General

You’ve been using Net Promoter Score in all the right ways, and now you’re looking to advance your CX program. Fear not, you’ve come to the right place!

The next level of CX for Growth Stage companies focuses on a few key things:

• Taking a more holistic view of the entire customer journey 
• Leveraging technology to listen to hundreds and thousands of customer comments
• Employing robust analytics

We’ve previously explained how to quickly build your first customer feedback program with a single survey like Net Promoter Score in a single channel. Now we’ll combine surveys with behaviors and concrete numbers to see how CX impacts metrics like product use, retention, and sales. 

Yes, it’s time to level up your CX program!

We’re sticking with the 3-step Listen, Learn, and Act model but upgrading each step’s activities from Early Stage to Growth Stage CX programs.

Step 1: Listen 

In this step, you’ll gather information across the customer journey. Many people at the Growth Stage have already identified critical touchpoints in the customer journey that drive success, including:

• Achieving first value
• Support interactions
• Using a new product or service

The Listen step focuses on asking the right questions at these touchpoints to help you optimize your CX. During the Early Stage, you offered up the Net Promoter Score survey. Now it’s time to move on to two other important customer experience metrics.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) asks customers how satisfied they were with a recent interaction, like a support call. CSAT is the most popular CX metric for transactional interactions, and you use it to gauge how well these interactions are being handled.

How might you use CSAT? If you’re with an e-commerce company, you likely use it to get post-delivery feedback on a purchase. At SaaS companies, product teams use a CSAT variation called a Product Satisfaction survey (PSAT). It’s often triggered in-app to get feedback that helps product teams optimize the user experience.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

The CES survey asks, “How easy was it to _________?” CES is used to improve systems that may frustrate customers. It allows you to capture early feedback and discover ways to make sure the path to the all-important first value is smooth. 

Use CES surveys to measure how customers feel about their onboarding, which is the critical first step of the customer journey. It’s much easier to retain a customer who has had an excellent first experience with your product than win over a customer reeling from poor onboarding that missed the mark.

When you combine the information gathered from NPS, CSAT/PSAT, and CES, you can uncover previously hidden areas of the customer journey and understand how those affect overall CX. 

Step 2: Learn

You now have a plethora of customer feedback from your three surveys, and it’s time to extract actionable insights. The important thing to realize here is you’re collecting feedback from thousands of surveys. That amount of data quickly becomes hard to address at scale, and text-match tags won’t capture the wealth of information available. You’re going to need more advanced tools than what you used at the Early Stage. 

Customer insights through machine learning

The most insightful input from customers comes in the free-text portion of your surveys. To mine that rich data, you’ll need a tool that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP), a form of AI for real-time text categorization and sentiment analysis.

For many businesses, the wealth of customer experience data has become overwhelming. Artificial intelligence gives us the means to retake the initiative.

– Jessica Pfeifer  CCO, Wootric

Advanced tools for the Growth Stage Learn step share two essential elements:

Categorization in real-time

One of the reasons you’re not manually analyzing the text is you don’t want to wait weeks for insights, and your customers certainly don’t want to wait that long for action. Natural Language Processing allows computers to auto-tag, interpret, and analyze text data as new topics arise, highlighting any issues immediately so you can take timely actions.

Sentiment analysis

Simply put, sentiment analysis tells you why your customers do or don’t love you. NLP performs sentiment analysis on your customer and user feedback, taking you way beyond the traditional text-match tagging. Not only is every topic tracked over time, but NLP also tracks the positive and negative tone and tenor of the customer voice. In a quick review, you can instantly gauge whether a specific product touchpoint performs well for your customers. This lets you see how your business initiatives are affecting your users in real-time.

Auto-categorizing feedback is a powerful step in VoC, taken with the help of new technologies like Natural Language Processing. 

Link CX metrics to business outcomes

You can tie CX directly to business outcomes by linking customer survey data to business-focused metrics like purchases, conversions, churn, and sales.

Say you want to tie CX to churn through your mobile app. No problem! 

1. Look at your post-survey 90-day churn metrics and see at what scores you begin to lose customers rapidly. 
2. Compare that with your NPS. Let’s say your NPS shows you can tolerate some Passives and maybe even some Detractors scoring you at a 5 or 6. Cool, you can let those ride a bit if you’re resource light. 
3. Detractors scoring you at a 0 or 4, however, could be at serious risk of leaving if they don’t receive the support they need to succeed. Put your resources there ASAP!

How else can you monitor the risk of churn? Well, if you’re a B2B business, you’re probably already looking at your Customer Health Score. Factor NPS and other CX metrics into your Customer Health Score and get even more insight with a system that takes into account behavioral metrics like the number of support tickets per user, usage of product features, and other engagement metrics.

Step 3: Act

You’ve listened, you’ve learned a lot, and now you’re ready to make an impact. But here’s the thing: CX is built by and affected by more than just one team at a company. So there are two critical parts to the Act step.

Get CX data into everyone’s workflow

A customer-centric organization relies on everyone having access to VoC data, so no individual or team at your company should ever have to search for it. All functions can drive better customer experiences and benefit from having CX data and analytics at their fingertips.

• Sales needs CX metrics at the account level in Salesforce to prepare for an upsell conversation.
• Customer Success uses Gainsight or other platforms for regular communications with customers.
• Customer Support is in Intercom or ZenDesk.
• Product may want data in their analytics platform like Tableau.
• Analysts will want to pull CX data into their relational database.

By connecting your CX program to the applications and software used by other teams, you can destroy silos and create powerful interactions that delight your customers. Look for CX platforms with native integrations and open APIs to make these connections seamless.

Optimize your product with CX

It’s all good and well to gather and distribute essential data and insights, but a CX program’s real power comes from making your product and services better. 

Use your CX data to rank and address the things that matter most to your customers and thus to your business’ success. We recommend creating a dual-axis plan of attack to prioritize what you optimize. 

1. Look at the number of impacted customers and their average score for each issue.
2. Combine that number with a qualitative measure of the engineering and operational effort required to address the issue.

Close the loop at scale

Once you’ve taken actions to improve CX, don’t forget to communicate back to your customers who gave you the feedback to make those changes. Let them know you appreciate their input and that it made an impact.

You now have hundreds and thousands of customers giving your feedback, and you won’t have enough resources to call each one personally. Thus you’ll need a hybrid model to close the customer feedback loop.

1. High touch. A customer success agent or account manager can reach out to their customers when they respond, even if just to say “Thanks!” This connection lets customers know you’re listening and appreciate their feedback. For a B2B business, this is the way to go if you have the resources. 
2. Medium touch. Segment the list by survey scores. Sync with a platform like Intercom to trigger automated messages or schedule a weekly email campaign to each group. 
   1. Thank Promoters and possibly offer them an incentive to be brand advocates, perhaps by sharing their positive feedback on social media.
   2. Route Detractors to Customer Success or Customer Support. That team can devote time to understanding why the customer’s not happy — especially those who didn’t leave feedback — and make the CX and relationship better.
   3. Automate a reply to Passives who didn’t leave feedback, spurring a “What would make you LOVE us?” conversation.
3. Low touch. Respond with information-sharing and transparency, such as a blog post or newsletter at the end of the month, summarizing the feedback you’ve received and stating your plans to address issues customers have raised. 

A growing company needs to grow its CX program. By expanding your view to the full customer journey, expanding the feedback you’re requesting, and then using more advanced tools to pull insights from the feedback, you’ll be ready to optimize the customer experience you provide and enjoy the success it brings.

As we begin this new year, we want to share some great news. 

Today we’re excited to announce that Wootric is joining Pearl-Plaza, a market leader in customer and employee experience. Pearl-Plaza serves many of the largest, most sophisticated global organizations from Starbucks to Ford to VMWare. 

This next step in our evolution means great things for our customers and other businesses seeking a modern approach to CX improvement.  

We will continue to deliver the world-class product experience you expect from us. In addition, our pace of innovation and our ability to support our customers around the globe will accelerate as we leverage the considerable resources and expertise of Pearl-Plaza. 

Our customers will also be able to tap into Pearl-Plaza’s expertise and enterprise solutions as their CX needs evolve beyond our turnkey approach.

Read the official press release here. 

Seven years ago, we founded Wootric with a mission to empower customer-centricity in every organization through modern, always-on CX improvement.  We launched with a high-response in-app microsurvey and quickly disrupted a dated approach to gathering and responding to Net Promoter Score feedback. 

Guided by input from our customers, we invested in omni-channel feedback collection, AI-driven customer journey analytics, and native integrations with the modern tech stack — all the while staying true to the flexible, lightweight, user-centric approach to CX improvement that businesses expect from Wootric.  

Wootric now delivers the fastest ROI in the Experience Management category on G2.  Over 1200 businesses worldwide, including DocuSign, Zoom, and Comcast, use Wootric software to improve customer lifetime value with insights and action from voice of the customer data.  

We thank our customers, partners, investors, advisors, and above all members of our exceptional team for their support, and for choosing to be on the CX journey with us.  

Together, with Pearl-Plaza, we will make 2021 an amazing year for customer experience!

With gratitude,

Deepa Subramanian, CEO  &  Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer

The founders would also like to extend a special thank you to Steve Gurney at Viant Group for representing Wootric through this process.

Executives and end-users look for different things when choosing software products. An executive, for example, might be more interested in ROI and scalability, while the end-user often cares more about just getting their work done, quickly and easily. 

There was a time when executives were the gatekeepers who decided which B2B software products their companies purchased while the end-user experience took a back seat—but that era has ended. Today, you’ve got to win over your end-users to gain a foothold in an organization and give your product a fighting chance.

What does this look like? Picture Sophie, an Accounting Manager who uses the free version of Zoom to chat with her brother in Spain. She prefers Zoom over Skype, so she recommends it at work. The department tries it out, likes it, and begins using the paid version. Eventually, other departments try Zoom and it gains company-wide adoption.  Cut to Zoom’s IPO in 2019, and global adoption in the wake of the pandemic. 

What is Product-Led Growth?

A Product-Led Growth (PLG) model focuses on the end user’s needs when developing products, crafting education and support strategies, and shaping user experience.

“Growth in a PLG business comes from consistently fine-tuning the product experience to optimize the rate at which new users activate, convert, and expand in the product. Ideally, these improvements start to compound over time, allowing PLG businesses to accelerate growth as they scale (unlike traditional SaaS businesses). Customer feedback is critical to prioritizing the areas that will make the biggest difference to your customers.”
— Kyle Poyar, Market Strategist, OpenView

Where end users rule, customer experience is everything

Welcome to the end-user era, a time when users (rather than CIOs or other executives) introduce SaaS products to organizations and drive product adoption.  If you want to succeed as a SaaS company in the end-user era, you need to find ways to eliminate end-user pain points and create a seamless experience.

Word of mouth drives new customer acquisition. Then viral adoption within a company increases customer lifetime value. This is a powerful combination. In recent years, PLG is how many of the most successful SaaS companies have rocketed to IPO. Think Zoom, Slack, Hubspot, and Atlassian.

If you’re at a company that takes a traditional approach to CX—tinkering around the edges, nudging the product team to “improve customer experience”—get ready for a big change. Once your C-Suite or VP of Product embraces Product-Led Growth, the spotlight will be on customer feedback in all forms.  CX metrics will drive cross-functional alignment and priorities. 

The relationship between CX and Product-Led Growth

Despite the name, Product-Led Growth is not solely the domain of the Product team. Customer experience is an integral part of any PLG strategy. “If there is a challenge in implementing Product-Led Growth, it is actually achieving alignment across and within teams along with monitoring the multiple digital and physical touchpoints affecting customer experience,” says Despina Exadaktylou, Director of Programs, Product-Led Growth Hub, the world’s first PLG academy.

Product Teams are taking note and initiating collaboration.

“Customer Experience focuses on brand loyalty and customers’ likelihood to recommend. User Experience [within a Product team] focuses on the immediacy of user interaction with your product. But the lines between them have blurred as the role of the UX researcher and the tools in our toolkit have expanded beyond the narrow focus of the user’s engagement with the user interface, “ says Carol Barnum, Director of User Research and Founding Partner at UX Firm. She counsels product teams by saying, “If you are siloed within a UX group that isn’t engaging with CX stakeholders, seek opportunities to … collaborate with them. We all want the same thing—great user experiences and strong loyalty to brand.”

Kieran Flanagan, VP of Marketing and Growth at Hubspot, takes this one step further. “To excel and thrive in a product-led company, you must be great at cross-functional collaboration,” says Kieran “A lot of the benefits that [PLG] has brought to companies is distilling your funnel down to these very concise metrics and the ones that actually matter.”

The importance of end user feedback

In the Product-Led Growth era, a seamless end user journey is paramount–from acquisition to advocate. As a result, product teams are hungry for data about user experience inside and outside of the product. Product managers and UX teams need to understand anything that is slowing end users down, so they can figure out how product design can alleviate that friction.

CX professionals and front line teams are skilled at using established customer experience KPIs to monitor loyalty and gather feedback. They have valuable information about end user pain at critical touchpoints in the SaaS user journey, including:

• • Onboarding experience
  • Support experience
  • Product or feature adoption

Creating Alignment

Product-Led Growth success demands shared accountability for metrics, so be ready to co-create a plan. Product teams benefit from the customer journey insight that CX teams (along with Success, Support, Sales and Marketing) bring to the collaboration. CX champions finally have the kind of cross-functional partnership that they’ve been seeking all along.

Three years ago, I wrote a post on “How to start a customer success program from scratch” and outlined all the reasons to do so: 

• The ROI from increased referrals, cross-sells and upsells
• The potential for a customer success program to become a “growth engine”
• The sheer impact of returning revenue and customer lifetime value
• The ‘free marketing’ of brand advocacy

And the list goes on. But, we’ve all had some paradigm shifts recently, haven’t we? So I’m not going to talk about what customer success can do for you. Because it’s not about you. It’s never been about you. It’s always been about other people.

What they need most, and what they need right now.

I predict that the companies that will grow from the Covid-19 pandemic crisis are the ones who deeply, genuinely care about their customers’ wellbeing. Not just their success.

How are your customers feeling right now? And how can you support them?

We can answer the first question ourselves — we’re all feeling isolated, lonely, cut-off, mournful, insecure, anxious. Maybe our kids/partners/dogs/cats are driving us a little crazy at this point. Maybe we’re self-isolating alone and wish we had kids/partners/dogs/cats around.

What we need most right now is to feel connected and cared about. And I’ve seen two companies step up to meet this need in vastly different ways.

[Yes, if we were to put traditional “Customer Success” verbiage around this, we’d say “what success looks like for your customer right now is to *feel* less alone. Not to get their work done faster. Not to multi-task with better focus. But to *feel* connected.]

Community Building

When these lockdowns started, many of us shared memes that read: “Check on your extravert friends… they’re NOT okay!” 

As time dragged on, however, even the introverts among us started to crave human connection. Human beings thrive on community, and you may be in a unique position to give it to them.

Wootric held informal CX “office hours” via Zoom for CS and CX professionals who want to offer each other support, ask questions and compare notes on how they’re adapting (or anything else, for that matter).

 “I’m part of an online community of marketing leaders. There’s something incredibly valuable about being with others who are facing the same challenges that I am, so offering that kind of forum to leaders in the CS/CX trenches became a priority for me, ” says Lisa Abbott, VP Marketing at Wootric. 

On the last CX Office Hour call, a Customer Success professional at a startup shared that she was feeling overwhelmed after losing her team and being placed on the front lines, dealing directly with customers. Members of our newly formed community jumped in with advice on how to prioritize and set boundaries, helping her get through it while maintaining her sanity.

Consider creating a similar forum for your customers—a live video conference where they can come together, connect, and share their wisdom and support.

Be there for a chat

I got an email last week from one of my favorite online companies, Greetabl, a service that sends beautifully packaged thoughtful gifts. I’ve been using them for years to cheer up friends from afar or show appreciation to clients and colleagues, and I didn’t think I could love them more, until I found this in my inbox:

Hey there Greetabl Insider, 

Brittany from Greetabl here (you might recognize my name from Greetabl’s marketing emails). If you saw Joe’s note on Medium over the weekend, you know that Team Greetabl has cleared our calendars of all scheduled meetings and we’re reaching out to our people to see if they want to talk. About anything. 

There’s a lot of uncertainty right now and social distancing can get lonely FAST, so I just wanted to let you know I’m here to talk. No sales pitch, no agenda; just a virtual coffee meeting to talk about whatever’s on your mind. Drop some time on my calendar if you want to chat. 

Best,

Brittany

Director of Marketing

Joe Fischer, Greetabl’s CEO, had everyone clear their calendars of their regularly scheduled meetings and instead, reach out to talk to people. Brittany, their Director of Marketing, sent out this charming email, and my favorite part is “No sales pitch, no agenda; just a virtual coffee meeting to talk about whatever’s on your mind.”

My friend, copywriter Lauren Van Mullem, took her up on this offer and says “Chatting with Brittany was the highlight of last week for me. We just hopped on a video chat, and we were both in our comfy sweaters, and just talked about life, these weird times, and some of the best and worst things we’ve seen from companies right now. It felt like talking to a friend, but almost better in a way. Our social circles are sort of confined right now. You don’t get a chance to talk with a stranger very often these days. So having a chance to connect with someone I didn’t know was really special. I can’t wait for a chance to repay that kindness by sending Greetabls, especially since I know that wasn’t the point of the call at all.”

SaaS companies are uniquely positioned to help

SaaS companies of all sizes have something to offer that even the big companies don’t have: Many of us are used to working remotely and using online tools to stay focused and connected at scale. We’re agile by nature, able to navigate quickly-changing environments. We’re adept at creative problem-solving, finding opportunities in challenges, and listening – really listening – to what our clients need.

Those are life skills not everyone has right now.

So now, more than ever, listen to your customers and your community. 

Create the solutions they need right now. 

Give them the frictionless customer journeys that get them where they need to go under the current, world-upside-down, circumstances. And don’t assume their “ideal outcome” this month is the same as it was just a few weeks ago. Everything has changed.

And above all: Reach out. Genuinely. Meaningfully. Human to human. Because generosity and human connection are what’s really going to get us all through this.

What can you do as a CSM right now?

Back to Customer Success – what can you do as a Customer Success Manager to support your customers during COVID-19?

Focus on empathizing with your customers and doubling-down on retention.

Because in times of crisis, existing customers are the lifeblood of your SaaS company.

Four questions to ask your customers

Be proactive. Reach out and get the conversation started. How to begin?  Recently, on a CX Office Hour call, customer experience thought leader Melinda Gonzales suggested that CSMs ask every customer these questions:

1. How are you doing, personally? 
2. What is the impact of the pandemic on your business?
3. How do you think it will impact your plans for 2020?
4. How can we help?

And, many clients right now are ranking their spending to decide what gets cut. Where your company lands on that list may depend on…

Empathy

How can you show empathy for your clients? Both personally, individually, and for their businesses? What solutions might greater empathy lead to? Here are some options to consider:

• Being open to negotiating contract terms – especially payment terms.
• Offering a short-term discount.
• Show your customer how they can get more value from your product without spending another dollar. Are there features they are paying for but not using? Can you share a best practice that will help them see more success? 
• Presenting downgrade options from a Customer Success standpoint (give them what they need to succeed right now, with the awareness that this may mean reducing spend).

Sure, will a few opportunists try to use COVID-19 as an excuse to negotiate a better deal? Maybe. And if you get one of those, present the “downgrade” option and make it very clear what that means in terms of reduction of services and reduction of results. 

But for most customers, give them the benefit of the doubt. So many industries and individuals are struggling right now. And the long-term ROI of empathy is worth some short-term sacrifices.

What you choose to do right now can ignite and cultivate long-term, lucrative relationships in the future.

And for our CSM friends and clients, can we just say: We understand how hard this time is for you too. 

You may not be able to do your best work right now, or afford the best tools to support your work. You may have dogs/kids/spouses/cats interrupting your client calls. You may be feeling what we’re all feeling — frustration, helplessness, fatigue, fear for the future.

Take it easy on yourself if you can. Upsells aren’t likely to happen right now, and that’s okay.

But your core goal remains the same: Helping your customers reach the results they need, by whatever means necessary.