A Little Bit About Popup Surveys: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Popups are those annoying little windows that cover your viewing area of a website you just visited. Yeah… annoying. So why should anyone use them? Most of you have heard Sir Winston Churchill’s “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” It is a bit of a similar situation. Are popups the best? No. But do we have anything better? Not really.

The Good

Though you need a bit of technical knowledge or support to put them on your site, they are still quick and easy to implement. If you are handy enough, they allow you to gather data while customers are still engaged with your website or product. Their response rate is unparalleled. Depending on the tool you are researching, popup surveys perform easily two, three, or even more times (ranging from 10-30% response rate) than their subtler cousins: slide-out surveys or feedback buttons (with a 2-5% response rate).

(Slide-out: a small widget on the side or bottom of the page that can be triggered by various actions such as scrolling, clicking on a specific button, or hovering over the widget.)

The Bad

Popups get a lot of bad rep from all the “You are the millionth viewer of this page!” scam or similar click baits. Many customers might close them out of habit without even glancing at the content itself (just imagine the response rates if you could avoid this!). If set up incorrectly, popups can be a high-ranking source of frustration.

The Ugly (Yet Surprisingly Satisfying)

The ugly part is the in-between space of how to bring out the good and mitigate the bad. Popups are really powerful, but oh-my do they come with responsibility… For more on that, keep reading.

Or if you’d rather learn more about website surveys in general, or you are just looking for a muse on what to ask the people that interact with your website, check out article Best Website Survey Questions [+Examples].

Introduction to Customer Effort Score

Let’s talk about Customer Effort Score (CES) for a moment. If you’re interested in the background of CES and how and why it works, you can download our Ultimate Guide to Customer Effort Score.

For the purposes of this article, all you need to know is that CES asks a simple question: “How easy was it for you to solve your problem today?” It’s a metric that measures how much effort a customer has to put in to get their problem solved. The less effort customers have to expend, the better the score. We all want our customers to have a great experience and not be frustrated, so let’s work on improving our CES scores!

Strategies for Implementing CES Popup Surveys (the ugly makeup)

 Let’s recap what we’re dealing with:

1. Popup surveys can be annoying.
2. Visitors may overlook them due to bad previous experiences.
3. We’re focusing on “How easy was it for you to solve your problem today?” (though the following tips are generally applicable for other types of surveys as well).

To overcome the dislike of popup surveys, stick to the following simple principles:

Define your objectives: Determine what you hope to achieve with your popup survey. Have you identified a bottleneck where visitors start leaving, but you don’t know why? Is your customer support team overwhelmed even though you have an extensive knowledge base users should be able to use instead? Are you unsure about the seamlessness of your onboarding? Regardless of your reasons, be mindful of the question you are seeking answers for?

Timing: I cannot stress this enough – timing is everything. You want to display the survey while visitors are still engaged, but not when it could disturb them from their current course of action. This way, the survey can appear as a part of the experience instead of a disturbance. Some good examples would be:

1. Survey your visitors after a purchase or conversion. It’s an ideal time to capture feedback from customers as they have just interacted with your brand and have a fresh experience to report on.
2. Use an exit intent survey. Many issues with popups come from the fact that they tend to appear after a short time spent on a page or even right when the page is opened. Showing a survey when the user is about to exit gives them an opportunity to provide feedback before they leave without disrupting their experience. This can be especially useful for surveying your knowledge base experience.
3. If you want to verify a specific process or interaction on your website, consider triggering a popup survey when the visitor finishes a monitored task. That way, the experience is still fresh, and though the popup grabs the attention, it feels relevant.

Frequency: Limit the number of times a survey popsup for a visitor. Keep this in mind both for repeating the same survey and for separate surveys on different pages. No one wants to answer the same question repeatedly in short time, and having a survey popup on every other page gets tedious even faster.

Quick Tip

• Don’t forget to check out our article on How to Create an Effective Popup surveys.

I’ve got some feedback – what now?

Once you’ve received feedback, the next step is to analyze it and take action. Breaking down feedback into actionable data is key to making improvements. Look for repeating patterns and take note of any suggestions for improvement. Even if your CES score is low, using customer feedback removes the guesswork from the equation. When customers see that you’ve taken their feedback seriously and made changes, they’re more likely to become loyal customers.

It’s important to keep track of your metrics over time, even if you have good scores. If you notice a decrease, it’s time to identify the root cause and take corrective action. On the other hand, if you notice an increase in scores, it’s important to identify what you did right and replicate that success elsewhere.

Check out the customer story of Man Crates which is a great example of how to combine metrics to get a more complete picture. CES is a valuable metric, but CES + CSAT is even better. Adding NPS to the mix can give you a truly holistic view of customer satisfaction.

Word in conclusion

Although popup surveys can be annoying, when used wisely and sparingly, they can become engaging and invaluable for your feedback loop. Just like fighter pilots rely on continuous feedback loops to improve their performance and avoid mistakes, businesses must prioritize feedback to identify areas for improvement and enhance customer experience. By collecting and analyzing customer feedback through tools like popup surveys and using it to make targeted changes, you can continually refine your processes and stay ahead of the competition.

The post Unlocking the Power of Popup Surveys: A Guide to Improving Your Customer Effort Score appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Measuring your customer experience (CX) can feel complicated.

There are so many different CX metrics you could track. But which one(s) should you actually use? 

Studies show that focusing on creating a great customer experience reduces customer churn, creates loyal customers, and increases customer engagement. All of this increases revenue and makes your business more profitable. Here are more great benefits of making sure your customers are satisfied:

• Bain & Company, the creators of NPS, found that just a “5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit” in some industries. 
• Esteban Kolsky found that 72% of customers tell 6 or more people if they’re truly happy.
• SuperOffice says that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience

A good customer experience management tool should make it easy to track and report on how your customers feel about your business, take the data you gather from customers, analyze it, and then distill it into an easy-to-digest report or dashboard. This helps you take action more quickly because it’s easy to figure out what your customers are happy with and what they’re not happy with. That’s exactly what NPS, CES, and CSAT metrics do. 

In this guide, we’ll explain the difference between these three most common CX metrics so you can make an informed decision on what’s right for your biz.

What is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

NPS is a metric that measures your customers’ likelihood of referring others to your business. The theory is that if a customer would refer someone to you, then they’re likely satisfied and you can consider them a loyal customer. It does this by asking one simple question:

“How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?”

Customers rate their likelihood on a scale of 0-10. The NPS score itself is calculated based on the difference between the percentage of Promoters (9s and 10s) and the percentage of Detractors (0s-6s). Customers who rate their likelihood as a 7 or 8 are considered Passives.

For example, if 100 people responded to an NPS survey with 50 Promoters, 20 Detractors, and the rest Passives, the Net Promoter Score would be 30 (because 50-20 = 30).

The benefits of Net Promoter Score

NPS is a proven way to measure loyalty. As humans, we like to tell people about things we love, like our favorite restaurants or gadgets. Word of mouth is powerful, and if you have a lot of excited and happy customers talking about your business, that’s undoubtedly valuable. 

Speaking of simplicity, one of the main benefits of NPS is its simplicity. 

We’ve all been asked to take a, ahem, short survey before, then been surprised when we get hit with dozens of questions on our experience. Long and complicated surveys ask a lot of your customers. 

NPS solves this. At its core, Net Promoter Score asks one simple question that takes only a few seconds to answer. While it’s a good idea to ask a follow-up question that helps you understand the context behind your NPS, at its simplest NPS, consists of one core question.

The drawbacks of Net Promoter Score

NPS is a good way to measure customer loyalty, but it’s not perfect. 

While the question is simple, the score itself doesn’t always give a clear picture of how satisfied your customers are. For example, say you have an NPS score of 20 from a survey of 100 people:

• You might have 60 Promoters, 40 Detractors, and no Passives (60-40 = 20)
• Or you might only have 30 Promoters, 10 Detractors, and 80 Passives (30-10 = 20)

Obviously, the first situation is better, because you’ve got twice as many customers likely to recommend you. But if you’re only looking at your NPS score, you’d think that both of these businesses are exactly the same. Looking at the data more holistically is the only way to understand your customer feedback accurately. 

You can also have a higher NPS—usually a good thing—while your number of Detractors increases. Let’s look at two examples from a 100-person NPS survey:

The NPS score in scenario 2 is better. While the number of promoters increased (+15), the number of detractors also increased (+10). 
What’s the right approach here? Should you celebrate that your NPS is increasing? Or should you be concerned that your number of detractors has doubled? 

NPS can be simple, but it doesn’t always make it clear what the best action to take should be.

What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?

CES is designed to measure how easy it is for customers to get the help they need. As you’d guess from the name, it’s attempting to measure the “customer effort” in a given situation. Customer effort score is measured by asking customers how strongly they agree with a statement, such as:

How strongly do you agree with the following statement: [Company] made it easy to resolve my issue

Customer effort score is usually measured on a spectrum from 1 – 7, with 1 indicating the lowest agreement and 7 being the highest agreement. 

According to Gartner, the proper way to measure CES is to calculate the percentage of respondents who at least “somewhat agree” (which usually means a 5 or above on a 7-point scale) that the company made it easy to get the help they needed.

Similarly to NPS, adding an open-ended follow-up question is generally considered a best practice with CES.

The benefits of Customer Effort Score

Like NPS, CES is measured by asking a single question, so it’s also very easy for customers to respond to.

Unlike NPS, a higher CES score is a definite sign you’re moving in the right direction. More customers indicating that they’re able to resolve their issues more easily is always a net positive improvement. 

The other big benefit of a customer effort score is that it gives you a clear indication of where your focus should be. Zeroing in on the customers that disagreed in your survey (those that responded with a 1-4) enables you to understand what made it difficult for them to resolve their issues. 
Focusing on those low scores pays off: as noted in this post on benchmarking CX metrics, studies have shown that improving CES responses from 1 to 5 increased loyalty by 22% (as opposed to a 2% increase when improving the 5-7 range).

The drawbacks of Customer Effort Score

One of the biggest drawbacks of CES is that it doesn’t automatically explain why the customer scored the interaction the way they did. Asking an open-ended follow-up question can help, but you won’t always get additional context. 

The impact of this is that your customer effort score may actually only reflect a small percentage of your customers. You can remedy this by comparing the CES score with other data you have, such as the issue type, the customer’s demographics, and how quickly it took your support team to respond.  

Exploring these different data points together paints a fuller picture. For instance, maybe you notice that the low scores are from new users, but experienced users score you highly. Perhaps that means you don’t need to overhaul your support experience, but you’ve found a great opportunity to improve your user onboarding process.

What is customer satisfaction (CSAT)?

CSAT is probably one of the most common metrics used across businesses. While it can be used to measure customer satisfaction on a broad level, it’s primarily used to measure a customer’s happiness with a recent interaction with your support team. This means that you’ll usually survey users shortly after they’ve contacted support—via email, within live chat, or anywhere else you can think. 

Companies sometimes measure CSAT in different ways, but the standard way is often best:

(The total number of positive responses) ÷ (Number of total responses) x 100 = % of satisfied customers.

For example, if you had 45 positive responses out of 50 total, your CSAT score is 90%. 

The benefits of CSAT

CSAT is simple to use, implement and understand. It’s also highly customizable. You can use it to ask one question to your customers (”How satisfied are you with your purchase/interaction/product/etc.”) and can follow it up with questions about specific areas of your service. 

And unlike NPS and CES, you can change the CSAT rating scale to match your varying needs. CSAT can accommodate anywhere from a simple yes/no response to a full 10-point scale.

CSAT also allows you to directly see the correlation between other support metrics and KPIs and how satisfied your customers are. By comparing your trending CSAT scores to your KPI trends such as wait times, handle times, and time to resolution, you can make an accurate determination about what your customers want.

For example, if you see CSAT scores trending downward along with an increase in the amount of time customers have to spend on the phone with your agents, that indicates improving handle times would most likely improve customer satisfaction.

The drawbacks of CSAT

The biggest drawback of CSAT is that the definition of satisfied can vary significantly between customers. What does “satisfied” really mean? 

Some customers may be satisfied with a longer resolution time as long as you’re working on it and communicating well, while others will be highly dissatisfied in the same situation. This variation can make it difficult to understand if your CSAT score actually tells you something significant.

CSAT also tends to measure only short-term sentiment because the focus is on the most recent interaction. You could have a customer highly satisfied with your product but unsatisfied with a particular support interaction or vice-versa. By itself, CSAT may not give you a complete picture of how satisfied your customers really are across the board. 

Five questions to ask to determine which CX metric is right for you

To determine if you should be using NPS, CES, or CSAT, ask yourself the following questions:

• What is your overall CX goal? If you have a specific goal of raising loyalty, for example, focus on gathering CES data and improving those scores in the 1 – 4 or 5 range. 
• How much effort will it take to implement one or more of these metrics? The right tool can make capturing customer feedback effortless. But when you’re in a bind, it’s often easiest to start measuring the metric that’s easiest to implement, then add in additional metrics over time.  
• Will this be a company-wide initiative or just a customer support initiative? CSAT measures customers support interactions really well. CES can measure both customer support interactions and purchase interactions. NPS is better for tracking overall company and brand loyalty. What’s your focus? 
• Are you more concerned with individual interactions or overall sentiment? CSAT and CES measure short-term satisfaction with a particular interaction or set of interactions. NPS measures how customers feel overall and is a better fit for understanding customers’ long-term sentiment. 
• Is there an opportunity to implement all three metrics? Using NPS, CES, and CSAT will give you the most complete view of customer sentiment, loyalty, and satisfaction. You probably shouldn’t ask them all in the same survey, but implementing each at strategic points in the customer journey can be really effective. 

More resources to help you take action

NPS, CES, and CSAT may work well alone (despite their flaws), but combining them across your customer journey can give you the most holistic view of your customers. Measuring the right CX metrics is the first step in using customer feedback to drive your business forward. 

Remember, there is no perfect metric. Use your best judgment, follow best practices where possible, and do what makes sense for your business. The important part is consistently taking action to improve the customer experience, getting more feedback, and then taking more action on that new feedback.

This post only scratched the surface of these three popular CX metrics. For more in-depth information on NPS, CES, and CSAT (and tons of other stuff), check out Nicereply’s resources page, and in case you have any questions visit Nicereply’s help center.

The post NPS vs. CES vs. CSAT Metrics: Which One(s) Is the Best For You? appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

What is an employee experience and why does it matter? Find out in our article!

Whatever industry you are in, delivering outstanding customer experience is most probably one of the major goals of your business. While there are several key factors contributing to customer experience, having an employee-centric culture within your organization can significantly add to it.

In fact, according to the Deloitte survey, 84% of executives rate employee experience as important. Yet only 9% said they were ready to actively improve employee experience. The undeniable link between customer and employee experiences still tends to be overlooked by many business leaders.

What is Employee Experience?

Employee experience, also shortened as EX, is how an employee feels working at your company throughout their entire employee lifecycle. That includes the whole period from pre-hire to post-offboarding and everything in between. Basically, every aspect of an employee’s relationship with the company shapes their overall employee experience.

The ‘The Employee Experience Index’ study by IBM Smarter Workforce Institute defines employee experience as: “A set of perceptions that employees have about their experiences at work in response to their interactions with the organization.”

Employee Experience vs Employee Engagement

Employee experience is closely related to employee engagement. Since EX has been given increased attention over recent years, there’s a lot of confusion between the two. Employee engagement is the emotional commitment an employee has towards the organization and its goals. It’s the energy and effort employees put into their work.

At the most basic level, the difference between employee experience and employee engagement is that the ‘experience’ is the input, while the ‘engagement’ is the outcome. That means employee engagement is the result of a positive employee experience.

How does Employee Experience Impact Customer Experience?

Ian Golding, a certified CX professional, talks about how customer experiences are directly impacted by employee experiences in his self-published book ‘Customer What?: The honest and practical guide to customer experience’. “If a business cares for its people, and they feel engaged and empowered, in turn, they will care for the customers of that business. If your business does not care for its people, your customers will interact with disengaged, unhappy employees, and disengagement and unhappiness are what they will remember about the experience,” Golding says.

Research by Harvard Business Review revealed that happier employees are clearly associated with companies’ ability to satisfy customers. That is particularly true in industries with the closest contact between employees and customers, such as retail, health care, travel and tourism, financial services, restaurants, and food services, the research claims.

Whether a customer receives a positive or a negative experience with your business, is almost always based on the perceived quality of an interaction they had with one of your employees. These are mostly employees on the frontlines dealing with customers as part of their day-to-day activities, like customer service, customer support, and sales reps. And numerous studies have proved that even a single interaction with a customer-facing employee can impact customer satisfaction by either making or breaking the customer’s experience.

Some of the world’s most customer-centric brands have actually achieved customer experience success by putting their employees first. Zappos and Ritz-Carlton are known to have made employee happiness and empowerment a key to delivering outstanding customer experiences. Richard Branson also believes that making employees the top priority is the reason behind Virgin’s success.

“It should go without saying that if employees are 100% proud of the job they are doing, if you give them the right tools, if they are treated well, they are going to be smiling, they are going to be happy and therefore the customer will have a positive experience. On the other hand, if employees are not looked after and not appreciated, they are not going to do things with a smile and the customer will be treated in a way where they won’t want to come back for more”, Branson said in an Inc. interview.

Benefits of Having a Positive Employee Experience

Increased efficiency and engagement

Employees with a positive employee experience at their workplace are more engaged, more productive, and efficient. According to the Eagle Hill Consulting Workplace Culture Survey, employees actually believe a positive company culture has a direct impact on their performance:

• 77% consider that it increases their ability to do their best at work.
• 76% have experienced improvements in their productivity and efficiency.
• 74% have improved their ability to best serve customers.
• 73% feel more committed to help achieve their company’s goals.
• 70% feel more devoted to ethical behaviors.
• 67% believe it increases their innovation and creativity.

Better customer service

Despite the rise of AI, automation and self-service, customers will always desire human connection when it comes to getting customer support. Especially when they are challenged by complicated customer service issues or want to complain. And your customer service employees are the only human interface they interact with. Happy employees are able to deliver a better customer service experience, because:

• They are more empathetic and more responsive to customers’ needs;
• They are willing to take ownership and deliver on their commitments;
• They are more likely to go above and beyond to resolve customer issues efficiently;
• They are more passionate about WOWing and delighting customers.

Employees becoming brand advocates

Happy, empowered, and highly engaged employees who feel cared for and valued are naturally becoming your best brand advocates and ambassadors. They are often more willing to speak positively about your company to each other, to your prospects, and to customers. Their knowledge of your products or services coupled with their enthusiasm and commitment to your company values greatly contributes to their ability to deliver a consistently positive customer experience.

Wrapping up

The obvious connection between employee experience and customer experience shouldn’t be overlooked by businesses. Building a positive company culture with the right working conditions and enjoyable work environment, ensuring employees are treated well, feel happy, engaged, and appreciated is a key to creating and maintaining a positive employee experience within an organization.

A customer’s experience with your business is only as good as your employees’ experience. When employees enjoy a positive employee experience, they are more likely to turn it into a positive customer experience. And the more supported, empowered, and engaged your employees are, the better quality of experience they can provide to your customers.

The post Why Customer Experience is a Reflection of Employee Experience appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

You can improve your customer experience without breaking the bank. These easy ways to reduce customer effort are a great place to start.

Your customer experience needs an overhaul, but you don’t have the budget or developers to make it happen.

Your helpdesk needs replacing, but you don’t have the expertise to migrate over all of your historical data.

You want to better understand trends in your support tickets, but you’re reliant on your data team to complete an in-depth analysis.

Do any of these sound familiar?

Most support leaders resonate with challenges like these. They’re frustrating because every support leader wants to keep improving their customers’ experience. It’s easy to feel discouraged.

But I’ve got good news: there are plenty of things you can do to incrementally improve your customer experience without a large resource commitment.

Making small changes to reduce customer effort can improve customer loyalty and satisfaction and can help your company’s leadership team understand why it makes sense to invest in customer experience.

Why customer effort matters

There may not be many guarantees in life, but there definitely are a few in customer service.

Here’s one: I guarantee your customers hate when you make them work hard for something that should be easy.

Customer expectations are changing quickly. Your customers expect you to understand what they need and expect from your product and company. Your marketing promises your product can do something and your customers expect you to deliver on those promises. When there are issues, they expect quick and effective support from your customer service team.

Measuring customer effort is a great way to understand how you can make things easier for your customers. Customer Effort Score (CES) is a strong predictor of customer loyalty. That means reducing customer effort results in lower churn and happier customers.

If you’re a support leader, reducing customer effort may be the single best way you can help your business grow. Here are seven low-hanging ways to reduce customer effort in your organization

Make your contact info visible and human help easy to reach

Remember the last time you were stuck in an endless phone menu when trying to call support? How about the last time you were stuck talking to a chatbot and couldn’t get the help you needed?

Tools like chatbots and IVRs (phone routing systems) can be a great way to reduce customer effort, but they can also create major frustration.

To avoid this frustration and decrease customer effort, find ways to make it easier for customers to get human help when needed. Over 60% of them are probably trying to resolve their issue on their own before reaching out, so once they’ve decided they need to contact you don’t force them to jump through a bunch more hoops.

In a world where everything is becoming automated, simply making it easy to get a human on the phone or on chat can make your company stand out from the crowd.

Adopt your grandma’s point of view

Odds are that you’re far more comfortable with technology than your grandparents are. There are always exceptions (like this), but by and large it’s generally safe to assume that younger people are more tech savvy than older people.

Recognizing this reality enables you to adopt a different perspective as you think about your customer experience. Start by asking yourself this question: What are the most common things people need to do within your product?

Once you’ve created a list of items, ask yourself if your grandmother could accomplish those tasks. Where would she get tripped up? What steps might she struggle with? What assumptions have you made?

Questions like these will help you uncover points of confusion or friction for your customers that you can then improve.

Update your templates and help articles

Most support teams have a long list of templates and macros they use to speed up the work of helping customers. Hopeful you’re also offering self-service options like a help center or knowledge base that empowers customers to answer their own questions.

The biggest challenge with these kinds of tools is that they can quickly grow outdated.

If you don’t have a process for regularly updating documentation like templates and help articles, over time they’ll become less useful to your customers. Every new product release could make things worse.

A quick and relatively easy way to reduce effort for your customers is to make sure all of your documentation is up-to-date and accurate.

Accurate and helpful documentation—including current screenshots or illustrative gifs—help customers take necessary action quickly and easily. Outdated documentation leads customers astray and creates unnecessary frustration.

Most support teams own documentation for their help center and help desk, so getting started on this might be as easy as blocking out some time on your calendar today.

Get a co-browsing tool

You love your customers. But they’re probably great at explaining issues in ways that don’t always make sense to your support team.

Whether it’s using the wrong terms or repeating the same thing over and over, unclear communication can get in the way of resolving customer issues.

Co-browsing tools like Glance or Cobrowse.io eliminate this confusion and make getting help way easier for your customers. They allow your support team to see exactly what your customer is seeing in real-time, making it easy to understand exactly what the issue is.

From there, your team can easily guide customers through your product to help them accomplish their goals.

Mystery shop your support experience

Mystery shopping is a research technique that companies use to measure the quality of their customer service. It’s common in brick-and-mortar stores—like those at your local shopping mall—but it’s something you can also do with your customer experience.

Mystery shopping can be a great way to uncover opportunities to improve your support experience. You’re putting yourself in your customers’ shoes.

It can be as simple as walking through each stage of your customer journey as if you were a customer. Submit a support ticket. Reset your password. Submit a feature request.

If you’re like many support leaders, it’s probably been awhile since you’ve done each of these things firsthand. Mystery shopping may be a very eye-opening experience!

Leverage chatbots

I mentioned earlier that chatbots can cause a lot of customer frustration. That’s very true, but they can also be a great way to reduce customer effort when they’re used strategically. There are a few reasons why:

1. They’re always available. Sure, you could offer 24/7 human support. But maybe that’s not viable for your business. A chatbot gives you the ability to provide real-time support 24/7.
2. They’re fast. Your customers want you to value their time. Chatbots can provide instant help for your customers’ most frequently asked questions.
3. They’re great at handling large volumes. Your human agents can only help so many customers at once. Chatbots give you a way to quickly scale up and handle large volumes of incoming customer questions.

Here’s the catch: Chatbots aren’t great at understanding context or reading between the lines. They don’t know when to hold strictly to a policy and when to make an exception.

They also aren’t always great at understanding sentiment (although they’re quickly improving).

If you want to use chatbots to reduce customer effort—without increasing frustration—only rely on chatbots where it makes sense.

For simple and repetitive questions, chatbots are a great fit. Instead of requiring a customer to wait for a live agent or an email response, a chatbot might be able to handle the question virtually immediately.

But for complex or technical questions, they’re probably a bad idea.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it once again for those in the back: Always make it easy for customers to escalate from a chatbot to a human support agent.

Collaborate with your Product and Engineering teams

The last low-hanging way to reduce customer effort requires prioritizing internal relationships within your company. While it might not seem like it has a direct impact on customer effort, building strong relationships between Support and Product or

Engineering is critical building a better customer experience.

Your customer experience encompasses all of your customers’ interactions with your brand and product, and your Product and Engineering teams build most of those touchpoints.

By building a strong and collaborative relationship with these teams, you’ll have a more influential voice into how the future of your product is shaped.

You’ll be better positioned to advocate for your customers. You’ll be able to provide feedback based on customer interactions. You may even be able to facilitate setting up customer interviews for your Product team.

While it might seem a bit counterintuitive, asking a Product Manager or Front-End Developer to meet for coffee may be the key to making life better for your customers in the coming months.

Take action wherever you’re able

Incremental changes often aren’t glamorous. They’re not sexy. They don’t attract a lot of attention or applause.

But by consistently taking action on low-hanging opportunities, you’ll be building momentum. As you invest in changes like the ones mentioned above, you’ll find they snowball into a much-improved customer experience over time.

The post 7 Low-hanging Ways to Reduce Customer Effort appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Everything you need to know about Customer Effort Score – why is so important and how to measure it.

A new month, a new topic! Let’s talk about a popular survey type known as the Customer Effort Score (CES) and discuss what it is; when to use it; and why it’s so important for your brand.

What is the Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Customer Effort Score is a metric used to evaluate how easy customers thought it was to get a resolution to their recent contact.

What is the idea behind the Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Customers prefer doing business with companies that are easy to work with. Do your clients have to work hard to get what they want? Then, there is a high probability (94%) that they won’t be loyal to your brand.

When should I use the Customer Effort Score?

Measure CES by surveying customers after the resolution of their conversation, finishing a call, fulfilling an order, ending a chat, or closing a deal.

By default, your survey is sent after 24 hours since resolving a ticket. However, the biggest advantage of Nicereply’s surveys is that you can customize the time when your surveys are sent. Don’t overwhelm your customers with survey emails and use over surveying protection. Choose after how many days can a customer receive another survey email.

How is the CES measured?

Customer Effort Score survey questions ask whether customers agree with the following statement:

“XY COMPANY” made it easy for me to handle my issue.

On a 1 (low) – 7 (high) scale they indicate whether they agree or disagree with the statement.

How do you calculate a CES?

You can calculate your CES by subtracting the percentage of people who responded positively from the percentage of respondents who offered a negative response. The neutral responses are normally ignored.

Recommended articles:

• The Ultimate Guide to Customer Effort Score
• Using Customer Effort Insights to Build Experiences People Love
• Benchmarking Customer Effort Score: How do your CES results stack up?
• How To Use NPS Feedback To Reduce Customer Effort

Podcast tip:

Listen to our special episode with Scott Rothman, Market Director at Challenger Inc. – a global leader in training, technology, and consulting to win today’s complex sale.

Together with Craig Stoss, they discuss how can your company benefit from CES & how to train your agents to provide an effortless experience.

The post Content Pie#5: What is Customer Effort Score? appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

“You don’t want to be underperforming, you don’t want to be overperforming. You want to be just right. And that’s truly the case for CES”

You can listen to Customer Experience Leaders Chat also on:

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts

A good support team is obsessed with finding ways to improve the customer experience and have an opportunity to impact it on a large scale. There are several different ways to evaluate the experience customers have and the Customer Effort Score (CES) is one of them.

However, it’s a lot tougher to game the system when it comes to Customer Effort Score versus some of the other metrics. A common concern with the NPS and CSAT is that the feedback is often out of the scope of the customer service team. But with CES, people tend to leave more feedback when they get asked: “Company made it easy for me to handle my issue” rather than just clicking on the smiley faces and getting a question like “How nice was my reply?”

Scott Rothman, Market Director at Challenger Inc. acknowledges that if a company wants to know how to improve and how to fix something, measuring customer effort is a good next step.

In Conversation with Scott Rothman, Market Director at Challenger Inc

In a special episode of Customer Experience Leaders Chat, Igor and Scott discuss how CES was developed and why any company should take the leap and set up their first customer effort score survey.

Scott talks about the beginnings of the Customer Effort Score. It all started when a team of researchers at the CEB (now Gartner) uncovered the most effective strategies customer service teams used to build loyalty. Their research showed that “effort” is a key driver of customer loyalty.

We also looked at the overall CES score, cases when CES can be too high, and why five or six can do just fine.

“You don’t want to be underperforming, you don’t want to be overperforming. You want to be just right. And that’s truly the case for CES”

Join our special episode with Scott from Challenger to hear about what CES is, how it can benefit your company, and how you can train your support agents to provide an Effortless Experience.

The post The Ultimate Guide to CES with Challenger Inc. [Podcast] appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Maximize the value of received feedback. Making a good follow-up and choosing the right survey questions is the key to customer satisfaction.

Are you managing a call center? Do you sell goods or provide services? It doesn’t really matter what your core business is. A good quality follow-up process is one of the puzzle pieces. Sometimes it might be confusing to choose the best questions for a particular survey. This new resource will lead you to proper queries and bring you the necessary answers.

We collected the most meaningful questions you should use if you want to understand your customers well. Checking your rates on a daily basis, and viewing the score and numbers is an essential bullet point of your to-do list. But at the end of the day what matters is understanding the real customer’s intentions and feelings.

So to help you supercharge your results and drive impactful changes, we’ve rounded up a list of survey questions & follow-up questions that you can use in your next customer-facing survey.

In a brand new e-book you will find:

• CSAT survey questions
• NPS survey questions
• CES survey questions
• Follow-Up questions

The post TOP Questions for CSAT, NPS & CES [Free resource] appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Created in 2010, the Customer Effort Score is fairly new to the scene but is becoming increasingly more popular. Ever been burned by a company’s support team? Long wait times, vague answers, and way too much back and forth. That’s exactly what the Customer Effort Score (CES) aims to eliminate.

What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Customer Effort Score is a metric, which customer service teams are using to evaluate how easy customers thought it was to get a resolution to their recent contact. They measure it by surveying customers after the resolution of their customer service conversation.

The idea is that customers enjoy doing business with companies that are easy to work with. Great customer service is a big part of making business transactions easy. Think about the last really frustrating experience you had with a company. It probably involved several emails back and forth with the customer service team. It likely felt very difficult to get clear answers and solutions from the company. After spending so much time and effort dealing with the company, you might think twice about purchasing from them again, right?

How was CES developed?

It’s a common belief that great customer service builds customer loyalty. Much of the work customer service teams do is designed to delight customers, making them more loyal. In this case, customer loyalty consists of three specific behaviors:

• Repurchasing: where customers continue to buy from you without canceling or churning.
• Advocating: where customers tell their friends and family about your company and refer new business to you, and
• Expanding share of wallet: where customers spend more money and purchase more from you.

Disloyalty is the opposite behavior. Disloyal customers will buy less, share bad experiences with family and friends, and eventually stop purchasing from you altogether.

In 2010, a team of researchers at the CEB wanted to uncover the most effective strategies customer service teams used to build loyalty. What they found surprised them. While most customer service teams believed that delighting customers was the most important part of their job, delight actually has very little impact on building loyalty, and mitigating disloyalty.

“As we analyze responses from more than 97,000 customers, what we find is that there is virtually no difference at all between the loyalty of those customers whose expectations are exceeded and those whose expectations are simply met.” – The Effortless Experience

What impact do customer service teams actually have on loyalty?

It turns out that customers are most swayed in their re-purchasing decisions by how easy it is to do business with a company. Customer service teams are highly influential in this area. The CEB discovered “that the specific things customer service does to drive disloyalty among customers are largely associated with the amount of work— or effort— customers must put forth to get their issues resolved.”

The Customer Effort Score metric grew out of a desire to measure the amount of effort customers were experiencing in their service interactions. By measuring it, teams can work towards decreasing effort, which in turn leads to more loyal customers.

And the metric works. It’s more predictive of future loyalty than CSAT. In fact, 96% of customers that report high effort experiences become disloyal, compared to 9% of customers with low effort experiences (from the Effortless Experience).

Why should I measure CES?

Measuring Customer Effort Score provides actionable insight into how difficult customers find it to get help.

Most customer service teams measure the quality of their work in some way. Often this is through customer satisfaction surveys. However, as mentioned above, CSAT is a very poor indicator of future customer loyalty. Fred Reichheld, the creator of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and author of The Ultimate Question, found that “60 to 80 percent of customers who ultimately defect had said they were satisfied or even very satisfied the last time they participated in a survey.” Measuring CES can help teams understand why these “satisfied” customers are still frequently churning.

Once a team is consistently achieving 90-95% CSAT, any resources spent increasing CSAT result in decreasing return on investment. To raise CSAT even a couple of percentage points would take a lot of time, and not even result in a massive change in customer loyalty or perception. For teams in this position, initiating a CES program can provide new avenues for improving the customer experience and building customer loyalty.

A common concern with NPS and CSAT is that the feedback is often too vague and out of the scope of the customer service team. While product feedback is always helpful, customer service leaders may feel powerless to actually impact product design in a meaningful way. But because CES is designed to measure a very specific interaction, the feedback is almost always actionable by the customer service department.

Wondering if CES is right for you? Here are some indicators that your team might benefit from implementing a CES program:

• You’re already seeing consistently high CSAT ratings and wonder: what now?
• Your customers continue to show signs of disloyalty even though CSAT ratings are high
• You’re receiving feedback that isn’t relevant to the customer service team

How do I measure customer effort?

You can measure CES by surveying customers after the conclusion of a customer service interaction. The survey uses a specific statement: “The company made it easy for me to handle my issue,” and the customer answers (on a standard 1– 7 scale) whether they agree or disagree with the statement.

After the customer selects their rating, they usually follow up question where they can leave any additional comments or an explanation of their score.

As most help desks don’t offer a native Customer effort score survey, teams wanting to measure customer effort will need to integrate a survey tool into their workflow. Nicereply integrates with all of the most popular helpdesks (like Zendesk, Intercom, HelpScout, and Freshdesk) and set-up only takes a couple of minutes. It’s also possible to use the Nicereply API to build an entirely customized survey flow.

Ideally, CES scores are attached to the relevant user and conversation history. This aids in the future analysis of effort score trends and churn.

What do I use Customer Effort Score for?

Customer Effort Scores are best utilized by teams looking to optimize for loyalty. As Mat Dixon writes, teams need to focus on “finding new ways to get rid of the hassles, the hurdles, the extra customer effort that leads to disloyalty.” CES helps point teams in the right direction. What’s a good score to look for? Well, the CEB says that moving a customer from a `1′ to a `5′ boosts their loyalty by 22%. Returns diminish after that. A customer who responds a ‘7’ is only 2% more loyal than a customer who responds as a ‘5’.

But it’s not all about the numbers either. Here are four other ways you can get the most out of CES analysis.

A real-time feedback mechanism

As Customer Effort Scores come in, they can reveal customers who are still unhappy with the resolution of their ticket. Keeping an eye on incoming feedback helps customer service leaders react quickly to problems.

Supervisors may also want to reach out to any customers who experienced a high-effort situation for service recovery. Apologizing to the customer proactively could help prevent them from canceling in the future.

Evaluating agent performance

Agents who consistently see above normal CES results may need additional training. Excessive back and forth, unnecessary troubleshooting, or misinformation are all high effort experiences driven by under-trained agents.

However, keep in mind that senior agents who pick up more complex tickets, or take over existing problems may also see high CES results due to the nature of their work.

Distribution, not just averages

CES is a somewhat unique metric because, to get the most out of it, both the distribution of scores and the average need to take to account. For example, an average CES score of 5.4 looks pretty good, right? Except if you find out that it’s made out of mostly 7’s and 1’s. While most customers are finding it really easy to get in touch (too easy? More on that later…), there’s a handful of customers who are having a nightmare of a time getting help.

Analyzing distributions can help identify if all customers are having a generally effortless experience, or if there’s a small subsection of customers who are really getting stuck. By identifying that small group of customers, teams can take action and proactively prevent churn.

Identifying trends and hotspots

Metrics are the most powerful when combined with the context they come from. This means understanding what type of customers are more likely to have high-effort experiences. It means understanding what channels have lower than average Customer Effort Score. It means digging deep into the data and uncovering trends that help explain the numbers.

Use CES data to help influence product decisions. By identifying common issues that are very difficult (high effort) to resolve, the product can prioritize the highest impact fixes.

Can CES be too high?

Yes, CES can be too high, and customers can find it too easy to get help. If every customer is finding it too easy to do business with you, you are probably not being very efficient with your customer service resources. When you are looking at the distribution, look for a bell curve with most responses around 5 or a 6. If it’s heavily weighted towards a 7, it’s too easy for your customers to contact you, and you should be encouraging them to self-serve. (If they were able to help themselves, you wouldn’t see them in this survey)

Self-service is anything that allows a customer to solve their problem or question. It might be an interactive guide to CES, a help desk article, or an in-product tutorial. Take a look at these survey responses to see what content your team should be creating, and hopefully, you’ll see the number of times customers *have* to contact you decreasing.

CSAT or CES?

Really love measuring customer satisfaction (CSAT)? Don’t worry, you don’t need to get rid of CSAT to measure customer effort score. These two metrics work well in harmony. CSAT is really great at real-time alerts that let you know how your customers are feeling RIGHT NOW. We recommend still including a CSAT survey in the signature of every one of your emails to seek feedback from customers frequently. Because CES is surveyed only on the resolution of a conversation, this doesn’t get in the way.

Antonio King, Director of Experience at Shinesty, moved from measuring CSAT with Zendesk to measuring both CSAT and CES with Nicereply’s integration. Not only did that allow Antonio to track both metrics, it actually increases their response rate. “We saw a 20%-30% increase in CSAT response ratings per week,” Antonio shares on Medium. “Pulling last week’s numbers, we had a CSAT response rate of 58% which is almost unheard of.”

CES and CSAT work really well together – so don’t feel like you need to choose one over another.

Benefits of CES

Customer Effort Score is rising in popularity for a few reasons. First of all, it is the best predictor of customer’s future behaviour. According to published studies, CES is 1.8 times better at predicting customer loyalty than customer satisfaction and 2 times better than Net Promoter Score.

It can also be helpful to companies that have already achieved consistently high customer satisfaction scores. Because CES focuses on a different part of customer experience, you’ll see different areas of opportunity to improve.

Potential CES Issues

There are definitely Customer Effort Score detractors out there. They argue that the research methodology is flawed and that the authors focus more on mitigating disloyalty that actually increasing customer loyalty.

In their research, the CEB team focuses on self-reported loyalty measures and “future intention” of loyalty or churn. How accurate are these measurements when compared to actual repurchasing and referral behaviours? It’s hard to tell. They need definitely more research to confirm the connection between difficult experiences and disloyalty.

Secondly, while increasing customer’s CES from a 1 to a 5 reduces disloyalty, the book doesn’t focus on what companies should do to build loyalty. In fact, they argue against any time spent delighting customers. Most customer service professionals would disagree with this stance. Dr. Van Bennekom recommends that companies separate the “bow wow” from the “wow”. Once you’ve eliminated high effort experiences from the customer journey, it’s time to focus on the “wow”.

How to superpower your CES experience

Tracking CES by channel

You will probably find that your CES varies the most by channel. Some companies are very easy to call for support, and some make live chat the most effortless experience. Customer Experience Futurologist, Dr. Nicola Millard, has found it is the best source of inspiration for her team at BT: “The great thing about [tracking by channel] is that it becomes very actionable then. For example, if IVR gets a rating of  two, you can question whether it really works for customers.”

Before cracking on with CES, ensure that the integration you use allows you to segment scores by channel, ticket ID, customer, product, agent, and any other information you track in your service interactions. You will need this information later to analyze results.

Integrating with other metrics

CES works best when blended with other methods of customer surveys. For example: measuring NPS over a customer lifetime can help pinpoint product issues and provide a more holistic view of how customers feel about your company. At some touch-points, CSAT may be high, but CES may be low. Varying your surveys will give you more actionable insight across different channels and situations.

Unfortunately, survey fatigue is very real. If you are asking your customers for their opinions too often, you might see your response rate drop. Hence, plan out a schedule for surveys before launch to avoid overwhelming your customers.

Company-wide understanding

With any changes in how you measure customer experience, success is much more likely if you have the entire company on board. CES is definitely a more difficult metric to understand than CSAT, so we recommend doing a quick lunch-and-learn or sending around a team email on the subject. Educating others on why making the experience effortless makes good business sense will help you get buy-in on any projects you want to build as a result of the incoming information.

Measuring CES will help you grow

Building a customer experience founded on effortless customer service will win your company a lot of fans. By focusing relentlessly on eliminating hassle and removing hurdles to help, you become easier to do business with. And in 2021, that’s a winning strategy.

Find out everything about CES in the podcast episode: The Ultimate Guide to CES with Challenger Inc.

Join our special episode with Scott from Challenger to hear about what CES is, how it can benefit your company, and how you can train your support agents to provide an effortless experience.

The post The Definitive 2024 Guide to Customer Effort Score appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

By comparing your survey results to other companies, you add context to your scores.

You might be looking at your latest survey results and wondering…. Are these good? How do we compare to our competitors? How are other companies in our industry performing when it comes to customer satisfaction? Should we be doing more?

We’re here to help.

Why is benchmarking important?

This is where benchmarking is helpful. By comparing your survey results to other companies, you add context to your scores. Without it, how can you possibly know if your company is outperforming your competitors?

Knowing what similar companies are seeing in their survey results can help you set realistic goals for your own surveys. This is where industry benchmarks come in. If you’re running a telecom company’s customer service department, your competition is consistently seeing very low scores across the board. If you’re working with a technology company, you should be aiming a little higher.

Check out the following benchmarks to see how you compare in CSAT, NPS, and CES, and inspire your own goal setting.

CSAT Benchmarks

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is measured on a scale from 1-10, or as a percentage. Benchmarks are calculated across the total data set of a large number of responses, or they can be broken down by channel or by industry. Here are some data points that you can use to benchmark your own customer satisfaction scores.

Nicereply

When looking at all scores received through Nicereply CSAT surveys in the last 30 days, the average across all responses is 8.59 out of 10.

Peak Support

Using a variety of data sets, including help desk reports and their own clients’ performance, Peak Support has calculated the following CSAT benchmarks per channel:

Email Support:

High: 96%
Average: 61%
Low: 85%

Chat Support:

High: 96%
Average: 75%
Low: 85%

Phone Support:

High: 95%
Average: 76%
Low: 87%

Zendesk

Zendesk calculates separate benchmarks across different industries, using the CSAT survey built into their help desk functionality.

Ecommerce:

High: 93%
Average: 88%

Entertainment:

High: 96%
Average: 89%

Logistics:

High: 97%
Average: 89%

Travel/Hospitality:

High: 95%
Average: 89%

To see more of Zendesk’s customer satisfaction benchmarking, including first reply times, check out their research center and select your own industry.

NPS Benchmarks

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is calculated by subtracting the percentage of respondents who selected 6 or lower from the percentage of respondents who selected 10 or higher. This gives a number between -100 and +100. Benchmark scores are often broken down by industry, or reported by independent brands who are proud of their customers’ loyalty.

Nicereply

When using all of the NPS survey responses received across the last 30 days, we’ve calculated our customers’ average NPS as +17.

SatMetrix

SatMetrix is the creator and owner of the NPS trademark. Each year they put out a benchmarking report that segments average NPS by industry. As you can see in the graph below, industries vary wildly when it comes to NPS, with specialty stores ranking first at +56, and internet services coming in at -3.

NetPromoter.com

If you want to compare yourself to the best of the best, check out these top performers reported by NetPromoter.com:

• Costco +80
• AirBnB +43
• Flipboard +55
• Ritz Carlton +66

For more benchmarking data, you can purchase NetPromoter.com’s benchmarking report.

CES Benchmarks

Customer Effort Score is measured by calculating the average of scores given on a scale from 1 to 7, as defined in The Effortless Experience by the creators of this important metric. However, some platforms still incorrectly offer CES on a scale from 1 to 5, or even 1 to 10. This makes it difficult to find accurate benchmarks.

Nicereply

When using all of the CES survey responses received across the last 30 days, we’ve calculated our customers’ average CES as 5.99 (out of 7).

The distribution of CES is also important to measure. In 2018, we examined the distribution across all of the CES responses we had collected, as shown below. Even though the average score is close to 6, there are still a significant number of customers who report finding it very difficult (1) to get help.

What if my scores aren’t good enough?

If you’re looking at your current scores and thinking that they don’t quite measure up to what you’re seeing here… that’s okay! The fact that you’re measuring your customers’ experience and hoping to make it better means that you’re already on the right track.

There are any number of reasons for your scores to be different than the averages reported here. You may be measuring your scores a different way or your customers might be more discerning. What’s important is that your score trends in the right direction… up!

Here are some tips for improving your scores, whether you’re below average or already a top performer:

CSAT

• Look at the drivers of dissatisfaction. What are the common reasons customers complain about having a bad experience. Take steps to address these common causes.
• Increase your survey response rate. Hearing from more people might show you that you’re closer to average than you think.
• Check out these 11 unconventional ways to improve your customer satisfaction score.

NPS

• Focus on the passives. The customers that respond with 7 or 8 are not necessarily unhappy with your product or service, but they aren’t blown away either. They might be the easiest customers to move to the Promoter category.
• Segment your NPS responses by plan type, demographic information, and how long they’ve been a customer to hone in on who is the most loyal, and who needs more attention.
• Don’t forget about the Promoters! Analyze their responses to see what they like most about your product or service. Make sure that you’re surfacing these features to other users as well.

CES

• Zoom in on those customers that are having the hardest time. What channels are customers who have responded with a 1 or 2 coming from? What problems are they seeking help for? It is far more important to improve the experience of these customers than those who only found it moderately easy. A CEB study found that improving CES responses from 1 to 5 increased loyalty by 22%. However, further improving from 5 to 7 only increases loyalty by a measly 2%.
• Take a walk through your help center as a customer. Find places where it’s not clear how to ask for help. What steps do customers have to take to be able to talk to a human? Where can you make it easier for them to find the right answer themselves? You might be (unpleasantly) surprised at how difficult it’s become to get help.

Comparison is the thief of joy

While it can be tempting to focus on your competitors’ scores, they are not the most important fact. Instead, look at how your scores are trending. Are customers staying loyal to your business? Are you quickly responding to dissatisfied customers when they complete a survey?

Instead of getting wrapped up in benchmarking your customer happiness scores, focus first on how you are analyzing and responding to your own data. That’s where the highest pay-off will come from.

The post Benchmarking CSAT, NPS, and CES: What’s a Good Score to Have? appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

“By measuring customer feedback, we gain solid data on how we are doing and where we can improve.”

Blueberry Markets is a global forex broker headquartered in Sydney, Australia with operations teams based in the Philippines and India. They provide platforms for trading currencies, commodities, share CFDs, and cryptos. Their goal is to become the go-to partner of beginner traders who wish to earn from the markets, as well as advanced traders looking for a reliable broker.

Problem

People at Blueberry Markets started with a third-party customer support service, and they noticed that there wasn’t much data about customer feedback. “It wasn’t until a year ago when we decided to bring customer support in-house, and decided from that point that we will gather feedback and measure customer satisfaction — because we can’t improve something that we can’t measure.”

Solution

Nicereply helped Blueberry Markets solve this issue. “Nicereply solved the problem because we were able to gather data right from the first day we set it up. It is super simple, easy to use, and integrates easily with our support ticketing tool.”

People at Blueberry Markets are measuring all three satisfaction metrics – CSAT, CES & NPS. “NPS is one of the company’s critical numbers we track. With Nicereply, we were able to set up a funnel-like feedback system. Customers receive a CSAT survey first upon closure of their support ticket. If we get a DSAT, we reopen the case and give it a second look to see if there was anything that we missed and try to turn it around. Then, we monitor the change in their service experience by keeping an eye on CES and finally, the NPS survey that they will receive a few days later.”

Blueberry Market’s CEO Dean Hyde started the company in 2016. “He saw a huge gap in the industry where other providers had competitive spreads but appalling customer service, which often left traders frustrated. Excellent customer service became one of the primary pillars of our offering and we have never looked back.”

Now, on top of 24/7 phone support, they offer email support within 30 minutes or less and live chat support with less than five seconds response time. “We are very proud to be the only one to offer this level of service. But all of these are for nothing without understanding our clients’ needs and overall experience. By measuring customer feedback, we gain solid data on how we are doing and where we can improve.”

When asked why they chose Nicereply for tracking customer feedback they replied: “It is simple, easy-to-use, integrated with our support tool, and the pricing is fair.”

Company Culture

Blueberry Markets employees try to stay up to trends by consuming industry-related content. “We stay up to trends by reading news and articles mainly from blogs of customer support tools like Nicereply. We get tons of insights and pick the ones that are applicable to our team.”

They also try motivating their team members by creating great company culture & setting ambitious goals.

“We believe that “motivation” does not last. So while we do have nice incentive programs for our support team, we focus more on maintaining our company culture, making each team member feel valued and recognized. As well as setting targets which can sometimes seem impossible (like right now, we are aiming at 65 NPS when the average in our industry is only 46). With these difficult challenges, we set out specific action plans that scream teamwork, where each member is expected to contribute, therefore reminding them that they have a bigger why rather than just composing replies.”

If they could give one piece of advice to other support teams it would be: “Utilize and do not underestimate The Three Framework — People, Process, Technology, but give priority to the People part. If you have the right people, everything else will follow.”

The post Benefits of Measuring Three Satisfaction Metrics with Blueberry Markets appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.