For any inbound business, it’s crucial to have a system in place to delight your customers at every stage of their journey. Pay close attention to how customer behavior changes, then evolve your marketing strategy around that.
One way to gauge the success of your customers’ experience is to ask for feedback directly from them. Collecting customer feedback allows you to understand exactly what makes customers happy and shows you how to improve your customer experience.
Knowing Your Customer
Amazing customer service starts with knowing information about your customers. In order to successfully communicate with your customer, you have to know who they are. That means collecting data. It’s how you use that data that will determine the quality of your customer’s experience.
To get that information, your customer service process has to put people first. HubSpot’s Service Hub customer service software ensures everyone has information about your customers and is completely focused on creating a better customer experience. 72% of consumers now expect customer service to already know their information when they contact them.
HubSpot’s “Conversations” tool is built right into the HubSpot CRM, so you can see important information about the customer you’re helping and understand their context more fully. Context is key to communicating with customers. Knowing background on each customer will ensure that you’re creating a more meaningful, personalized interaction.
For example, if you receive a live chat message from a customer, they’ll typically like the fact that you have all their basic information available. They won’t have to answer a series of initial questions before they get to the heart of the conversation, saving them time.
However, be careful with how you use this information. Many customers may appreciate that you know who they are, but not everyone will appreciate it if you mishandle their data. Remember to be respectful of your customers’ privacy.
Instead of saying, “Here are some interesting events happening near your home in Boston,” say “Here are some interesting events happening in your area.” Instead of saying, “I see you looked at our website for 23 minutes on Tuesday and downloaded our eBook later that afternoon,” just say “Thanks for downloading our eBook.”
The Importance of Customer Feedback
Customers have always been an important part of the inbound methodology. In 2018, customers are the driving force behind marketing. Word of mouth marketing is one of the best channels for marketing your product or service. The creation of Service Hub and the inbound service framework emphasizes how crucial customer support and satisfaction is for your business.
Customer satisfaction depends not only on the quality of your product, but also on the quality of your company overall. Your reputation is defined by your customers’ experience. As a result, it’s essential to create a positive experience that will continually make your customers happy.
In order to create the best customer experience, you first have to understand what makes your customers happy. The best way to do this is to gather customer feedback.
Gathering customer feedback allows you to hear about any common issues your customers might be having. When it comes to customer feedback, you want to actively listen to what your customers are saying.
The Voice of the Customer
According to HubSpot, “voice of customer is used to describe the needs and requirements of a customer. It is the process of capturing all of what a customer is saying about your business, product, or service”.
Your company should be listening to customer feedback, sharing the results, and interpreting it to improve customer experience and retention. You want to use voice of customer (VoC) to bridge the gap between experience and expectation.
The customer feedback tool in Service Hub can be useful when capturing VoC. There are a variety of surveys, like Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score, and Customer Satisfaction, that you can put out to capture qualitative and quantitative feedback from your customers.
The Net Promoter Score survey allows you to see how loyal your customers are over time. The Customer Effort Score survey allows you to gather information on how easy it is for customers to get support from your company. Finally, the Customer Satisfaction survey allows you to understand how satisfied your customers are during different points of their journey.
With the data you generate from your surveys, you’ll be able to start understanding how happy your customers are and how satisfied they are with your service. You should come up with a plan for surveying customers to help you gain a better understanding of your customers’ satisfaction.
Types of Customer Feedback Surveys
1. Net Promoter Score
Net promoter score (NPS) allows your company to see the loyalty of your customers over time. It’s important to know how loyal your customers are. The more loyal the customer the more likely they are to recommend your product or service.
In order to calculate NPS, you have to ask your customers to rate how likely they are to recommend your product or service to a friend on a scale of 1 to 10. Since you’re only asking one question, this type of survey usually has a high response rate.
NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
- Detractors: the customers who wouldn’t recommend your product or service.
- Promoters: the customers who would recommend your product or service.
If you don’t have a customer feedback tool, it can be time-consuming to calculate NPS. Luckily, Service Hub offers a customer feedback tool that calculates the NPS for you. You’ll be able to see the results on your dashboard alongside the results of your other customer feedback surveys.
2. Customer Effort Score
Customer Effort Score (CES) allows you to gather information that conveys how much effort it takes for a customer to get support from your company. The point of CES is to gather data that will help you make your customer experience more effortless.
To calculate CES, you ask your customers how easy it was for them to solve their problem. The answer options range from very difficult to very easy.
Decreasing the amount of effort your customers have to put in to solve a problem actually boosts customer loyalty overall. Harvard Business Review found that, of customers that experienced low effort, 94% said they were interested in repurchasing and 88% said they would increase the amount they spent.
Customer Effort Score is the best way to predict how customers will behave in the future when they purchase from your company. It will also give you a good idea of how likely your customers are to refer your product or service.
3. Customer Satisfaction Score
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) measures how satisfied your customers are during different points of their customer journey.
Normally, CSAT questions are asked at the end of a live chat or knowledge base article to determine how helpful your customer service team was at solving the customer’s problem. Usually, the question will ask a customer to rate how satisfied they are with the support they received, from poor to excellent.
Just like Net Promoter Score, CSAT has a high response rate because it is only one question and has clear answer options.
CSAT shows you exactly how happy your customers are with your service and support. They are rating the entire customer support interaction. This will help you gauge how helpful and efficient your customer service and support efforts are.
Use Data to Improve Customer Experience
The data you collect from your surveys is essential to improving customer satisfaction and overall customer experience. The information you have gathered is meant to help you understand your customers’ happiness.
All of your customer feedback is housed in one dashboard in Service Hub, which allows you to monitor changes in customer satisfaction.
You should organize your feedback into categories that pertain to different teams of your company, like: product, marketing, sales, and service. Make sure that you share the feedback with your whole company because your company should have a shared understanding of customer service.
Every team must be equipped to act on any feedback they receive and alter their approach to engaging customers.
Any negative feedback you receive is an opportunity to learn how to improve your customer experience. It’s an opportunity to improve your support and make sure that your customers have a positive experience, even on the way out.
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