Interacting with Your Customers for Signals
What’s the best way to learn how to improve customer experience and build loyal customers? Ask your customers. Your customer’s feedback is full of signals or ideas for what they want and expect from your company, your product(s) or service(s), and your employees. Don’t just ask customers to provide you with a Net Promoter Score or Customer Satisfaction Score without also providing the opportunity for direct feedback. Ask your customers, in their own words, to describe to you what they like and don’t like, and consider asking customers to optionally respond to additional questions that are more specific to different areas of your business.
Identify the channels where your customers are likely to engage, and solicit feedback in those same channels. Then ensure that all of your employees are encouraged and rewarded to listen for feedback and act upon that feedback. Customer feedback shouldn’t be the responsibility of just one department. For example, customers will share feedback on social media, which is likely monitored by a marketing team or agency. Whoever is responsible for reviewing social posts should bring that customer feedback to meetings and share it across departments to make an impact. Same with a sales team. As a customer success manager or account manager interacts with customers, they should be recording all of the feedback into their CRM so there is a single source of truth on the customer and their feedback over time.
To reassure customers that you are listening to them, enable all departments and all customer-facing employees to respond quickly to customer concerns and incorporate customer feedback to finetune your offerings, your customer service, or any other aspect of your business. This approach should not be siloed to a single department but your entire organization.