7 Steps to Customer Success (and Outperforming Your Peers)

How to Master Customer Service and Achieve Customer Centricity by Capitalizing on Customer Complaints

My wife called AT&T about our mobile service changes. Three hours later, she hung up. Issue, unresolved. And that’s why we switched to Verizon . I called Marley Spoon about missing, damaged and incomplete meal delivery shipments. After listening to an hour of excuses and blame transferring, I hung up. Issue, unresolved. And that’s why we switched to HelloFresh . Do you have similar stories? Never mind, I know you do. We all do.

Now what about your business? Are consumers saying bad things about your customer support? If so, you may as well halt production on whatever it is you produce. As my friend ?Shep Hyken has reported, 96% of your customers will leave you behind for bad customer service, and 92% will also call you out on your BS (bad service). That’s a problem in a post-Millennial society dictated by online reviews and social media influencers.

Although you could focus 100% of your energy and investments into perfecting your product or service, you’d be better off acknowledging: no matter what you (or any other brands) do, there will always be customer complaints. Once you’ve accepted this truth, you can begin to formulate your customer experience (CX) strategy and customer complaint process. You might even find that customer complaints create incredible opportunities for growth.

Why Customer Reviews and Customer Support Matter

Can we all agree the key to business success is satisfying our customers? Satisfied customers are repeat customers. And satisfied customers share their positive experiences with friends, family and followers, online and off, creating new customers.?

But do you know how important customer experience and customer reviews are? Few do, without this compelling research:

• 96% of consumers will no longer shop a brand after experiencing bad customer service
• 68% of consumers are willing to pay more for products and services from a brand known to offer good customer service
• 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent customer service
• 78% of consumers will do business with a company again after a mistake if the company’s customer service is excellent
• 83% of consumers feel more loyal to brands that respond and resolve complaints?
• Investing in new customers is between 500% and 2500% more expensive than retaining existing ones

But that’s not all. If you prioritize the customer experience you provide, you’ll immediately position yourself ahead of your competitors. According to my own 2022 research conducted with Customer Management Practice :

• Only two in 10 consumers (21.65%) believe companies provide transparent communication
• More than 40% of consumers say they do receive some communication from brands — but no “solutions” — when experiencing product delays

How to Maintain and Grow Your Customer Relationships

Companies that do CX correctly don’t stop at call centers and chat bots; they:

• Strategize cross-functionally for customer success and the highest customer lifetime value
• Incorporate UX as well as sales, tech and customer support into their 360-degree omnichannel digital marketing strategy
• Demonstrate authenticity, transparency, consistency and empathy at every touchpoint

How? By:

• Performing ongoing social listening
• Including interactive, data-capturing elements across their user-centered website
• Conducting customer surveys
• Measuring customer satisfaction scores and other CX KPIs (included herein!)
• Developing and utilizing a voice-of-the-customer program
• Providing easy access to self-service portals
• Leveraging the information obtained to improve products, services, marketing and sales messaging, as well as the UX and CX they provide — and sharing all improvements with their audiences, celebrating the inclusion of their customers in their decision making
• Identifying and addressing gaps and opportunities in processes and cross-departmental coordination

When you look at digital marketing holistically (i.e., as driving a customer journey), you can see how the user, prospect, lead and customer experience unfolds:

1. An online user sees a digital ad or an organic social media post from the brand or one of its customers or influencers; or, an online user conducts a Google search based on their pain points, needs or goals
2. The user clicks to visit the brand’s website, creating a new site user and session
3. The user clicks through the site and — if the site is designed for optimal UX — completes a form for gated content, a newsletter subscription, a free demo or to speak with a representative, converting the user to a lead
4. The prospect/lead data is captured by Google Analytics and the brand’s CMS, CDP and CRM, triggering an email drip campaign ?
5. The lead’s behaviors trigger automated sales emails
6. The lead returns to the brand’s website to make a purchase, seek additional information or contact the company through chat, email or phone
7. If the lead is not prepared to make a purchase, the CX the brand provides dictates whether the lead goes cold or eventually converts to a paying customer
8. Once a purchase has been made, the brand is able to obtain additional data on the customer’s preferences and behaviors, better equipping the customer success and technical support teams to provide the best ongoing customer experience
9. Any conversations between the customer and support teams are documented and incorporated into the brand’s data warehousing, enabling the marketing team to continue to develop the customer relationship and potentially create a brand ambassador who can promote on the brand’s behalf, recruiting new prospects to the brand’s site and social media accounts

Of course, not every new user will follow this path. Customers, website users and random haters will all make complaints — often, very publicly. How you handle these complaints will make or break your business — especially now .

A brand launching its digital marketing strategy without first establishing its customer experience KPIs and developing a customer review/complaint process is like a singer trying to perform for their audience without the backup band or instruments. Fans may appreciate the a cappella, but it’s not what they paid for.

13 Mission-Critical Customer Experience Metrics for Optimal Customer Success

CX metrics track the effectiveness of your customer experience and customer review/complaint strategies, tactics, processes, procedures, and support agents. Although specific campaigns may require an enhanced focus on particular customer service KPIs, the following should be used for all campaigns (and your overall CX team reviews).

1. Customer Sentiment

While many organizations strive to ascertain customer sentiment using traditional CX KPIs like CSAT and NPS, customer sentiment encompasses more than a customer’s level of satisfaction or likelihood of promoting the brand; customer sentiment is complicated, qualitative and ephemeral — measuring how the customer feels about you.?

Customer sentiment analysis refers to the examination of customer sentiment as expressed by customers (or users) across platforms and devices throughout the customer journey; this can include data collected via voice-of-the-customer programs, self-service portals, customer surveys, customer reviews and even social media posts, blog post comments or email replies.

Customer sentiment score refers to the value applied to customer sentiment, expressed numerically in a range typically between 0 and 5, 0 and 10 or 0 and 100. To measure customer sentiment at your company, you could develop your own manual scoring system; or, you could invest in AI .?

These AI-powered tools employ machine learning to generate sentiment scores from algorithms that scan customer interactions, tracking phrases, words and behaviors with pre-assigned values, and then integrating measurements to gauge whether customers have positive, negative or neutral views; they also provide actionable insights based on when, where and why customer sentiments develop.

2. Customer Satisfaction Score

The customer satisfaction score, or CSAT, demonstrates each customer’s level of satisfaction; analyzed in totality, your customer satisfaction scores can tell you whether you’re truly offering customer-centric experiences — and, if not, what needs to be changed. Usually measured on a five-point scale, from very dissatisfied to very satisfied, you can use the CSAT to gather feedback during any stage of the customer lifecycle. All you have to do is establish criteria for your scoring, establish the metric that equates to a positive score, and include customer survey forms in your digital marketing and CX communications. Then, to determine your organization-level percentage score, multiply your pre-established positive score by 100. For instance, if you have 50 positive scores from a total of 100, your CSAT is 50% ((50/100) x 100 = 50%).

3. Net Promoter Score

Often coupled with the CSAT, the net promoter score, or NPS, measures the likelihood a customer will recommend you to others — and, ideally, become an influencer for your brand. To determine your NPS, develop a survey with a single question or multiple questions geared toward promoting and sharing, on a scale from 0 to 10, from “not likely at all” to “very likely.” Customers who provide (average) scores between 0 and 6 are considered detractors; passive customers typically score between 7 and 8; and your promoters will give you a 9 or 10. Then, to calculate your NPS, simply subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. And for more detailed, nuanced, qualitative feedback, ask an open-ended question, as well. All of this information can be automatically added to your customer profiles in your CRM or CDP.

4. Earned Growth Rate

The net promoter score was invented by Fred Reichheld , who introduced “the one number you need to grow” in Harvard Business Review in 2003. “Since then, NPS has spread rapidly around the world” and is now used by two thirds of the Fortune 1000. Unfortunately, this has proved problematic, with “self-reported scores and misinterpretations of the NPS framework… sow[ing] confusion and diminish[ing] its credibility.” So, Reichheld et al. went back to the proverbial drawing board to develop a new “complementary metric that drew on accounting results, not on surveys.”?

Earned growth rate, the researchers realized, would be “far more resistant to gaming, coaching, pleading, and the response biases that plague the results of non-anonymized surveys.” It would also “reinforce the effectiveness” of the original KPI, providing “clear, data-driven” connections across and among:?

• Customer success
• Repeat and expanded purchases
• Word-of-mouth recommendations
• Positive company culture
• Business results

Earned growth rate measures revenue growth generated by returning customers and their referrals. The earned growth ratio, meanwhile, measures the ratio of earned growth to total growth. This data forms the basis for your CLV, or customer lifetime value, which projects “the value you can expect to gain” based on “probabilities and higher math.” Earned growth, on the other hand, quantifies actual customer value by measuring results — and “can help every team learn how it is performing.”

As the KPI’s creators explain, earned growth comprises two elements:

1. NRR, or net revenue retention
2. ENC, or earned new customers

To determine your earned growth rate, begin by calculating your NRR as follows:

1. Organize your revenue by customer
2. Tally current year revenues from existing customers (who were also customers the year before)
3. Divide this amount by the previous year’s total revenues
4. Express this figure as a percentage

Next, you have to “ascertain why new customers have come on board,” isolating your ENC — the percentage of new customers earned through referrals — from new customers gained via other methods. Since “few firms” could quantify their ENC, Reichheld and team “pioneered a solution,” simply by adding a “relatively painless step” to the customer onboarding process: asking them the “primary reason” they gave you their business.?

So:

1. Sort your customers into two categories: “earned,” e.g., from a referral; and “bought,” e.g., a Super Bowl ad or sponsored social media post (most organizations have found earned new customers “far more profitable” than bought customers, “many of whom are revealed to be money losers over their life cycle”)
2. Use a set of expected customer responses, along with an open-ended “other” response, from which you can gather additional information to help you finetune the categories and options over time

Finally, determine your earned growth rate by:?

1. Adding your NRR and ENC together?
2. Subtracting 100%

Of course, if you want to compare your results to those of your competitors, you’ll need them to follow the same earned growth rate framework.?

5. Customer Lifetime Value

The customer lifetime value, or CLV, is a forecasting of the net profit an organization can expect to earn from a customer over the entire period of their relationship. When measured and ranked by customer, the CLV can help you segment — and better personalize the experiences for — your highest-value customers. When combined and contrasted with total expenditures, you can determine the overall effectiveness of your digital marketing, sales and CX efforts.

To determine your average CLV:

1. Calculate your average purchase value
2. Multiply your average purchase value by how often a purchase is made
3. Multiply this figure by your average customer lifespan

For example, if your average purchase is $100, made twice a year for 3 years, your CLV is $600 ($100 x 3 x 2 = $600).

To use this measurement to improve your marketing to high-value customers, create a list of the customers with a CLV exceeding your average.?

6. Customer Health Score

The customer health score is used to determine whether or not a customer will remain loyal over time. In contrast to most other customer experience metrics, the customer health score requires strategic legwork and is developed from a collection of the other CX KPIs most important to your unique business. Among the most commonly included metrics are:?

• Product/Service usage period
• Product type (free/paid, license level, etc.)
• Number of interactions with the support team
• Money spent with your brand
• Social media posts about your brand
• Referrals to your brand
• Willingness to answer customer experience surveys

Based on the metrics that make the most sense for you, develop a grading system for your customers; then, for easier segmentation and personalization, divide them into four categories:

1. High-value
2. Healthy
3. Unhealthy
4. At-risk

7. Customer Effort Score

As it sounds, the customer effort score, or CES, measures the amount of effort your customers have to expend to execute specific actions, like completing an online form, finding a product or resolving a technical issue. To determine your average customer effort score, you’ll again need to create a survey; this time it should ask customers to rate the level of effort required to complete an activity or series of activities. The results will tell you whether you really designed for UX, and what you should change to improve the user experience.?

8. Customer Service Satisfaction Score

The customer service satisfaction score measures customer satisfaction specifically with your post-sales customer service. As is customary in CX best practices, ask your customers for feedback after every interaction, using a standardized rating system and consistent questioning so you can identify trends over time.

9. Customer Retention Cost

Investing in new customers is between 500% and 2500% more expensive than retaining existing ones. Of course, retaining customers costs money too. And to ensure your marketing and CX strategies are producing positive ROI, you need to measure the cost of your customer retention efforts. To calculate your customer retention cost, or CRC, add all of the expenses incurred in keeping (and obtaining!) customers and divide that figure by the number of customers in your database. If your CRC is higher than your MRR, or monthly recurring revenue, it’s time to make some changes.

10. Monthly Recurring Revenue and Expansion MRR

Also a sales metric and ideal for SaaS and subscription-based businesses, your MRR tells you how much your customers are spending with you each and every month. Expansion MRR identifies how much your customers are spending outside of recurring subscriptions or payments. To measure your total monthly recurring revenue, multiply your number of monthly customers by their average monthly spend; for expansion MRR, add all additional revenue and multiply that figure by your total number of customers.

11. Churn Rate and MRR Churn

The churn rate is the rate at which your customers stop subscribing or shopping with your brand over a specific time period. Low churn rate, obviously, reveals customer satisfaction; high churn rates mean there’s something wrong with the product or service, your marketing of that product or service, or the amount of effort required to subscribe to or purchase that product or service. To calculate your churn rate:

1. Set your analysis period (e.g., a month, a quarter, six months, or a year)
2. Subtract the number of customers you had at the beginning of the time period from the number you had at the end
3. Divide this figure by the number of customers you had at the beginning

For instance, if you had 100 customers on day one and 75 on day 30, your churn rate is -25% ((75/100) x 100 = -.25 = -25%).

Your MRR churn, meanwhile, tells you the amount of monthly recurring revenue gained or lost as a result of your customer churn.

12. Average Resolution Time

For years CX ‘experts’ almost exclusively advised companies to find resolution as fast as possible. Today, we know speed isn’t everything — and CX professionals should be granted the time and resources necessary to truly resolve the issue and meet or exceed the customer or prospect’s expectations. Nevertheless, average resolution time remains one of the more important customer service KPIs, as it informs business leaders how effective their CX team and CX reps are in resolving issues quickly.

13. First Contact Resolution Rate

Even more important than the average resolution time is the first contact resolution rate, or the rate at which your CX professionals are able to resolve an issue during the first interaction. The more often this is achieved, the less overworked your team will be — and the more satisfied your customers will be as well. To measure your first contact resolution rate, divide the number of tickets closed after one interaction by the entire number of tickets received.

Your Customer Review Strategy

The hard truth is that consumers don’t really care what you think about your products and services. They’re sick of being advertised to.

• What consumers want from you is authenticity, consistency, transparency, and empathy
• What consumers want from their friends — and their favorite influencers — are product and brand recommendations

In fact, 92% consider peer reviews and user feedback to be the most credible source of potential purchase information. And, importantly, nearly half of all consumers will share their positive brand experiences on social media.

So, whenever you see a review, respond quickly — and on brand! If the review’s negative, expedite more, without losing the brand voice. (According to Yelp , if you respond within 24 hours, you increase the likelihood of the customer upgrading their review to a higher star rating by 33% .)?

Of course, this alone will not help you build a library of glowing testimonials, amplify brand awareness or build brand loyalty.

How to Ensure Your Customer Reviews Count

You can't create brand loyalty out of nowhere. It must be nurtured and instilled throughout the customer lifecycle, on social media as well as via email and on your website. If you’ve provided consistent, personalized and empathic experiences from initial awareness, you have the opportunity to exponentially amplify your reach — and boost your ROI — by empowering brand loyalists to promote you on and offline through customer reviews and user-generated content.

To ensure you’ve positioned yourself to benefit from brand loyalty, ask yourself the following questions:?

• Have we included social media follow and share buttons on our website and marketing emails?
• Do we engage with customers and prospects on social media, through chat, and in comments?
• Do we offer customers exclusive perks such as discounts and birthday gifts that keep them coming back?
• Do we offer customers additional perks exclusively for posting positive reviews?
• Do we have a referral program that makes it easy for customers to connect us with more prospects?
• Have we made our company easily accessible via email, phone and live chat?
• Have we developed and implemented an influencer program ?
• Do we put out requests for and then post user-generated content?
• Do we have a process whereby we monitor, log, analyze and iterate based on influencer- and user-generated content and/or customer reviews?

Your answers to these questions, coupled with how you manage customer complaints, can make or break your business in our customer-centric, very online society.

The Customer Complaint Process

A customer complaint process consists of the customer complaint management procedures taken to investigate, respond to and provide solutions for customer complaints.

5 Keys to Capitalizing on Negative Reviews

While the primary goal of customer support must be to minimize customer effort, support experiences are also valuable opportunities for learning, as well as strengthening and extending your customer relationships. Like a social media post or email, support conversations are part of the customer journey.?

Follow this advice so you can make the most of each and every chat, call and email:

1. Don’t merely resolve the immediate issue — use it to prevent the next one. While many companies believe they can anticipate and ‘forward-resolve,’ they rarely do due to excessive focus on call times. Instead, customer experience teams need to consider the entire customer support process, as customers gauge the effort they expend based not only on how a call is handled but how the company as a whole manages evolving service needs and experiences.
2. Focus on empathy. Sophisticated consumers expect more than personalization — they want to feel understood and valued, across all their interactions with the brand. Twenty-four percent of repeat support calls stem from emotional disconnects between customers and reps, but with basic instruction they can learn to not only listen but hear and respond accordingly.
3. Minimize channel switching — by improving self-servicing. We all think we want choice, and to some extent we do, but when we have too many choices, most of us feel overwhelmed. If a customer is confused or angry already, the last thing you want to do is aggravate the issue by hiding solutions in far-off places. Ask yourself: wouldn’t switching from a brand’s social media to their website, and from their website help center to their online chat, make you feel exasperated and increasingly alienated? Needless to say, that’s not what you want. So, instead of providing support everywhere in every way, use your zero- and first-party customer data from your owned properties to determine the type (or types) of support each of your audience segments prefers. Then, create pathways on your website and other properties so that help is readily available. And always ensure there’s a live human who can step in as needed.
4. Learn from your mistakes. Most of us record our customer calls. Many have some form of internal dashboard where we input customer feedback. But how many of us actually use that customer feedback? As George Costanza and Kenny Bania famously say on Seinfeld, “That’s gold, baby.” So, why aren’t we leveraging it to inform our future strategies, tactics and behaviors? With what your customers tell you, you may be able to implement dramatic improvements not only to your support processes and digital properties but to the products, services and people that/who make your brand.
5. Replace productivity with positivity — and empower your support reps. Average handle time doesn’t matter if the customers hang up, dissatisfied or worse. Even if you “fix” the immediate problem, you haven’t succeeded if the customer doesn’t feel heard, respected and valued. And they’ll likely turn to a competitor. Even worse, they may also take to social media to trash your brand, your product or your customer service. So, abandon your reliance on “productivity,” update your KPIs, and reward customer success experiences that not only resolve issues but strengthen relationships.

7 Steps to Successful Customer Complaint Management

To convert your complaints into opportunities, follow these seven steps:

1. Assess the problem

1. Determine the source of the complaint by listening and asking questions; what product, service or experience led to the issue, and why?
2. Develop an understanding of the customer’s perspective; ask yourself: how would I feel if I were in their situation?
3. Confirm you understand the type of resolution or restitution the customer seeks
4. Develop a checklist of concerns
5. Identify possible solutions, and how those solutions can be provided

2. Assess the customer

• For customers who are openly angry, stay calm and respond firmly and politely
• For high-value customers who expect premium support, don’t make excuses and move as quickly as possible toward resolution; also, consider creating a VIP folder and workflow to streamline identification and response
• For repeat callers, avoid showing frustration and work toward nurturing them into repeat customers (they are clearly invested already)

3. Assess your products, services and/or processes

1. Identify the impacted departments, employees, policies, processes, products, services, accounts, marketing materials and legal/compliance requirements
2. Gather files, correspondence (letters and emails), statements and any meeting or telephone call notes, and share details with impacted parties
3. Request and review materials from the impacted parties so you can better understand the product, service or process under review
4. Clearly outline all areas of dispute between the customer and your company
5. Clearly outline all areas that need further investigation
6. Allocate the appropriate amount of time for the investigation

4. Weigh the evidence

1. Identify any internal processes that may have led to the customer complaint
2. Identify any online technical errors that may have led to the customer complaint
3. Identify any product/service defects
4. Identify any breakdowns or malfunctions in manufacturing, shipping and other areas managed by third parties
5. If necessary, reconvene with the customer and/or internal and external stakeholders to gather additional information
6. If necessary, seek legal advice

5. Provide solutions as quickly as possible

1. Apologize
2. Provide a clear, chronological explanation of what went wrong, as well as how you investigated the matter, how you came to your decision and how you’ll be preventing future occurrences
3. Offer a replacement product/service (or product repair), as appropriate
4. Add a goodwill gesture, like a future discount
5. Request a public review, if they’re satisfied with the resolution
6. Ask what you can do better next time, and what the company can do better to improve their products, their services and/or the customer experiences they provide

6. Fix the problem

Fix it, whether it's a:

• Faulty product or service
• Unreasonable delay in product or service delivery
• Inaccurate or misleading advertising or marketing
• Poor customer experience
• Failure to comply with legal requirements or regulations
• Anything else

7. Log the experience and track resolutions and trends

Consider a customer support platform for:

• More comprehensive customer insights
• Advanced analytics and reporting
• Improved internal cross-functional collaboration
• Better customer support
• Seamless scaling

The Top 10 Customer Support Platforms

You already know that by automating your employees’ more mundane responsibilities, you can free them up to focus on the message, and the big picture. Sometimes, though, CX tech is about more than automating and streamlining; it’s also about organizing, understanding and improving — and that’s where the AI-powered customer support platform comes in.?

These are the 10 best customer support tools:

1. Freshdesk by Freshworks
2. Help Scout
3. HubSpot Service Hub
4. Intercom
5. Jira Service Management
6. LiveAgent
7. Salesforce Service Cloud
8. Sprinklr Service
9. Zendesk Support Suite
10. Zoho Desk

For More Like This

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