Pearl-Plaza Highlights

Happy CX Day! We hope you’re taking advantage of today and celebrating your customer experience efforts.

Wherever you are on your CX journey, it is always helpful to share stories and hear from other companies on the same path to customer experience success. With this in mind, I’ve gathered some quotes from our CX Spotlight video series to share and discuss with you.

1.

“We actually consider [open-ended feedback] to be the most valuable feedback that we get. Although scores are important, when we hear something specific from the guests, that’s very valuable and we can either go back and make a correction or reinforce the behavior that wowed our guest.” — Jeff Jacobson, Chief Operating Officer at Costa Vida

Customer Experience is more than just the sum of your scores; it’s your unstructured data that can give you the best idea of how you are doing as a company. Even more so, it’s the open-ended feedback Jeff mentioned that will give you the actionable insights you need to truly make a difference.

2.

“It’s one thing to say, ‘hey, we provide great guest service and we welcome people’ here and there. Everyone can say it and you could potentially use profits or sales to understand if you’re really performing, but until you have a good feedback system and listen and understand what your guests are saying, I’m not sure how you can attach those two things together.” — Helmuth Mayer, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Dave & Buster’s

When it comes down to it, every business strives for consistently satisfied customers. CX programs help you to bridge the gap between data and results, telling you what the key drivers are for your business and therefore, where you should place your efforts.

3.

“Our customers are directly telling us what’s important, and I think that really helps the team to focus our energies… it’s the comments from the customer that are important.” — Cathy Dages, Customer Support Supervisor at KARL STORZ Endoskope

Every business has an idea of what their customers want, but without feedback, it’s hard to know if those supposed standards reflect what customers truly want. By keeping open dialogue with your customers through a VoC program, your picture of your customer is 100% correct, because you are getting your facts from the source.

4.

“The catalyst [for implementing a CX program] was really the end of our mystery shopping program. The one store, one visit per month had run its course. It just wasn’t productive enough and there was too much technology out there to give feedback.” — John Heatherington, International Operations Manager at Marks & Spencer

Mystery shopping is helpful at gaining specific insights from one location on one day, but it is hard to derive actionable insights for overall business objectives from one instance. With VoC programs, you can survey mass amounts of data from multiple locations at multiple times to get a 360° view of how your customer experience efforts are really going.

5.

“We are always surprised at what our customers are telling us. With the surveys, what we found out was the certain words that the customers were looking for were very different than the words we had in mind for that specific moment… this information helps us to react [to client expectations] quicker.” — Alexa Larsson, Senior Retail Operations Manager at The North Face

The whole purpose of collecting customer data is to predict customer demand so you can meet them. Every moment matters, so knowing what your customers want to hear in each touchpoint with your brand is pivotal to CX success!

We consider our clients to be CX heroes, and so when we celebrate CX Day, we celebrate all the work they’ve put in and the lessons they’ve learned in their pursuit of positive customer experience.

We all know the age-old comparison “like looking for a needle in a haystack” and we’ve all had experiences that make that saying relevant. While searching for your car keys may feel like looking for a needle in a haystack, sorting through your customer data shouldn’t.

You spend time and resources collecting customer data in order to gain the type of insights that can guide your business decisions, but sometimes the path from point A to point B can feel unclear. When you have a multitude of data from multiple channels, insights on one specific topic can seem hard to find. In fact, the task of picking through masses of data for one specific thing can seem so tedious and daunting that you may be tempted to just send a one-off survey out to your customers on a specific topic.

While this technique may be fine every once-in-a-while, using surveys as your main data collection method puts your customers at risk of one terrible CX pitfall: survey fatigue. If their inbox is flooded with surveys every few days, your customers are more likely to be irritable and less likely to give you the valuable feedback you need.

So what do you do? Do you look for the needle in the data haystack or do you risk survey fatigue? Luckily, there is an alternative option that gets you the answers you need in a timely manner: data filtering and prioritization.

Today’s most effective CX software features tools that will allow you to sort through the data you already have to find the information you need to create premium customer experiences. Tools such as Explore™ allow you to slice-and-dice data in multiple ways for multiple insights. To give you an idea of what this looks like, I will discuss three of these filters and how they can be effective problem solvers.

1. Location

Sorting through data by location is endlessly useful. Let’s say you want to see how a new product is doing in specific regions. You simply specify the region on your platform overview and search the product. Your CX platform will automatically sort through existing data to bring up product relevant customer feedback for that area. In filtering your data by location, you have an understanding of that area so you can make decisions that make good business sense and satisfy your customers.

2. Negative Score and Sentiment

Closing the loop with customer complaints is one of the ultimate goals of customer experience. In fact, 70% of the time a person will become a repeat customer when a complaint is resolved in that customer’s favor. The benefits of solving customer complaints are obvious, but it is time-consuming to try to solve every problem as it comes in. To resolve effectively, you need a strategy. Filtering your data by negative score and sentiment can give you that strategy. Simply sort, see what customers are saying, and come up with a way to address the issue. Then you can contact customers to let them know how you are resolving the issues. You’ve saved time and your customers feel heard: It’s a definite win-win!

3. Time

Sorting data by time has two major benefits. Firstly, it allows you to spot trends over time. For instance, you can identify which products are more popular at which time of the year and make decisions to reflect that insight. Secondly, you can put out fires before they start. When you sort your data by time, you can see the feedback that has come in most recently, identify anomalies, and address them before they become a greater problem.

Filtering data not only saves you time, but it also gives you the actionable insights you need to make your customers feel heard.

When it comes to dining out, everybody has a preference. Some people are held back by dietary restrictions, some are adventurous eaters, and some are just plain picky. There is not one type of restaurant that will please everyone, and that makes dining an incredibly personal experience.

The most obvious determinant for a positive customer experience in a restaurant is the quality of food, but there are many other factors that weigh into culinary satisfaction. The majority of these concerns can be sorted into five major categories: quality of food, staff interactions, speed of service, atmosphere, and value.

In a world where 91% of unhappy customers will not return to a brand, it is crucial for restaurants to drive customer satisfaction in these areas—but how can they keep up?

That is where Voice of the Customer (VoC) technology comes in. These technologies give providers direct access to their customer feedback so they can make impactful changes in the way they do business.

Voice of the Customer solutions can be applied to restaurants in many ways, but I am going to outline four specific VoC tools that can address these five main concerns and determine positive or negative customer experience for your diners.

Real-time Alerts

Some Voice of the Customer platforms offer real-time alerts that notify staff of customer concerns as they happen, allowing them to take action almost immediately. Though these can address all five categories listed above, they can be most helpful with issues of atmosphere and quality of food.  If a customer asserts that the bathrooms in a certain location are unclean or the food is cold, the location would receive a notification of that customer’s feedback as it was made. Management could then rectify the situation, helping to ensure positive atmosphere and quality of food experiences for other customers that day.  

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics give businesses the power to forecast demand and make differences in both speed of service and staff interactions. With this VoC tool, managers can determine when there is a rush and schedule staff accordingly.  This small adjustment stops one of the biggest customer complaints—long lines and wait times—before it even starts. As an added bonus, staff members won’t be under pressure from grumpy customers, ensuring positive staff interactions for customers.

Location-Specific Insights

VoC Programs with location specific insights are most useful for identifying anomalies in quality of food. For example, if there are three cases of food poisoning in one region, businesses will be made aware of the problem before it gets out of control. This tool is also useful when testing out a new product. If one region tests it, location-specific insights can surface conclusive customer feedback on the new product.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking VoC tools give restaurants the ability to see how they match up in comparison to their competitors. This can be most useful when comparing value of their meals versus other providers. With this information, businesses can make cost-effective changes to assure customers that they are getting the best value for their dollar.

At the end of the day, all restaurateurs strive for satisfied customers, no matter what kind of food they serve. By utilizing VoC tools, businesses can make day-to-day, time-relevant adjustments that tailor to their customers’ taste and give them the best dining experience possible.  

Listen. Understand. Share. As customer experience continues to gain momentum and becomes the new competitive battleground for businesses around the world, these three principles remain consistent.

In the same way Pearl-Plaza supports brands in their efforts to give customers a voice at the decision-making table, we strive to practice what we preach, ensuring our own customers are collaborators in improving the products and the services we offer.

In just a couple weeks, Pearl-Plaza will release an updated Dashboards product. These user-centered Dashboards help brands easily view and configure real-time customer data. Dashboards are effortlessly configured to uncover relevant insights for each role in the organization.

But we could not have gotten here without input from our current clients. These new Dashboards are the result of several months of Pearl-Plaza product managers, UX designers, and software developers working directly with brands who participated in a beta program to help us better understand their business needs.

How We’ve Listened

Pearl-Plaza collects feedback from our clients across many touchpoints throughout the product development life cycle.

Some of these channels include:

• Weekly phone calls with Customer Success Managers
• Interviews and surveys from a multifaceted customer listening program
• Ideas and discussions on the client-exclusive pearl-plaza.rumunity
• In-person conversations with members of our product and leadership teams

One brand that played an integral role in the development of the new Dashboards is maurices, a leading women’s fashion retailer.

“We view Dashboards as a critical component in telling our brand story consistently to everyone, adding other data to create deeper insight, and piecing together the puzzle to enable different departments to get the most out of our experience data,” said Kristin Anderson, AVP of Customer Insights at maurices.

Anderson met with Pearl-Plaza weekly to help a cross-functional team understand how Dashboards could better meet maurices’ business needs. “At every meeting, the team at Pearl-Plaza listened, asked intelligent questions, and sought to understand what they could do differently. Their enthusiasm—both for their own product and for the use cases we were presenting—was always contagious.”

How We’ve Acted

Improving customer experience requires more than just listening to what customers are saying. It is understanding and acting on data that truly sets CX leaders apart from the rest.

Creating the new Dashboards was a team project—both externally and internally. Multiple teams at Pearl-Plaza played a part in bringing our customers’ vision to life. At times, this was difficult, as each employee wanted to make sure that even competing client ideas were fairly heard and considered.

• The UX designers gathered early feedback that the design felt clunky and jarring . They responded to this perspective by creating a modern design where each button, dropdown list, swipe, and scroll felt as natural as possible.
• Our QA Engineer carefully recorded and investigated each bug and broken feature that was submitted. Dashboards went through hundreds of revisions as developers worked hard to earn that quality assurance “stamp of approval.” The final result is one of the largest and cleanest product releases we’ve ever seen.
• Developers wanted to improve upon past complaints that legacy dashboards were slow. This required the development team to find new and better ways to do its work. It required balancing short-term obstacles with long-term vision while also keeping the end user at the front of mind.

This past March, the entire Dashboards team attended our CX Elevated conference together to watch as the product was first introduced on the main stage. The positive reception from customers and industry leaders helped reinforce enthusiasm for the product. With that being said, we know that we still have more work to do.

A Commitment to Innovation

Listening isn’t a one-time action—it’s a continual process. While we are excited to share the new Dashboards product, we are committed to keep building and refining features to better meet our clients’ business objectives.

How are you taking action on feedback from your customers?

As a follow up to our recent white paper on resolving customer issues, we teamed up with CustomerThink for a webinar on closing the loop.

Led by Pearl-Plaza’s SVP of Global Business Development, Erich Dietz, the webinar provided additional insights on closing the customer feedback loop more effectively, reducing business costs, increasing revenue, and creating loyal brand advocates.

Here’s a roundup of some of our favorite quotes and findings from the webinar:

“Get executives personally involved in closing the loop. It will build empathy for both the customer and the employee.” #CX #closingtheloop

— Pearl-Plaza (@WeArePearl-Plaza) May 4, 2017

91% of unhappy customers won’t return to your brand. Executing on the inner and outer loop leads to hard ROI.

— Pearl-Plaza (@WeArePearl-Plaza) May 4, 2017

Brand experience is found at the intersection of 3 questions: Why are you loved? What are you good at? Why are you different? #CX

— Pearl-Plaza (@WeArePearl-Plaza) May 4, 2017

What’s the good to great story? Some of the biggest ROI from closed loop is found in moving passives to promoters. #CX #closingtheloop

— Pearl-Plaza (@WeArePearl-Plaza) May 4, 2017

“Every metric in your business needs to have an owner.” #CX #closingtheloop

— Pearl-Plaza (@WeArePearl-Plaza) May 4, 2017

Don’t miss the opportunity to share what you’re doing with customer feedback. Communication is key.

— Pearl-Plaza (@WeArePearl-Plaza) May 4, 2017

Golden rule of CX: Don’t ask if you’re not willing to make changes. If you do make changes, tell your customers and employees. #CX

— Pearl-Plaza (@WeArePearl-Plaza) May 4, 2017

To learn specific best practices on closing the loop, you can watch a recording of the webinar.