Level Up Your Customer Experience Tools and Technology

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The following article contains the first level from?the?CX Maturity Playbook: Technology and tools , a guide with actionable insight to uplevel your use of technology and tools for optimizing the customer experience, written in partnership between?GetFeedback ?and Jeannie Walters, CCXP, CEO of?Experience Investigators .

Technology and tools

When it comes to delivering a great customer experience (CX), in a time where customers’ expectations and needs are constantly changing, having the right technology and tools is imperative.?

The term?technology and tools?casts a wide net, including everything from the right?CX management solution?and a robust tech stack, to internal resources like training and education, all made available to empower employees at taking the right, strategic action to better your organization’s approach to delivering superb customer experience.

A mature organization has technology and tools that allow its teams to scale and pivot quickly in order to meet evolving customer needs. This means they use solutions that are?founded on agility—easy to implement and modify—and enable all employees to collect customer feedback where and when it matters most, so they can spot trends in real-time and take swift, impactful action.?

The North Star for?technology and tools?occurs when all business insights tools and technology—customer experience management, customer relationship management, Human Resources management, etc.—are integrated to provide a truly holistic view of the business. No decision is made without the consideration of the customer, the employees, and the business goals.?

Such a state is achievable through strategic action, which you can start taking today with the help of this playbook.?

The level below is defined based on general processes, rules, and expectations of technology and tools. We recommend you start with the level that GetFeedback's CX maturity assessment scored you as.?Take the assessment here .

ACTIONABLE STEPS

Level 1???

What it looks like?

At this stage, there are no CX-specific tools or technology available to assess and improve the customer experience. Instead, customer feedback is collected, sorted, and evaluated manually.

For instance, Customer Support agents might capture feedback from incoming service calls and log it into a spreadsheet, or Marketing might track social media brand mentions by capturing the text into a Word document.?

At Level 1, leaders collect feedback only at some touchpoints in ad-hoc ways, so there is no alignment around the customer journey, an overall CX strategy, or a true?Voice of the Customer (VoC) program.

In other words, nothing is done from a centralized CX tool, and technology is not leveraged to deliver results at scale.?

Instead, employees are asked to use some basic tools to track internal efficiencies—like Contact Center inbound call volume or social media brand mentions—all of which aren’t connected to customer experience. As such, employees don’t have visibility into the customer’s overall journey and can’t properly recognize what actions a customer has taken, what communication they’ve received, or what interactions they’ve had with your brand.?

You might hear employees make statements such as:

Sometimes during a marketing campaign, we ask customers for feedback. But it’s not really part of our regular process, and we don’t store that information anywhere special or put it into use after the campaign is over. It’s sort of all over the place right now. — Marketing Leader

Priorities to advance to the next level???

Moving from Level 1 to Level 2 happens when leaders begin collecting feedback via the use of a basic survey tool(s) specifically to track certain customer experience metrics for their team.

To move forward, you’ll focus on:

• Basic survey tool(s)
• Team education

How to take action

Step 1: Identify a basic survey tool(s) that’ll empower teams to reach their specific customer experience goals and priorities?

At Level 2, leaders and teams are just beginning to establish more clearly defined goals for collecting the right feedback. And although it’s not recommended, at such an early stage, it’s common to have multiple survey tools used throughout the organization.?

To advance from Level 1 to 2, just focus on making survey tool(s) available for teams. Different tools offer different features, so when suggesting a survey solution, it’s important to be mindful of each team’s needs.?

Some questions to consider when looking for the right survey tool:

• What are the basic features your team needs??
• What budget is available?
• Does the tool provide best-practice templates (based on writing, survey design, and logic)?
• Will teams be able to easily collect the type of feedback—like?Net Promoter Score? (NPS?),?Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and?Customer Effort Score (CES)—that they need??
• Is there an easy integration with your CRM (for teams like Sales and Customer Success that are already using a Customer Relationship Management solution)??
• What are the reporting functionalities??
• Will the customer data export in a way that’s easy to share (like an online dashboard)?

Consider what features are most important and evaluate tools based on not just today’s priorities, but tomorrow’s. For example, you might not prioritize a CRM integration today, but will you need it in the near future??

Knowing what features are important for the future will lead to better decisions around technology now.?

Step 2: Educate teams on how to use their survey tool(s) so they can confidently rely on it to improve the experience?

As mentioned before, survey tools vary in their features and structure. Leaders and their teams need to feel empowered to leverage whichever survey tool is provided.

The best way to do this is to?include the team throughout the selection and onboarding processes.?Here is how:?

• Get their ideas and feedback about what features are most important. This will help employees feel engaged and, consequently, better understand why a particular survey tool is selected in the end.?
• Invite employees to share what manual processes they wish were automated. Remember, many teams at Level 1 are still evaluating data based on manually entering and sorting with spreadsheets.?
• Once the survey tool is selected, hold a group onboarding session and assign individual onboarding tasks to help employees feel comfortable using the technology.?

Introducing a survey tool can empower leaders to evaluate customer feedback faster and with more actionable insights. Over time, once teams see the results of strategically surveying customers, they will be more eager and confident to use the survey tool to its full potential.

For Levels 2 - 5, visit the full playbook here.

This article contains the first level from?the?CX Maturity Playbook: Technology and tools , a guide with actionable insight to uplevel your use of technology and tools for optimizing the customer experience, written in partnership between?GetFeedback ?and Jeannie Walters, CCXP, CEO of?Experience Investigators .

Read the full playbook here.