The speed of mobile feedback from customers is increasing as mobile marketing adoption spreads, according to Medallia‘s recent release of its annual Customer Benchmark Research Study.
The report shows that organizations that engage their frontline, embed the voice of the customer (VOC) into their business, capture customer feedback from across channels, and invest in customer recovery achieve much higher customer satisfaction than those who do not.
To develop the benchmark report, the Medallia Institute, a unit of Medallia, analyzed hundreds of customer experience management (CEM) programs in the Medallia client portfolio. Companies fell primarily within seven industries: business services, financial services, hospitality, manufacturing, retail, software/Internet, and telecommunications.
Click through for five best practices for a successful customer experience management program, as identified by Medallia.
Engage your frontline
Medallia’s benchmark study shows that organizations where employees, from the C-suite to the frontline, engage with customer experience feedback achieve greater customer satisfaction. Frequent frontline engagement with voice of the customer data is associated with Net Promoter Scores (NPS) that are up to 20 points higher on average.
Embed the voice of the customer into the fiber of the business
Companies that embed the voice of the customer into the fiber of their business, gathering feedback everywhere the customer is and delivering it to every employee to close the loop, get far better results than those that do not. Medallia found that 66 percent of its customers capture multi-channel feedback, which can include email, interactive voice response (IVR), online, mobile, receipts, and social posts — and the trend is growing. Having the right systems in place to capture customer feedback, deliver tailored insights and prioritize actions to every employee drives measureable improvement. For example, companies that enable their employees to access customer feedback “on-the-go” via their mobile devices achieve a Net Promoter Score (NPS) 11 points higher on average than companies whose employees don’t.
Optimize for mobile
Marketers and customer experience managers need to assume that everything they do online (advertising, brand marketing, feedback, etc.) could be engaged with via a mobile device, so they need to think about the optimal experience for mobile (simple, transparent, easy to navigate, etc.). The rate at which end customers are using their mobile devices to provide companies with feedback (via email, SMS, on websites, etc.) has increased in alignment with the general market adoption of mobile. Medallia found that feedback provided on mobile devices surged to up to 60 percent of total feedback provided in 2013.
Design surveys with the customer in mind
With customers now giving feedback across multiple channels, it is critical to have feedback mechanisms that are optimized for email, interactive voice response (IVR), online, mobile, receipt and social. For example, the design for mobile feedback should be short and easy (as abandonment is higher on mobile when feedback mechanisms are long). Companies with optimized surveys are more likely to receive feedback from their customers, and in turn are able to close the loop with unhappy customer “detractors” 62 percent more than “laggard” companies, those in the bottom quartile.
Customer recovery works if you invest in it
Companies that invest resources to adequately identify and recover at-risk customers are leaders when it comes to satisfaction scores, compared to companies that either recover infrequently or not at all. Customer recovery can take many forms for sales, call center, frontline, manager and leader teams. Recovery actions can be as simple as a call center manager reaching out to a customer via phone or email after he has a bad experience and gives negative feedback, merely to apologize or rectify the issue right there on the spot. Recovery could also be a more sophisticated workflow that triggers process and product changes and actions to get customers involved in “re-engineering” projects.
Most companies with high Net Promoter Scores identify all their detractors and have invested in the resources to recover them. They generate detractor alerts to their teams and resolve issues as they occur. For example, 88 percent of Medallia customers have detractor alerts, and they are also the companies with the highest Net Promoter Scores. Companies that have lower Net Promoter Scores generally detect only the strong detractors — with alerts triggered only if the score is very low.
A copy of the full Benchmark is available for download here: http://www.medallia.com/resource/medallia-customer-benchmark-2014/
