and category. The next step is to turn the customer feedback into actionable insights

Based on your business type, customer relationships, and survey campaigns, your customer feedback follow-up program could consist of two primary tracks:

·???????? ‘Customer feedback recovery actions’ based on Individual response

·???????? ‘Business transformation actions’ based on general feedback and analysis

When designing and setting up your survey campaign, you must consider which meta data is needed with the response, to identify, prioritize and direct your follow-up actions for both recovery and transformation.

Customer Feedback Recovery Actions

Recovery actions will naturally vary based on the customer's experience. If you've lost a customer, understanding their reasons can guide your efforts to win them back. Ideally, an effective customer experience program should resolve issues before they drive customers away. For instance, if a customer's problem wasn't satisfactorily resolved by customer service, you should explore better solutions and propose alternatives to the customer. This approach is often the most common in customer feedback follow-up actions.

You can collect customer feedback at various touchpoints throughout the customer journey, even before they become a customer. When you make an offer, you can ask "to what extent" the customer liked the offer. This provides an opportunity to refine your offer to better align with the customer's decision criteria, preventing them from abandoning the purchase or turning to a competitor, thus avoiding lost sales.

This is where both the right meta data, and the reason mapping becomes critical to plan and execute the right actions. If a potential customer dislikes your offering, you need to identify improvements to win their business. If the product is wrong or does not fit, maybe someone with the right product knowledge should act, but if the pricing is off, it may be a task for the salesperson.

To determine the right action, you need to know what the response is about, and who can or should engage with the customer. For example, is pricing a problem (and the main reason), who is the representative (meta data) and maybe even how valuable the customer is (meta data).

In the ideal customer experience program, your survey trigger will include a unique customer identifier. As such, the customer response is transferred back into the relevant customer engagement system (e.g. marketing, CRM, or service management) and paired with the relevant customer data based on the unique identifier. Then you can complete your follow-up with all the information you need, and in your normal daily working tool.

Individual Response Based Actions

Your follow-up actions can be prioritized and processed in many ways. The easiest and most common way of planning prioritized follow-ups is a two-dimensional approach, with a customer value (e.g. ABC) and the rating. Some organizations work with 3 tier detractor ratings (0-2, 3-4 and 5-6) to address the most valuable and most dissatisfied customers faster.

With prioritized follow-up actions, you will be able to focus your limited resources on the most important 1:1 action. If fully implemented, undone or overdue actions will have reminders, and even escalations to managers, to ensure completion and recovery from bad experiences.

With a customer database or system supported follow-up program scheme (e.g. in marketing and/or CRM), you can enrich the process with additional information to prioritize, plan, and automate recovery actions or express gratitude to satisfied, loyal customers. Rather than basing follow-up rules on just the current response, you could include the customers feedback history, including the average satisfaction score, overall NPS score, the feedback, and other customer data like segments, purchase history, product types etc.

The most common follow-up action for most is to have a relevant representative make a recovery or appreciation call directly to the respondent, based on the recent rating (and/or prioritized with the follow-up action scheme). This often serves as an effective quick win. However, many businesses find it challenging to allocate the resources necessary for time-consuming, one-on-one manual follow-up actions.

If you need to recover from bad experiences, for example in the sales and buying process, delivery, or customer support, of course it's crucial to act immediately. But in other cases, you might want to plan your follow-up action for the next customer interaction. This could involve various actions, such as offering something extra on the next purchase to compensate for the unfortunate experience or discussing it during a customer status meeting.

Another reaction could be to set up a feedback trigger within your marketing automation system, that will trigger a relevant marketing flow, to send information based on both the transaction, the response and other relevant customer information.

With a system-supported and automated follow-up program that is both responsive and data-driven, your customers will understand that their feedback is taken seriously and that you are actively working to enhance or maintain the aspects they value.

Customer Pulse Based Follow-up Actions

Rather than taking actions solely based on the individual response, it may be beneficial to look at the bigger picture. You may want to consider customer feedback and satisfaction on a project or organizational level (if you deal with companies), rather than solely on individual contact experience.

Your customer relationships can vary based on your product offering, ranging from short-term, project-based interactions to continuous, long-term engagements. If your customer engagement is not continuous, for example completing a one-time delivery or project (like constructing a new home), you might want to understand how multiple contacts or stakeholders assess how you are doing overall, and throughout the project or delivery.

In such cases, you should implement an account (or project) based feedback and action program. The basis for this is first to make sure all responses are related to the relevant account or project. This is done by adding the account or project meta data to the survey and response. Now you can report and monitor feedback on account (or project) level.

If your organization uses a customer engagement system (like CRM, service management, or project management), integrating response data into this system can be highly beneficial. This way, you can monitor and act on customer feedback data on both contacts, accounts, projects, cases etc.

Consider implementing metrics like average ratings or NPS Score, possibly segmented by time periods (e.g., the past six months). This way, you can set up notifications and alarms, based on overall satisfaction or NPS development on the contact and account (or project etc.) level. This way, you can set up actions, based on a broader picture that includes both responses and other relevant customer data.

With your common customer pulse, you can act proactively and timely, considering both individual feedback and a broader context. With aggregated satisfaction metrics on your customers, projects, cases etc. you can now set up alarms and actions based on a bigger picture, rather than just a single experience and individual response. If for example the account rating trend goes below 6,5 or the average NPS score for the last 6 months goes under 45, action must be taken.

With these new insights, you can drive much stronger and targeted actions to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Here are a few examples:

• A project or delivery average rating goes below you target and the project or delivery responsible initiate corrective actions
• The average customer support score on an account goes below target and the responsible agent or manager initiate corrective actions
• An average customer pulse goes below the target based on ABC customer classification and the responsible initiate corrective actions
• A customer wants to cancel or renegotiate a contract and you use aggregated feedback and documented satisfaction to strengthen your position

Your proactive follow-up program is a great opportunity to give your customers a real WOW experience. Providing WOW experiences though your product or service can be challenging. However, by making it easier for customers to share their experiences, whether good or bad, and by reacting in a timely matter, you do not only enhance the satisfaction and loyalty but also increase the likelihood of them becoming promoters of your company, its products, and services.

Business Transformation Based on Real Insights

Your transformation and decisions to change and improve your business, including product, services, and customer experience, should be based facts from customer feedback, rather than guesses, intuition, or individual employee opinions. Understanding your customers' overall perception of your brand, and the experiences they have with transactions/touchpoints, as well as your company and staff, is crusial for any successful transformation.

To gain maximum value of customer feedback and to drive a fact-based business transformation, you need to:

• Turn your responses into understandable and actionable insights
• Set-up processes and an operational program for change

Turning Your Responses into Actionable Insights

As previously explained, you can enrich customer free-text feedback by manual reason mapping, or with respondent-based reason mapping, and/or AI based analysis and response categorization.

To understand the key drivers of customer satisfaction and loyalty and to establish the foundation of value-based and prioritized transformation actions, you need reports and dashboards that clearly presents where your business excels, and where customers see room for improvement.

If you ask additional questions in your survey, your operational focus should be on the main question. This means that your CX program reports and analytical BI set-up should be based on this.

Initially, you should be capable of filtering the response data you are analyzing (BI people call this drill down, slice and dice etc.). If you are conducting both rNPS (relational) and tNPS (transactional) campaigns, you can sum up all survey responses to obtain an overall average rating or score, for instance, within your CRM system on contacts and accounts. But for analytical and reporting clarity, you need to separate rNPS and tNPS responses and drill down to the relevant set of response data. Your filters could be by period, survey campaigns, business units, teams and all the way down to employee level.

In the ‘Overall Dashboard’ you get an overview of your entire survey program, including total response rates, average ratings, and NPS scores. This could include an NPS development timeline, that allows you to monitor changes in your NPS continuously, for all or specific customers, based on real-time customer experiences, rather than just annually or semi-annually. This way an rNPS timeline will have immediate relevance and not only after several years of surveys.

Moreover, the dashboard should categorize feedback reasons, so you can see the reasons given from your most satisfied customers (promoters), moderately satisfied (passives), and dissatisfied (detractors).

Looking at the broader picture, you should be able to drill into your data by selecting specific surveys, such as a tNPS survey, and then drill down into more detailed response data. For example, in a selected tNPS hotline campaign seen below, you could filter down to 6 detractors who chose "Communication" as the main reason. This would reveal their rating distribution and show that they constitute 0.6% of all respondents. A word cloud could summarize the most common terms used, alongside the exact comments from each respondent. In this example, the main issue for the detractors was 'response time', rather than just resolution time, which highlights the importance of timely communication during the customer case handling.

With the right BI set-up connected to your survey data, you will be able to access the right insights across your surveys and customer feedback, allowing you to make fact-based decisions when prioritizing and planning your actions and transformation efforts.

In the ideal dashboard/BI set-up, your analysis wouldn’t be limited to survey responses and the related metadata; you should also be able to include other relevant customer data into your filters.

This is a simple way of pinpointing which customers are highly dissatisfied, as well as those who have little business significance, and who may even be speaking negatively about your company.

The goal is to either quickly improve their satisfaction level or consider removing them from your customer base.

When looking at the large red and yellow dots, that represents significant customers who are unhappy or moderately satisfied; the model indicates that immediate action is required to retain these specific customers. In such a case, it might involve a direct outreach from your CEO, who can understand the underlying issues, ideally by reviewing details directly in your CRM system.

Setting up an Operational Transformation Program

In larger organizations, customer feedback analysis is probably carried out by a customer insights employee or analytics team. In smaller organizations, the business unit manager or team lead is probably the one digging into responses, trends, and satisfaction drivers.

No matter if you are a smaller or large organization, you need to identify what your overall goals and customer experience transformation targets are. Here are a few examples:

• Improved ambassador effect and reduced marketing costs
• Increased quality of content and communication
• Shortened sales cycles and increased deal win rates
• Reduced costs of delivery and service ?
• Product quality and satisfaction improvements
• Improved customer retention

If you don't have baseline data, you might want to conduct baseline surveys to identify critical issues and establish performance benchmarks, that can help you set targets and prioritize actions.

Before you can turn your survey campaigns into operational programs, you need to define the satisfaction levels you aim to achieve and how you wish to perform reporting. Moreover, you need to make insights easily available for relevant stakeholders and decide how to execute your transformational initiatives.

Your primary task is to make your feedback data visible, easily available and understandable, in a format that is tailored for all relevant employees. This encompasses everything from overall NPS score and target status, to specific surveys, periods, and teams. Feedback sharing can be done in many ways requiring none, little or tight system integration. Here are some examples:

• Live Web Dashboards
• Manual Excel reports
• BI dashboards and reports
• Digest reports sent by e-mail (or other channel) with relevant frequency
• Reports and dashboards in your CRM or other systems
• Data and graphs on customers, projects etc. in any customer system
• Inside Teams, Outlook or other productivity and collaboration tools ?

Many organizations struggle to turn feedback into real actions and changes, yet this doesn’t have to be hard or complicated. Essentially, it is a matter of adding the customer feedback review and action discussions into your current operational calendar, such as on marketing planning meetings, sales team meetings, delivery and support status meetings, product board meetings etc.

In organizations where top-level management drives or embraces customer experience and loyalty, the status, initiatives, and progress in these areas naturally become integrated components of management and board meetings.

Conclusion and Final Advice

The first and most important advice to help you gain real measurable value from your customer insights and to succeed with your program, is to think big but start small. Implement a program that will allow you to gain quick wins and visible successes and expand from there step by step. We call it the salami method – one slice at a time. If you adopt the NPS method for your CX program, you are probably well on your way to a simplified, effective, and valuable program.