With all the nuances of cross-functional teams, there isn’t any one answer on how to do it best, but there are some universal things to keep in mind.

There’s a common conundrum I like to refer to as “the waiter’s dilemma.” It’s the scenario in which a customer gets their food delivered and it’s less than satisfactory. Since they don’t have a direct line to the chef, the waiter usually gets the brunt of the ire and the chef, sometimes, is none-the-wiser.

Working in support, in any capacity, can lead to a lot of “waiter’s dilemmas.” You’re the front line, but rarely are you building the product, or even having a ton of input about it. It’s kind of an odd set up when you think about it. Support, generally, has the most interaction with customers. So, you’d think they would have some valuable insight into how the product should be designed.

User experience (UX) teams do a lot of testing and iterating, but it’s pretty easy for that testing to happen in a vacuum of sorts. Think of it this way. If you design a house and use all pocket (hidden) doors, it’s very obvious to you how to open and close doors – after all, you designed it. However, if you’re just someone walking in off the street, maybe you’ve never seen a pocket door. You’ll walk in thinking, “where are all the doors in this place?”

As almost anyone would tell you, good design needs to be functional. You can have the most beautiful car in the world, but if you can’t figure out how to turn it on, it’s going to sit in the driveway. In those instances, you need perspective. An outside eye that can see what you can’t. In my mind, that’s what customer support (and their data from customer conversations) can be to UX.

In this article I cover four tips to help support and UX work together more closely:

• Be Deliberate
• Build it Into the Process
• Have Clearly Defined Roles
• Have Shared Goals

Be Deliberate

Working with members from another team doesn’t happen by accident. You’re going to have to be intentional if you want it to be a success. It’ll be made easier if you already have an idea of how they can contribute prior.

So, if you’re on the UX team brainstorm different ways that customer success may be able to help with projects you’re working on. Do your best to make sure it’s relevant to their current role, but it should vary some. As they say, “variety is the spice of life.”

One way I’ve seen the knowledge of support agents be utilized by UX teams is through helping with persona building. Since support agents have the most regular interaction with customers they can add in detail that a demographic overview may not inform.

Also, it could offer support agents a break from some of their more day-to-day job duties, which can be invigorating. According to research, workers that get to have some amount of variety at work have higher levels of happiness and well being.

You may also consider having them test out a new system you’re developing for onboarding or something similar. Basically, if you’re building something and want to get an idea of how customers may react to it, customer support will probably be a great first resource to use.

Build it Into the Process

According to research done by Duke University up to 45% of our daily decisions are done out of habit. Each time we make a decision it makes it easier to make that same choice moving forward. However, the opposite is also true: the less you make a choice the harder it becomes to make it.

Since working together with another team may not come as second nature at first, it might be a good idea to build the coworking into your team’s process. Perhaps, you could have your UX team add in a step to have support review potential design changes. Or, perhaps you could bring them in when you’re in the iterating process and they could help eliminate an option.

Really, what you’re going for is to make it second nature to interact with one another. The more practice you get, the more comfortable you’ll be and the better you can work with one another. Cross-functional teams can have challenges, so the more barriers you can remove, the better.

Have Clearly Defined Roles and Tasks

Ambiguity is tough to deal with at work. Project managers are there to help, but it might not be an option in cross-team situations. Even within your own team, it’s not always totally clear what may be expected of you. When you add in that you’re bringing people together from more than one team, the confusion can increase. That confusion could quickly turn into frustration, so it’s important to make sure that everyone knows what their role is.

Secondly, define exactly what you need from the customer support team when they are asked to provide input. While asking “how do customers feel about X” at the watercooler might get you some anecdotal stories, you’ll get better customer feedback if you give support managers time to pull the data. Understand what input you need from customer support and make a specific request (with time to respond) so that both teams benefit from the collaboration.

Have Shared Goals

When you’re working across different departments there can be some conflict. Jobs and priorities vary and create the lens through which you see work. Reconciling those different viewpoints can be a challenge.

One way to squash those issues is by having a common goal you’re trying to achieve. It’s probably going to be quite obvious why you’re working together, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll have specific measures of success. Without them, it can be difficult to know if you’re doing well or having an impact.

For example, you may know that you’re helping the UX team develop a new gamification process for onboarding, but that’s pretty vague. A more specific goal – perhaps you want to increase product adoption rates in the first 90 days of each account – gives the team something tangible to work toward and can help unite you further.

According to research done by McKinsey, having set goals can help improve employee engagement which, in turn, elevates performance. So, not only can goals unite the team, it can also help them work better. Achieving those goals, and celebrating them, together could lead to closer bonds and make working together in the future even more likely.

Conclusion

Bringing two teams together can be a tough task. There are obstacles and it takes commitment from both sides to make it work. With all the nuances of cross-functional teams there isn’t any one answer on how to do it best, but there are some universal things to keep in mind.

Be deliberate when starting your project. Having a solid reason to work together could help reduce some potential friction. Build working together into your normal working processes. The more you can make it a habit, the easier it will be to continue to make the choice moving forward. Once you’re working together, make sure everyone knows their roles. It’ll help improve efficiency, and lower your chance of failure, once you start your joint projects.

Having shared goals can help unite your teams. Knowing that you’re all working to achieve the same thing can improve engagement and increase happiness. As we mentioned above, working with another team can be tough. There are going to be some areas where you naturally overlap, so try and find those opportunities. The more you practice, the better it’ll get, and the bigger return you’ll see.

The post 4 Tips to Help Support Teams Work More Closely with UX appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Use your CSAT scores to open up conversations with other teams about where issues are, who is responsible for fixing them, and how they will get fixed.

Traditionally, customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys provide insights about how your customer support team is performing. That said, they can also be useful indicators for other teams’ successful behaviors and a valuable tool in promoting cross-functional collaboration to level-up your customer experience.

Instead of viewing your CSAT scores in a silo with your support team, find ways to review them with other teams. Don’t hoard those deliciously useful customer insights to yourself—bring everyone into the loop and create excellent cross-functional CX.

Open up communication

Speaking with someone that doesn’t speak the same language can be challenging. Customer Satisfaction score results give different teams, like Product and Support, a common language that they both understand: caring for the customer.

Most businesses only hear from 4% of dissatisfied customers, with the other 96% of unhappy customers choosing to churn without any explanation. When your whole company is looking at the same thing, you’re all able to talk about the issues coming up in your results and fix them directly. There’s no one left out of the loop.

How to do it

Discuss CSAT more regularly at top-level meetings or company-wide functions. Shed light on particularly meaningful changes or qualitative results to increase team buy-in. With this shared context, CSAT results work more meaningfully in conversations outside of support.

Empower teams with the knowledge

CSAT measures everything the customer touches: from your blog posts and your product to their support experience, and even their buying journey. Beyond just uncovering what customers do or don’t like, your CSAT scores also give you the knowledge and understanding of your business’s critical trends. For instance, after a massive release, do you see an influx of readers to your blog or website? If so, that may tell you that focusing on those two areas, along with the product experience itself, is vital.

CSAT helps to break down silos within teams so they have the same level of knowledge and experience. CSAT results are straightforward. Reviewing your CSAT as a company, instead of separately across teams, gives you deeper insights into precisely what your customers care about. Use this intimate knowledge to improve your customer experience and create a more trusting relationship with your customers across the board.

How to do it

Create an optional monthly or biweekly meeting just to review CSAT results and qualitative responses. Write a follow-up all-company email that includes a summary of your findings. Your message could consist of assessing the tags in your helpdesk associated with your CSAT results, or a breakdown of CSAT across customer segments.

Make smarter investments

If you’re hosting a dinner party and don’t ask anyone what kind of food they like or what they’re allergic to, the chances of you cooking something that a person can’t eat is pretty high. The same goes for your product. Outside of customer support, many teams use assumptions of the customer experience to make decisions, without actually asking customers what they think. CSAT lets you double-check those assumptions.

Making vague decisions around semi-baked ideas takes a lot of effort and energy with minimal potential payout. Similarly, doing seemingly endless trials and A/B testing to see what works can be a waste of time with little return. CSAT gives you a measurement of your customer satisfaction across every interaction and gives you more information to make smarter investments cross-functionally. Stop making assumptions and start using data.

How to do it

Grant your product team access to your CSAT results so that they can use them when considering new product changes. Be diligent about tracking customer insights, both negative and positive, in any bug-tracking or feature-tracking software that you have. Add qualitative CSAT comments as context each time you do.

Monitoring and improvement

One study found that 85% of consumers churn because of poor service. Further, companies could avoid 11% of that churn if they made an effort to rebuild a customer relationship after the poor experience.

Everyone at your company cares about churn—it may even be a top-level metric. Use that drive to get everyone watching CSAT and taking action as soon as a negative review comes in. Marketing, who usually has their thumb on your proactive communications pulse, could implement automation to reach out to customers with low CSAT scores, for instance, or product could use negative reviews to find bugs and improve the product long term.

How to do it

Create a Slack channel that shares all of your CSAT reviews so that everyone can see and monitor them in real-time. Encourage participation and cross-functional discussion whenever something new or exciting comes in.

Set clear expectations

It is 16 times more costly to build a relationship with a new customer than build loyalty with a customer you already have. Creating a sticky experience that makes your customers want to stay around is one of the most valuable things you can do as a company. Finding the holes in your experience where customers may drop off is essential.

Outside of your product, CSAT can lend insight to cross-functional processes that might be failing, such as the purchase or upgrade process, how you triage bugs or even your cancellation flow. Use your CSAT responses as evidence that specific internal processes need improvement. Pinpoint the areas of each step of the journey that are most problematic, use CSAT results to understand why, and then set clear expectations for which team is responsible for which stage of the process moving forward.

How to do it

Discuss issues and trends that come up in CSAT with different teams, and evaluate where they play a part. For instance, if your company notices negative CSAT associated with an administrative page, you should work with your Product and Marketing teams to nail down where the issues are, who owns the changes that need to happen and then build a plan to get them resolved. Don’t let your company fall to the perils of the bystander effect. Assigning roles and acting on them is the best way to get things done.

Share customer insights with the right people

When support team members are in their groove and working through their daily tasks, it might be tricky to switch into sharing customer insights. When it’s not a part of the process, extra steps to inform other members of different teams might not come to mind immediately.

In fact, in a survey by Eptica, 79% of brands said their support team shared relevant information with marketing, but only 38% provided it to e-commerce and other teams. Everyone benefits from hearing about your customers’ satisfaction. Instead of putting additional work on your support team’s plates, automate it to ensure that everyone gets the info that they need.

How to do this

Build a Slack process or a weekly email that shares out your quantitative CSAT results, any interesting qualitative responses, and which teams they directly impact. Identify which aspects of CSAT other teams find most exciting and call attention to them. For instance, Product may want to know about CSAT around customers reporting bugs, whereas Sales may want to know about pre-purchase issues.

It’s all about communication

The best way to promote cross-functional CX collaboration is for everyone to know where they stand. Use your CSAT results to open up conversations with other teams about where issues are, who is responsible for fixing them, and how they will get fixed. Once you’ve made improvements, continue to monitor your CSAT to see if it is improving or getting even worse. Make sure to share the results of all of this testing across the company—the more communication, the better.

Nothing is more empowering for change than knowledge. By formatting your CSAT results in a way that other teams care about and understand, you’re creating a bridge towards excellent customer experience.

Review them with your product team to improve the product experience. Share them with your marketing team to create even better resources for your self-service and prospective customers.

Everyone cares about your customers—CSAT helps you unify your efforts to knock their socks off.

The post Using CSAT Scores for Better Cross-Functional CX Collaboration appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Be all ears to your customers and let them boost your sales because of your ace customer services.

The earliest that you grasp this message, the better it will be for your company’s growth. Happy customers not only come back to interact more with your brand, but they bring loads of other customers too.

Look at these figures that indicate how customer experience and better services can impact a company’s growth;

• 77 % of people are likely to recommend your products or services if they love the experience.
• 86% of customers will spend more for a better experience and service.
• Companies that make $1 Billion yearly can earn $700 million more in the next three years by investing in crafting an unparalleled customer experience.

Internet-savvy customers are looking more than just products and services from companies. They want a customized experience and something that they can talk about in everyday interactions with friends and colleagues.

Customer support forms the primary touchpoint with your users. Time and again, we tell customer support to be more human and concise. But the story doesn’t end there.

Cross-sell & Upsell, but first, answer the query

When a customer calls support, it is to get solutions for the problem. Although this can be one of the greatest opportunities to pitch your products, the priority must be to resolve the issue.

Once your team has successfully helped the customer with the query, know if they need anything else.

One of the good upselling models could be to offer the try something for free (limited time). For example, a user called you with a problem that something is not working for him.

One scenario if the user did not understand how it works. A completely different case when there was a bug in the system.

Here comes a good upselling option. Depending on your saas pricing model, you could offer the user a temporary up his package like a compensation (for example, for 2 days). Using a large set of functions, then it is more difficult to switch to a smaller one.

When can you upsell/cross-sell?

Just bombarding your customers with your product catalog will vex them, and this can be bad for your brand. Before telling them about your products, make sure that you ask them about their needs. Understand that and then with the right tone and message, ask if they would like an upgrade on their purchase.

Focus on resolving issues through Email Campaigns

Rather than having an FAQ page where customers have to scavenge for answers, ask them to email you when they face problems. FAQs don’t have a touch of personalization, and you won’t be able to keep track of the widespread issues.

Instead, prompt your users to email their queries. This way, your support team can know if the error is widespread and report it to the product development team. On the front-end, craft emails addressing the pain points of customers to appease them by empathizing.

This method of error solving is time-consuming, but it can be the best solution for the long run to improve the customer experience through flawless products.

To retain, reciprocate

As humans, we tend to return what we get – a good experience for a good one and a mean step followed by an even meaner response.

Applying this to your customer support, have your team go that extra mile for the customers who reach out to get a corresponding response. This can be a free eBook guide to your services or a discounted entry for your next webinar or just extra credits in their account.

Once you show how much you value your customers, they will reciprocate the same with acts like referring your company to their friends or family or continuing with your brand for a longer duration. A little incentive provided this way can result in reduced customer churn.

Track and analyze customer metrics

Customers are not just looking for a product that fulfills their requirements, but they want something that is personalized just for them. The need of this hour is to keep yourself updated with what your customers are talking about and the brands that they like the most.

It’s time to invest in analytical tools that can keep you abreast of all you need to know about customer interactions. After knowing this, you can segment users to provide a seamless and personalized experience.

Tracking customer metrics not only helps you serve better but can also result in boosting your sales through improved customer experience.

Rephrase your customer support interactions

Customer support will be the first level of communication that customers have with your brand. The support team must address the problems of users as humanely as possible. You don’t want your customer support to be just an IVR.

Having a friendly yet responsible tone for interacting with customers is ideal for taking forward conversations. Empathizing not only mellows the angry customers but helps in gaining their trust that your team wants to help rather than just the big talks.

Some of the phrases that can be used are:

• “I understand, and I am sorry.”
• “Happy to help you.”
• “I’d be frustrated too.”
• “Thank you for bringing this to our notice.”
• “I apologize for the inconvenience.”

Leverage CRM platforms

One mistake that you can’t afford is not having all your teams on the same page when it comes to serving customers. Time is critical when a customer calls for support. And if your team fails to fetch the right information at that time, customers will lose their faith in your services.

Empower your customer interactions by having a sound CRM system in place. This ensures that all the information about the customers is available to the team members that interact directly with customers.

Few benefits of CRM system:

• It helps you serve customers quickly.
• Your sales and service teams are aligned with homogenous information about customers.
• It is easy to access from anywhere, so your team can provide customer support on-the-go.
• It improves customer interactions resulting in smooth customer relationships.

Enable omnichannel services

A person will be checking out your products on your app at one moment and then, after a while, may switch to social media or your website. In today’s world, users are looking out for information everywhere.

Providing an omnichannel experience is, therefore, essential to give a seamless transition from one touchpoint to the other.

Best practices for crafting an omnichannel service:

• Mobile-first approach – As mobile is the most widely used medium of internet surfing, ensure that your customer support pages are optimized for mobile searches and are responsive.
• Social Media – Users now openly approach companies by tagging/mentioning on Twitter or Facebook to get solutions. Be quick in responding to your users across social media platforms.
• Newsletter & update releases – Provide users with detailed information about the products and services that they are using through newsletters. This not only solves their queries but adds value to the user experience.

Train and upgrade your support team

Technology is changing rapidly, and so are the interactions with customers. Knowledge scaling is as crucial to enhance your brand as the scaling of other resources.

Provide appropriate training time and again to your support staff, this includes knowledge of the latest customer support tools and communication skills too.

What can you do to empower your customer support?

• Invest in customer support software that eases the task of your support team.
• Check out the latest market trends and craft your customer communications using slang that customers can relate to.
• Provide incentives and motivate your customer support team to give their best through employee reward programs.
• Give credits to your team to encourage them.

Listen and respond to negative feedback

Customers will share their experience with your products and services in their network. Sometimes, this can be customers recommending your brand.

But, when the customer has faced difficulty in using your services, they are bound to voice it out.

Be active in listening to feedback, but be super active in listening and responding to negative feedback.

Have your support team monitor comments on social media platforms and respond quickly to solve their problems. You can also offer additional services or increase credits in the accounts of grieved customers to compensate for their bad experiences.

Be proactive

What is better? Customers reaching out to you or you put yourself in front of the customers in their hour of need? Of course, the later one! This shows how much you value your customers.

Track customer interactions to know their preferences and requirements. After gathering this information, design a strategy by taking that extra mile to serve your customers the right way with what they are looking for.

With push notifications, inform your customers about your offers and remind them to use your products or services through personalized messages. But, make sure that you don’t do this often because you don’t want to interrupt the normal flow of their day.

Summing up

Serving your existing customers can not only bag you loyal brand followers but help you in getting newer ones too. Be all ears to your customers and let them boost your sales because of your ace customer services.

The post 10 Ways How Customer Service Can Boost your Sales in 2020 appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Managing marketing endeavors is no easy task, especially with an SME that aims to grow and become successful in due time.

If you’ve got a business, you’re definitely trying to stand out from the crowd, doing everything you can, and more, investing in technology that can sometimes exhaust your budget and putting lots of effort into brainstorming sessions with your teams, in hopes of coming up with something cutting-edge and all around great.

But what happens if you’re a Small/Medium Enterprise (SME) and have little to no knowledge of Marketing Technology (MarTech)?

This article is here to clarify everything and give you a solid idea of various MarTech tips and tools for SMEs, whether your pain point is email marketing, social media or CRM platforms.

What is MarTech?

Marketing Technology (MarTech) is a general term used to describe the marketing software and the tools used to help with the marketing endeavors of any business: planning campaigns, creating, executing, measuring analytics and determining KPIs and so on and so forth.

This means that MarTech automates processes otherwise done manually, from collecting data and issuing reports, to creating high engagement levels and resulting, eventually, to higher conversion and brand awareness.

Therefore, all useful tools fall under that umbrella, from CRM tools to content management software and so on and so forth.

The tools you may need

You won’t need just a couple if you’re in for the kill (ie, if you’re ready to do a proper job and see conversions fly off the roof). Managing marketing endeavors is no easy task, especially with an SME that aims to grow and become successful in due time.

Let’s see what the arrows in your quiver are called.

Email Marketing Software

Email marketing is the first thing on the list and email marketing software is your first tool, seeing as it can give you unlimited possibilities, such as forwarding a campaign to a friend. For example, Moosend (which is a great alternative to MailChimp by the way) gives you this option.

But let me be more specific on that one. First and foremost, email marketing is the most cost-effective of all marketing tools, that can generate an ROI of 3800%. Therefore, you’ll get 38 dollars in revenue for every dollar spent.

This, of course, makes email marketing the most profitable strategy.

So long as, of course, you’re not a spammer and you’re not using email blasts or bought lists. Sit down with your team and brainstorm, check and segment your data. Entice prospects to subscribe with fantastic design, a freebie with every order after they become subscribers and perhaps segmented newsletters, like this:

Buzzfeed’s “Subscribe to our newsletter” page and philosophy follows that principle. The designs are relevant to each newsletter topic, but still consistent with the brand’s fun and youthful voice. And by letting subscribers pick and choose as they wish, you’re creating tailor-made content, without even trying.

Buzzfeed even took it a step further:

By letting the subscribers know when they’ll be receiving their updates, Buzzfeed is practically training the subscribers to expect the newsletter.

This example shows how useful email marketing really is, seeing as this type of newsletter could definitely increase conversion, especially if it were to be coupled with some fantastic offers.

Social Media Management Software

Social Media is another, very powerful tool that can also do pretty much anything: score sales, increase user engagement and make brands go viral.

Of course, these things don’t come on their own and you’ll need a great deal of effort to make them happen. And since all marketing endeavors need a great deal of effort, practice and continuous testing, you won’t be able to achieve too much without some management tools.

One of the tools you could use in order to increase your Social Media performance without focusing on menial tasks, is Buffer. This tool will help you build more interesting content, plan the best time of the day to post it, analyze performance and engage with your customers.

Of course, a tool is not something that will work on its own, and you’ll need, down the line, to come up with more strategies than posting content, but here’s one to get you started: find some user-generated content (UGC) and urge your followers to create some themselves and tag you. That can work wonders with any and all brands.

You see, UGC is a valuable tool on its own. It can make contests go viral, especially that Instagram giveaway that can increase brand awareness and give you tonnes of new followers.

Normally, these tasks would take a lot of time, and you’d need more people as your brand grew, in order to make it and have happy customers, which is the end goal. And this would go heavy on the resources.

So, for SMEs, social media management software is much needed, in order to find, create and use UGC as it’s supposed to be used, create a stunning feed and get those timelines and content ideas on point without breaking a sweat!

Not to mention creating a successful sales funnel, down the line.

Tools for SEO

Is SEO important for SMEs?

Let me start by saying that search engine optimization is one of the best techniques out there, seeing as it can boost your SERPs (much like influencer outreach) and your chances to be discovered by more people than you could imagine.

SEO is the technique, through which a page can get traffic from organic search results. This means that you don’t utilize tools such as Pay Per Click ads (PPC). On the contrary, through SEO, you can get to the first results of Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

Which means more traffic, more engagement and, ultimately, better conversion rates for your SME!

Of course, SEO needs to be done by experts and you need to remember that you’re in for the long game, since the very beginning. But this also means it’ll take time and resources, if you want it done properly.

So, what you can do is invest in an SEO tool that will help you out with the SEO basics. Through that, you can automate your endeavors and have more free time to observe and take the right steps to determine which keywords are worth the time and effort.

The statistic above shows the most effective SEO tactics that you can use, in order to give your SEM that boost it needs, in order to perform in the most optimal level.

Survey Tools

Let me tell you, first and foremost, that surveys are something you need to use, in order to reach more people, get more engagement and find out what your followers really need.

Surveys work wonders for that, as they make people feel valued and your business will come across as a brand that is there to serve its followers and not make a profit out of them.

Through surveys, you can discover what your customers want, what their needs are and even what they love or loathe about your business. All in all, through surveys, you can better your business in less time than you’d think.

But again, coming up with the questions, the templates and the timing is not easy, and it can take time, much like coming up with the perfect email template takes time. So, let’s see what you can do, in terms of tools, in order to automate the whole process:

Use a tool that can help out with building custom surveys and nailing the content that will be correct and appropriate for your brand and your goals.

For example, Nicereply is a fantastic tool that is affordable, has great features-for example, you can run a Customer Satisfaction survey with customizable wording, which will set your survey apart from everyone else’s- and offers you the opportunity of a free 14-day trial, to make sure that it suits your SME’s needs.

Hint: It will suit you. No question about that.

Oh, and while we’re at it, don’t forget to use the “freebie” method. Incentivize your efforts. This will be the way to understand and respond to the “Why” question: Why would someone take the time to answer your questions?

Why, for a little thing that won’t break the bank, of course! It could be a free product, a free consultation session (try it if you’re a SaaS company, or even a fashion brand! Free tips from stylists never go amiss!)

In conclusion

There are a lot more you can do, of course, in order to boost your SME’s performance and lead to conversion rate optimization and there are a lot more tools for you to use. The ones stated above are personal favourites.

Of course, you need more tools, like Google Analytics, in order to determine whether your performance is good or not, but these are the ones I picked out for you.

Just remember: Out of the plethora of tools that exist out there, there definitely is something that suits your business’ needs!

The post SMEs: Do they Need MarTech or What? appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Customer journey map is incredibly useful when it comes to providing companies with deeper insights into customer experiences, but how do you create and leverage it?

Chances are you’ve already got a fairly robust customer feedback system within your company—you’re paying attention to CSAT, you’ve got a thumb on the pulse of your customer effort score.

But there’s probably still more that you could be doing. Surveys like CSAT and NPS can, by their nature, be unreliable—they’re only offered at very specific times during the customer lifecycle and may not address the feelings of your entire customer base as much as a small subset.

Customers may not always feel compelled to offer their true and valuable insights about what they are being asked, or might not even be driven to answer at all. It’s important to make sure you ask at exactly the right time.

How a Customer Journey Map drives Customer Feedback

That being said, it can be difficult to determine where and when the best places to ask are. One of the cleanest and simplest ways to do this is to create a customer journey map.

Customer journey maps are timelines that highlight key customer experiences. These can include anything from the very first time they view your company’s blog all the way through to when (or if!) they churn away from your product. To go a bit deeper, it also maps the emotions and motivations of customers as they use your product, and allows you to align them with how they’re contacting your teams.

So, for example, when a customer is trying to learn more about an advanced feature, are they more likely to reach out to support? Having this knowledge gives you deeper insight into what your customers actually need to be successful rather than what you think they need.

By using a customer journey map, you have a clear view into a few things:

• Where you’re interacting with customers
• How you’re interacting with customers
• Where there are opportunities to proactively help customers
• How communicating with your team impacts a customer’s feelings

Knowing the exact touchpoints customers encounter gives you the opportunity to sprinkle in extra interactions, or spread out conversations that are already occurring in order to boost responsiveness for your customer outreach.

For example, you may find that you’ve been sending three surveys back-to-back to customers within their first month of using your product—yikes! That’s a surefire way to tank your survey response rates and frustrate your customers. A customer journey map helps you uncover situations like that and start to move towards remedying them.

Not only that, but you’re also able to see where you might be able to implement the feedback that comes through your surveys more directly.

For example, if you know that you send a survey out to every customer on their three month anniversary of purchasing, taking a deep dive into what kind of insights you receive there can help to improve the first 90 days of customer onboarding. Taking what you learn and directly applying it to where it’s needed will be directly impactful to how your customers actually relate to your product.

So, great—we now know that customer journey maps are incredibly useful when it comes to providing companies with deeper insights into customer experiences, but how do you create and leverage them?

Create a customer journey map

The first step in creating a customer journey map is understanding who you are trying to reach. If you don’t already have an understanding of who your ideal customer is, that should be your priority—you’ll never know how to best serve someone unless you really understand who they are, what they are trying to accomplish and what motivates them.

So, start there.

Take into account both qualitative and quantitative measures when making your blueprint for the ideal customer. You should consider, for example, both how much they pay you per month as well as their pain points. This will give you a well-rounded picture to work with moving forward.

After you’ve figured out who you’re reaching, start to map out how you are reaching them. Take stock of every customer contact point that you have: on social media, on your blog, within your support organization—everything—marketing emails and automation count, too. Leave no stone unturned! Look through your Google Analytics tools and marketing software to make sure that you don’t miss any potential contact point or frequency.

With information about who you’re trying to serve, how you’re trying to serve them, and where your current fallback points are, you have a basic customer journey map.

By compiling this information together on a timeline, you can start to get a sense for trends of areas where more (or less!) reach out may be appreciated by your customers. It will also help you get an inventory for where most customer frustrations might be experienced.

For example, do you get a ton of survey responses when people are first getting used to using your product and none when you survey them at the end of the year?

While it may be true that no news is good news, finding another time to ask about your customers’ opinions could be valuable for providing additional, actionable insights.

Identify places where you already talk to your customers

As you’re looking through the individual points of contact, start to pull in responses from any survey data that you already have.

Take the time to evaluate where there may be existing customer frustrations or challenges, and start conceiving how they might be resolved. You can find these struggles by looking at anything from cart abandonment, negative reviews or customer churn.

Knowing where you are already contacting customers can help you determine where additional contact might be useful or where you should scale it back to be more impactful. For example, if you are only contacting them once a year to ask how they feel about your product, there may be more opportunities to reach out or using different methods to get useful, differentiated information.

Along with the frequency of contact, knowing when you reach out to someone and receive feedback can help you better contextualize the information that you’re receiving. For example, if you hear consistently that, three months in, people are very likely to recommend your product, but a year in they are not likely to recommend your product, it shifts the perspective on the feedback—what’s happening by one year that is turning your customers off?

Paying attention to these nuances is important and valuable because they help you to better serve your customers and understand what they actually need and want.

Find places that are dark spots in your product

As you lay out your contact points on the timeline of a customer journey map, it also lets you see where you aren’t asking for information. Doing this helps you identify where you might not have enough data about how your customers are feeling to make an informed decision. For example, how often do you ask for customer insights about the purchasing process, or after cancellation? If you aren’t asking these kinds of questions, looking at a customer journey map can help shed light.

It’s almost just as bad to ask too few questions as it is to ask too many. Don’t keep your customers the dark—even if you aren’t regularly surveying them, give them the opportunity to share their feelings about your product and service regularly.

Conclusion

Collecting feedback on each of the major touchpoints in a customer’s journey is a great way to keep your thumb on the pulse of how they are feeling overall.

Chances are there are some things in your customer journey map that customers will be uniformly happy about, and others that frustrate or discourage them across the board.

Mapping your points of contact out and tracking that information helps you get a clearer picture into all of the ways that your product could be improved. It allows you to discover pieces of your product that you don’t have insights into and should be asking more about.

Overall, your understanding of your customer experience will be greatly improved and deepened by implementing and following a customer journey map.

The post How Marketing Teams Can Use a Customer Journey Map for Better Customer Feedback appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

It’s important to follow customer service trends because these days, customers can easily jump ship to another brand without a second guess.

In this second half of 2019, We’ll show you the customer service trends you need to follow if you’re yet to do so.

Here’s why it’s important: today, businesses are operating in a changing environment. In this digital era, businesses are faced with a technology-led, fast-paced and shape-shifting world.

Hence, in the attempt to keep up with the latest innovative trends and software; the single most important aspect of your business is neglected: The Customers.

In today’s world, brands are being changed by customers so effortlessly. Customers can easily jump ship to another brand without second-guessing if they have a poor experience with their current brand.

As you may know, this spells doom for your business. Research has shown that a 5% rise in customer retention can boost a brand’s income by 75% and such retention is the outcome of quality customer experience.

This is even further proved by another survey by Forrester which revealed that the revenue growth of customer experience leaders is 5.1 times that of laggards.

Customers aren’t just numbers but people and no innovation or technological advancement can change that.

Now, let’s see 7 customer service trends to keep an eye on in the remaining quarters of 2019.

1. Experience is King

A few years ago, having customer feedback concerning how good your product is and on its price could be sustainable. However, in today’s world, that’s an outright failure.

The value placed on experience is increasing while that of price and even product is dropping as a 2020 Walker prediction states, but it seems we’ve gotten there already.

Michael Brenner, CEO, Author, and marketing guru strongly agrees, stating that “Experiences are the only thing people are willing to pay a premium for, not your brand, logo color or product.”

Furthermore, Tiffani Bova, a Salesforce Customer Increase Evangelist cited Uber as a case study: “People prefer to wait for Uber cabs while staring at other taxis drive pass them.”

The summary is that you can rule the market by providing quality customer experiences from entry to exit point even if your competitors offer better products or pricing.

2. Co-browsing

As much as customer experience is shifting towards human-less interactions, there’s still a trend that integrates human and technological innovations in order to create a bond with the customer. And it’s Co-browsing.

It’s quite frustrating trying to explain complex transactions to customer service and have them misunderstand you.

In fact, a Forrester Research Paper revealed how businesses are increasing usage of video engagements such as annotations, screen-sharing, co-browsing.

Cobrowsing enables the customer service agent to access the screen of the customer and help them hand-hand through certain difficult transactions like paying for a product or filling a form.

It’s vital to state that it isn’t like screen-sharing, as in co-browsing the customer can place restrictions on what the customer service agent can access on his/her computer in order to protect sensitive information.

This is necessary because in today’s world as a recent study shows, web users are more concerned about their privacy than any other thing.

Co-browsing also aids companies to reduce cost while boosting customer satisfaction. One of the largest banks in Nigeria integrated Live Video Chat and co-browsing in order to enhance its inbound support requests KPIs.

And saw a huge reduction in cost compared to when it used phones and chat alone.

That’s the power of co-browsing not only does it improve customer experience but it also reduces the costs associated with customer service.

How amazing is that?

The benefits of implementing this tech are simply mind-blowing. You create an emotional bond with your customers as it allows you to actively assist them to solve problems and not just tell them how to do it.

Who wouldn’t opt for that?

3. Preemptive or Proactive Strategies

Getting feedback from customers whether positive or negative used to be a celebrated method of improving customer experience, however, in the digital era that’s outdated.

Accenture revealed that 89% of customers feel frustrated having to explain their issues to numerous representatives. And the only way to avoid this is literally reading the thoughts of your customers and handing them the solution before they ask.

What’s more, Harvard Business Review states that the number one factor in ensuring customer loyalty is the reduction of customer effort.

4. Personalization

Delivering a blanket approach to your customers is so old-school. Every customer wants a unique experience tailored to their specific personality.

Throughout 2018, personalization grew stronger and it’s definitely going to be TOP #1 trend throughout 2019.

Customers want to feel like they’re part of the core system.

As a matter of fact, 74% of customers get irritated when website content isn’t personalized, with 76% of business buyers expecting customer service to know who they are without an introduction by 2020.

Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technology, you can learn all about your different customers on a 1:1 basis.

This isn’t just some basic stuff, you need to dynamically alter your website to suit each unique customer, offer retargeting and personalized ads on social media, and display personalized pricing to each customer, as well as recognize customer persona as it develops, etc.

Why is this essential? Accenture reveals that 81% of customers desire that brands know more about them and understand the right time to reach out to them and when they shouldn’t.

Also, Gartner predicts that in 2020 businesses will delegate 20% of staff to AI management; however, Fareportal a travel brand is there already.

By implementing WayBlazer’s AI technologies to their hotel offering they’ve seen a 10% rise in online bookings conversions and huge leaps in website engagement.

5. Self-Servicing

Self-Servicing is now the standard; specifically, with generation z and millennials. Previously, it was permissible to deal with customers over the phone for every issue they have, however that’s so 2008.

In fact, 72% of millennials in a recent survey stated that calls aren’t the best ways for them to get solutions.

Voice-enabled tech, chatbots, and virtual shopping assistants are where it’s at. You can provide customers with Intelligent, rapid support and direction beyond human capacity effortlessly as a result of the ocean of data that can be quickly pulled from.

It might even interest you that there are predictions that by 2020, 85% of all customer interactions with brands platforms will occur through personal and digital companions.

What’s more, Say2eat is one of the leaders in the food market due to creating a customer experience that integrates voice-powered chatbots and text. Customers can easily order from their chosen outlets via personalized chatbots.

Hence, to stay on top in 2019 and beyond customer self-serving is a must.

6. Brand and User Integration

70% of the big guns in the global retail market are willing to introduce brand and user integration or IoT to enhance the experience of their customers.

This is because IoT (Internet of Things) and integrated technology offers amazing customer experience by creating a consistent link between the user and the brand.

Basically, such brands have the capacity to know what a customer needs before it is demanded. For example, a customer can be alerted as soon as it’s time for him/her to change tires, service a gadget or even stock up the fridge.

A practical instance of this is from the company Pirelli. Pirelli launched an AI system that informs customers when their tires need to be changed.

Furthermore, BMW linked up with IBM to create a system that monitors the car more than the owner is capable of doing and sends alerts based on the results.

This is not a trend to overlook as recent studies have shown that by 2025, IoT apps will have over $10 trillion worth of influence.

7. Virtual and Augmented Reality

Elaborate technological innovation like virtual and augmented reality experiences are transforming customer experience from it was previously known as.

Take IKEA for example, shoppers can now go through their new house layouts, exactly how they would if they were right in the store.

This is absolutely amazing for CX. Not only does it show customers how their new purchase will look like in their own space, but it also decreases the event of returns and refunds. Why?

Because buyers can now know how exactly the product will fit into their world without hesitation.

What’s more, this amazing IKEA AR tech isn’t just limited to that, the brand’s Place App overlays the chosen products over whatever the customer’s smartphone camera is viewing.

In such a way customers get an amazing view of their new products for what they intended it for.

Also, AR and VR innovations for customer service aren’t just limited to B2C businesses, as even B2B brands are taking full advantage of it as the infographic below shows:

By cutting through the borders of reality, AR and VR enhance the perception of what a brand offers.

Conclusion

The world is in its fastest paced era, and in order for your business to remain relevant, you must be in the know of the various customer service trends that can shape the outcome of your business.

Gone are the days when simply offering a good product or service is enough, customers demand more now, and to stay afloat you must meet up with these demands.

Personalized and adaptive service is what customers require and diving into the customer service trends listed in this article will surely enable you to provide them with such.

The post 7 Trends That Will Shape The Future Of Customer Focused Marketing appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Conversational marketing is mostly about listening to your customers when they’re in need—and using what you learn about them throughout your engagements.

As a consumer, imagine that the next time you entered your favorite store, you were greeted by a one-on-one shopping assistant promising to cater to your every need.

Throughout your experience—and beyond—your personal shopping assistant would:

• Listen to your product- and experience-related needs and desires
• Give you information and advice based on these needs
• Guide you through the buyer’s journey, making every step along the way simple and easy

(Oh, and they also go away when you don’t want them to be there—but will come back whenever you do.)

While such magical creatures don’t actually exist, the next best thing, for the consumer, is for brands to create a customer experience centered around the ongoing dialogue between parties.

Which is where conversational marketing comes in.

What is Conversational Marketing?

Conversational marketing refers to any marketing effort that revolves in some way around one-to-one communication with individual customers.

There are two important things to note:

• Communication is a two-way street
• Communication is done to allow the relationship between parties to grow

With that in mind, it should be clear that conversational marketing is mostly about listening to your customers when they’re in need—and using what you learn about them throughout your engagements to further provide for their needs and improve their experience with your brand.

How Conversational Marketing Improves the Customer Experience

There are a ton of possible ways to go about making improvements to your CX.

So, why is conversational marketing so effective at doing so?

Provide a More Personalized Experience

Conversational marketing enables your team to provide more personalized—and sometimes even more individualized—service to your customers.

This is exactly what the modern consumer wants:

• 84% of customers say brands that treat them like humans (rather than faceless customers) win their business more often
• 78% of customers only engage with offers that are tailored to their needs, based on their history with a brand
• 77% of consumers choose, recommend, and pay more for brands that provide a more personalized service

The more often you converse with your customers on an individual level, the more you’ll be able to learn about them—as well as how their experience with your brand has been. In turn, you’ll have a much better idea of who they are, what they need, and how you can better provide for them moving forward.

It’s also worth mentioning that engaging in conversations with prospective customers is an efficient way to both qualify and segment them as you bring them on board.

Best Practices for Personalizing CX via Conversational Marketing:

• Approach each conversation with attention to the context of the given situation, and the context of your relationship with the customer in mind
• Use all pertinent information about the customer to inform the conversations you have with them
• Use every conversation with your customers as an opportunity to learn more about them in order to engage with them even further in the future

Respond in a Timely Manner

Another key desire of today’s consumers is timeliness.

Ten minutes is all the time your customers will give you to respond to their inquiries but it’s not as bad as it seems.

Your customers want to have their inquiry acknowledged within ten minutes of communicating it to your team. Basically, they want to have peace of mind knowing that your team is “on the case”—which you can easily provide by communicating back to them in a timely manner.

Of course, your customers also expect your team to look into and follow up with their inquiry in a timely manner. The more conversations you have with your customers in need, the more you’ll understand about their actual needs—and the quicker you’ll be able to give them what they’re looking for.

For your business, the benefit is clear:

Since you’ll have become more efficient at handling customer inquiries, you’ll be able to do more in less time. In turn, you’ll have more resources to invest in making even further improvements to your overall customer experience.

Best Practices for Responding in a Timely Manner:

• Be where your customers need you to be, when they need you to be there
• If a hand-off is necessary, be sure the process is streamlined and remains focused on the customer’s overall experience

Be Authentic

A 2016 study by Cohn & Wolfe found that consumers thrive on authentic engagements and brand experiences—to the point that nearly half of respondents say they would remain loyal to the brands that meet their expectations regarding authenticity.

Adopting conversational marketing as your company’s modus operandi will provide you with many opportunities to have such authentic engagements with your customers at various points along their own personal journeys with your brand.

Best Practices for Creating Authentic Conversations with Your Customers:

• Learn and understand the literal voice of your customers—and adjust the language your brand uses accordingly
• Above all else, ensure your brand’s dedication to your customer’s success is communicated loud and clear throughout every conversation you have with them

The essence of conversational marketing is in creating a relationship with your customers in which both parties actively participate in true communication with one another.

By getting your customers to “open up” to your company—and following this up with laser-focused action on their behalf—you’ll be able to provide your customers with the high-quality experience they expect from brands in your industry.

How Can You Implement Conversational Marketing?

Broadly speaking, conversational marketing can be implemented on any channel in which direct interaction with the customer is possible.

(However, this is not to say that all marketing done on these interactive platforms is conversational marketing. This will become more clear in a moment.)

Let’s take a look at some key channels your conversational marketing initiatives will likely revolve around.

Chatbots

Companies that use chatbots today typically do so for one of two key reasons:

Firstly, chatbots are used to provide surface-level assistance to, and accomplish basic tasks for, the customer. For example, Whole Foods’ chatbot helps customers find recipes based on their individual preferences:

As has been discussed previously on our blog, for your chatbot to perform these basic tasks for your customers, it will need to have a robust database of information to pull from, which is where having a well organized knowledge base and robust CRM come into play:

“AI is only as good as the data it has access to. While humans can provide a second check before sharing customer data that doesn’t make sense, AI likely won’t do the same. If your data structures are out of date and chaotic, your customers won’t get the right answers and you’ll cause panic.

The same goes for any knowledge base articles. If your AI solution uses your existing help center content to provide answers, it’s limited by what you have already documented. Review documentation to make sure there’s no gaps or outdated information.”

The other key function of chatbots is to screen customers in need of more in-depth assistance, and to pass them along to the correct staff member.

As this handoff process begins, chatbots can then begin collecting preliminary information about the customer’s inquiry—allowing the human team member to take over the conversation in a seamless, nearly organic manner.

(Note: Make sure to assess the “conversations” your customers have with your chatbot to identify areas of your CX that may be in need of improvement.)

Live Chat

Live chat combines the immediacy of chatbots with the autonomy and authenticity of human brand representatives, allowing you to provide highly-tailored, as-deep-as-necessary service and support to your customers.

Nordstrom, for example, allows customers to connect with a variety of departments, for a variety of purposes, using live chat technology:

But live chat is good for more than just solving customer inquiries and the like. Implemented correctly, live chat technology can allow you to get as close to providing the “personal shopper” experience we mentioned in the intro.

For example, take a look at this exchange between a customer and a representative of clothing company ASOS:

Here, we see true conversational marketing at its most effective: Using live chat technology, ASOS’ sales reps are able to converse with customers in real-time. This, then, allows them to provide the customer with laser-focused product suggestions based on the information conveyed throughout the conversation.

Social Media and Email

Social media and email are two other platforms where your conversational marketing efforts can thrive.

(Note: Unlike chatbots and live chat, not all marketing done on these channels can be considered conversational marketing. For example, blast announcements and pinned posts wouldn’t be considered parts of your conversational marketing initiatives.)

A few ways you can use social media and email to further engage in conversation with your individual customers:

1. You can provide responsive customer service to individuals in need of assistance:

My View during all the flight (4hours). No movies, no TV. First complain to one of my favorite airline. @JetBlue pic.twitter.com/Cipl9Pjiy6

— Esaí Vélez (@EvpLares14) November 26, 2015

2. Or, you could solicit feedback via emailed surveys:

3. You can even engage your audience in further conversation in real-time via platforms like Facebook and Instagram Live.

Simply put:

Email and social media were created specifically to allow people—and companies—to communicate more effective and efficiently with one another. While both channels have evolved into much larger entities with many other purposes, it’s essential that you keep in mind that they all revolve around one main concept:

Engaging in authentic and organic conversation with your customers in order to improve their experience with your brand.

Wrapping Up

As with any relationship, communication is the key to allowing your relationship with your customers to grow.

After all, if you don’t actively engage in conversation with them, how should you learn anything about them in the first place?

But conversational marketing isn’t about simply chatting with your customers, making them feel welcome enough, then going about your business. Conversational marketing makes it your business to have these conversations, and to use what you learn to make improvements to the services that matter to your customers.

The post Using Conversational Marketing to Improve Your CX appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

The primary focus of modern companies is to improve CX rather than sending large questionnaires or following-up the calls to your call-centre.

Currently, customer experience is a hot issue in many companies. The business environment is changing with a dizzy pace.

However, a few companies can handle CX well. Why is it so?

The team responsible for online promotion focuses on increasing conversions. Marketers concentrate on returning value to the business. Operations department aims at keeping up to the pace. CEO considers investing in customer experience risky or expensive. Many companies faced these problems while trying to keep the train on the tracks.

In fact, customer experience requires special attention, applying new techniques and creating partnerships. Only this way companies can drive change. The advice that can be found in this article is based on the experience of marketers who succeeded to develop an effective practical approach to drive CX.

What Is the Lasting Impression after Interaction with a Brand?

The lasting impression has nothing to do with marketing campaigns, websites, visual identities or call centers. CX Marketing is about the lasting impression left right after the interaction with a company, feelings and thoughts of consumers and staff. Other things related to branding.

Any analysis in marketing starts with the understanding of consumers’ feelings after interaction with a brand. Creating the correct lasting impression should be the major effort of any company because it can differentiate the company in the market and help increase customers’ engagement.

CX Is Not a Post-Sale Service

Customer experience is more than marketing channels, companies’ websites, marketing events or advertising. Tight interlinks between the customer experience and marketing may mislead inexperienced marketers when trying to develop appropriate CX strategy.

CX concerns all areas of business, including service, support, usage of products, interactions with back office, finance and other departments across the company.

Surveys and Feedback

Many people face the situation when they are asked to answer several questions about products or services, but few people like to waste time on it. This way, companies aim to derive feedback from their consumers and better understand customer experience.

However, surveys don’t reflect real-time information because it takes time to compose them, send to consumers and process the feedback. In addition, consumers are more likely to answer immediately. Therefore, it’s better for companies to give customers an opportunity in a customer-friendly way. For example, encourage consumers to share their experience using their mobile phone.

Tie Customer Feedback to Database

Taking feedback in real time and asking customers about their immediate experience is a good idea.

However, tying up feedback with customer records to take further actions regarding the improvement of customer experience is even more important. Many companies are dreaming about collecting this data because it allows enhancing sales.

From Real-time Surveys to Real-time Actions

Few customers can waste one hour to answer 50 survey questions.

An ideal survey should be short, take 5-10 minutes maximum and tied to the customer base. Taking into account the fast-paced business environment, companies should take immediate actions to improve customer experience. Otherwise, customers may switch to competitors.

Understand How CX Is Formed

Marketers should understand the mechanism of forming CX. According to Assignment Help in Australia, many companies need to better understand what customers feel when they interact with these companies. The companies, in their turn, should be more empathetic and attentive to their customers.

Some companies take customer-centric or employee-centric views, but sometimes these perspectives ignore their actual business interests. Therefore, a balanced perspective should be taken into account when analyzing CX.

Trigger the Change

Triggering the change is not easy. You can either establish a sense of crisis or directly explore what real customers feel when using the products or services of the company by visiting their homes.

This way, stakeholders can face the reality they can’t ignore. This is not a joke: leading marketers used these methods to derive real CX.

Getting creative may also help trigger the change. If stakeholders can’t understand CX, you can bring it to them. For example, you can map customers’ journey and mark each point where customer service issues arise. By following the way all customers do you can understand them better and improve CX.

Turn Vision into a Practical Concept

Things will be clearer to you once you define your focus.

Find an “ah-ha” moment in your business and you will succeed. For example, one of the business owners discovered that the core CX was that customers wanted to do something together. He transformed this vision into a practical concept of his gym business and nailed. The main idea is to turn your vision into something material so customers can understand.

Find Partners

It’s very important for marketers to find partners among the stakeholders of the company. It would be great if you can find the support of a company’s leader.

New leaders are ready to drive change as they can consider issues without a biased judgment. In order to acquire a partner in the person of a more experienced leader, you need to be aggressive and delicate at the same time.

The general rule is to partner with those who have appetite and power to drive real change.

Direct Talk

Giving your customers the feeling they are needed and appreciated is the primary focus. You can reach this goal in many ways like directly talking to them.

Answer support calls and schedule personal meetings, tell them your value their opinion and build solutions to their problems. Ask them what they really need to use your products or services in more effective ways.

In this way, you can capture the most important insights of CX and build strong relationships with your customers.

Don’t Let Customers Forget Why They Chose Your Company

Advanced marketers recognize the value of increasing the number of leads. It’s also important to extend this concept to your customers.

Understanding post-purchase experience of your customers can help improve CX. How to do it? You may provide them with industry research results or white papers or invite them to webinars to address their challenges. You can use this approaches to remind them how useful and functional your products are.

Try to build relationships with your customers rather than track post-service experience.

Don’t Forget about Continuous Measuring and Refinement

Identify clear goals and follow them.

Measure the effectiveness of your operations on a regular basis. Outline customer retention strategy with the help of process refinement. This will ensure that you didn’t waste your efforts and allocated resources efficiently.
Hence, the primary focus of modern companies is to improve CX rather than sending large questionnaires or following-up the calls to your call-centre.

Building long-term customer relationships is preferable. These activities should be emphasized to gain customers’ trust and loyalty.

The post 12 Reasons Why Should Marketers Drive Customer Experience appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

How you deliver your customer surveys will impact results and the insight you’ll gain from those who spend their time with your product will prove invaluable.

Your customers and target market are full of information and feedback that can help you improve your product. Instead of guessing what they’re thinking, why not ask? Next time you find yourself wondering how people feel about your product or what they wish you would add to it, create a customer survey and find out.

In this article, I’ll share the key pieces to getting started with customer surveys for your organization, including:

• Why customer surveys are important,
• How to create a survey,
• Types of customer surveys to consider.

Why Survey?

Whether your product or service is new or well-established, it’s vital to stop guessing about who your audience is and get actual data in your hands. By creating a survey to gather details on your customers or readers, you can compile data that directly impacts your brand strategy.

Customer surveys help you collect information like:

• The demographics—age, sex, location, interests, etc.—of your audience.
• What they like about your current offerings.
• What kinds of changes or upgrades they may be interested in.
• The problems they have with your product or service.
• Ideas they want to share with you.

You might have a general idea about how they feel through your usual interactions with them, but a survey can take that understanding to the next level. Use the information you already know to craft the questions you’ll ask as you take a closer look. The data you collect here will help you better serve your customers, decide what to do next, and develop your customer-centric marketing plan.

How to Create an Effective Survey

Crafting a successful survey isn’t as simple as it may seem at first. You’ll need to figure out what the point of it is, find the right audience, and develop the questions. As you create your survey, be careful not to inject bias or add leading questions into the mix, as you want to encourage the respondents to share their honest answers.

Keep the following guidelines in mind as you develop a survey:

Define your survey goals

Before you write your first question, establish the goals of your customer surveys. Aim for a concrete collection of information, rather than an aimless batch of questions that may confuse people.

Survey goals will depend on your specific needs at the time, but may include:

• collecting demographic details from your audience,
• assessing interest for a feature you’re considering, or
• requesting feedback on a recent update.

Try to keep your survey’s goals limited in scope. Avoid packing one survey with lots of requests, and instead, plan to do more than one survey if needed.

Know Your Participants

Before sending out your survey to every single contact you’ve got, consider who will really be able to contribute the information you need. For example, if your product includes free and paid options and you’re wondering why some people haven’t ever paid to upgrade, ask them! But don’t ask the people who have paid. Narrow the audience to the correct scope.

Beyond asking the right people in relation to how they interact with your business, consider their personal details too. A person’s age, education, location, and more will impact their answers.

You may not use this information to remove people from your survey participants list, but should consider the data you collect through the lens of the people providing the information.

Craft Your Survey Carefully

From the questions you ask, to how you present it to your participants, creating your survey for maximum replies and understanding is essential. Write your survey to be welcoming and friendly, and avoid using jargon that may be difficult for some people to understand.

When you distribute your survey, make sure the language asking people to participate—whether it’s an email subject line or a request in a blog post—is clear and inviting.

Keep it Short and Simple

Be sure to keep your survey short by only adding the information you truly need to include. Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to (hint: if you’re emailing the survey to them, you already have their email address, and likely their account information too!). If you ask too much time of people, many won’t make it to the end. Furthermore, for multiple choice questions, limit the number of answers to just a few.

By adding several answer options, you’re more likely to paralyze a survey taker with indecision and cause them to give up. People are busy and have so many other ways to fill their time, so use it wisely. However, if you can, include some questions with text boxes for survey takers to fill in as they’d like.

Open-ended questions can help you identify data points you may not have even thought to include and also give your users a chance to provide their real, honest feedback.

Find the Right Survey Tool

How you deliver your survey will impact results, so be sure to develop a plan that will help you get the data you need. Gathering feedback from your audience can be as simple as sending them a link to a Google Form you’ve created for free or a more in-house option like adding one-click feedback surveys onto your website or asking questions right in an app as people use it.

To find the best tool for your survey, consider budget, what your team can implement, and how you want the survey presented to your customers.

Types of Customer Surveys

Once you’ve decided to create a survey, next you’ll need to figure out how to deliver it. As you roll out your customer surveys, you may find a combination of a few types to be the best way to obtain a well-rounded set of responses. Consider the following survey options as you get started:

Marketing Survey

A marketing survey meant for all or any segment of your customers or readers can be crafted and shared across platforms for maximum participation. For more targeted results, consider segmenting your audience and surveying a group with questions you’ve written specifically for them.

Use surveys to measure brand awareness, analyze your target market, gain insights into your product or a feature you’re thinking of adding, and to understand your current users better.

Website Survey

If people are already visiting your website, why not ask them for some quick feedback occasionally? By adding a survey directly onto your site, you’ll get it in front of the right people and make it easier for people to share their insight, since they don’t have to click a link and go elsewhere to do it.

In-App Survey

If your product or service includes a mobile app, why not survey the users there too? A person who regularly uses your app may have key insight, and may also not use the desktop or web version, so their feedback will be app-specific. I’ve mentioned the importance of providing customer support in your mobile app before, and think customer surveys should be no different.

The people using your mobile app are a specific type of user with plenty of data to share, if only you ask. An app survey may include questions asking how often they use the app, their favorite feature, what they think could be improved, or what one addition to the app would result in them using it even more often.

Plus, by keeping the survey in the app, you’re likely to see higher participation, and you’ll also be keeping the users in the app right where you want them.

Blog Survey

If you run a blog, you probably want to hear from your readers. A survey to ask them about your blog may include questions on where they read it, how often they visit, or which content they like best.

Example of blog survey from Nicereply

Once you’ve created the survey, share it with your readers by sending it to those who are subscribed to your blog, linking to it directly on the blog, and sharing the survey link in other areas your readers follow you, like Facebook or Twitter.

Survey for Success

Customer surveys are a fantastic way to hear directly from the people who use your product outside of the more frequent interactions you may have with them through customer support conversations.

Example of NPS survey (you can create a survey that will match your branding and attract your customers).

People who use your product are guaranteed to have opinions on it, so every day that passes where you’re unaware of those is one more day you’re just guessing about how they feel. If you’ve recently added a new feature to your product or are wondering how customers feel about things in general, start developing a survey today.

The insight you’ll gain from those who spend their time with your product will prove invaluable.

The post The Savvy Marketer’s Guide to Customer Surveys appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

As you develop your marketing plan, focus on how it fits into the overall customer experience you’re creating and be sure to measure your success so you can adjust the plan as you go.

Developing a customer-centric marketing plan is essential for creating a strategy that’ll keep up with the times. By focusing on the customer, instead of the business, you’ll connect more closely with customers and truly understand the people who use your product or service.

Instead of marketing at people through ad copy alone, you can connect with them through inspiring customer experiences, helpful information to educate them on your product, and genuine connections.

Customer-centric marketing can help your business in many ways, including:

• Understanding your customers and their motivations
• Improving customer satisfaction and increasing retention
• Increasing trust and brand loyalty

In this post, we’ll cover the five areas to focus on as you map out your customer-centric marketing plan.

Five Key Pieces to a Customer-Centric Marketing Plan

Content

Any marketing plan must include content. Create original, high-quality content that will engage, incentivize, and connect with your current customers, as well as potential customers.

While not all content will be the right fit for every customer, aim to create a collection that reaches each potential target audience in the way that makes the most sense for them.

As you plan it out, consider developing content that:

• Shares use cases, featuring real customers and their experience using your product or service,
• Tells the story of your brand, with a focus on where you’re at and where you want to be in the future, and
• Provides educational information to about your product or service to allow your customers—and potential customers—to better understand and use it.

Content that is genuinely helpful can be difficult to create if you’re not experienced in the industry you’re marketing to. In that case, pull in industry experts, rely on team-members that have more experience and share the stories of the people who actually do the work. This strategy will resonate louder than trying to fake depth and expertise.

Support

While this might not be something the marketing team will produce any content for or handle directly, it is an important piece to understanding your customers.

Make sure your organization shares customer communication and feedback outside of the support team so that your marketers can use it to inform their decisions. Plus, if the customer support your organization provides is top-notch, you can even include a spot in your marketing plan to boast about how great they are as a reason for a new customer to give your product or service a try.

According to PwC’s 2018 Future of Customer Experience report, “42% [of customers] would pay more for a friendly, welcoming experience.”

The willingness to pay more for good customer experience indicates people place a high value on service and the overall journey of their experiences with your organization.

Since customer support is the team with frequent, direct contact with the customer, they play a big part in making a positive impact, and the data they gather is invaluable to your marketing team.

Community

Develop a way for your customers to publicly engage and interact with your team, as well as with each other. Fostering a sense of community and belonging among the people who use your product the most will increase brand loyalty and overall customer satisfaction.

Beyond their interactions with each other, including a space for them to regularly communicate with members of your team will build on the sense of community around your product. To do this, consider creating a community forum, hosting customer meetups or creating other public space for customers to interact with each other.

For best results in your community forum:

• Make sure to have some of your organization’s staff available to moderate the forum.
• Keep it active by encouraging discussion, asking for feedback, and pushing the most interesting conversations to the top.
• Be sure to show appreciation for people who choose to spend their time contributing positively to your community through rewards or incentives.

Advocates

Your product and support teams can do the work that creates advocates for you. By providing a quality product or service and being there for them when they need support, you’ll create happy customers who will go out and share their love for your brand.

And since people tend to trust their friends more than reviews by unknown people, creating and focusing on the type of customer experience that leads to organic, positive mentions is priceless.

While your marketing team doesn’t necessarily have to do anything to create advocates, looking for ways to encourage and foster their sharing is essential. Not all people will naturally think to share their positive experiences with a business with their friends, so look for ways to market to them to give them the nudge they need.

Influencers

Beyond recommendations from friends, the current state of the web means people with large followings on social media platforms are the next best thing for convincing people how great you are.

Develop a plan to work with influencers who make sense for your particular brand, rather than with every influencer who might be willing. Keep in mind that follower counts aren’t everything. Look for social media influencers with high engagement and the right audience for you.

If you’re new to working with influencers, consider trying out the following methods to get started:

• Engage several at the same time to get the word out about a new feature launch,
• Share their authentic stories about using your product, or
• Develop an ongoing campaign with a handful of perfectly targeted influencers to share your product in various ways over time to build long-term recognition and credibility with their audience.

Remember: the key to a successful campaign with social media influencers is identifying those who have an audience made up of your target market and see a lot of engagement from their followers. An account with five million followers posting about your product won’t do much for you if those followers don’t need or want to use it.

Conclusion

Creating a customer-centric marketing plan will take your marketing from the basics to the best.

From developing a community to utilizing advocates and influencers, the internet has made it easier than ever to find your audience and speak directly to them about your product.

The state of modern technology means people are more active and consistently on the web than ever before, so finding ways to forge lasting connections with them and use that for your benefit is essential to your organization’s growth and lasting success.

As you develop your marketing plan, focus on how it fits into the overall customer experience you’re creating and that it connects with people in an honest way, and be sure to measure your success so you can adjust the plan as you go.

Creating content that inspires, educates, and establishes an ongoing relationship with customers will make them happier with your product and more likely to stick around year after year.

The post Developing a Marketing Plan that Keeps Your Customer at its Heart appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.