Speaker 1: 0:33

Today we're going to talk about how to respond when somebody sends you written feedback. Once again, welcome to the Digital Customer Experience Podcast with me, alex Turkovich. So glad you could join us here today and every week as we explore how digital can help enhance the customer and employee experience. My goal is to share what my guests and I have learned over the years so that you can get the insights that you need to evolve your own digital programs. If you'd like more info, need to get in touch or sign up for the weekly companion newsletter that has additional articles and resources in it. Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom. For now, let's get started.

Speaker 1: 1:12

Greetings and welcome back to the Digital CX Podcast, the show where we talk about all things digital in CX. This is episode 94, and I'm your host, alex Turkovich, so glad to have you back. That was a lot of words just then, without a breath. Really happy to have you back this week and every week as we talk about Digital CX. You'll notice I've been doing quite a few solo shows recently just because I got some stuff to say, but it's kind of you know, a theme around just showing my work a little bit, but then also talking about things that have been on my mind and things that I'm working on Today a little bit of a brief episode, but I wanted to talk specifically about NPS feedback. I'm not going to go nuts on NPS, and really the topic that I'm talking about could be correlated to any kind of feedback that you get from your customer, but specifically written feedback that you get from your customer. We tend to be quite quick to send out surveys. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but nine times out of 10, and I'm sure you can relate to this one thing that we miss often, once we've received those surveys, is actually responding to them in a meaningful way and taking action on the feedback that you're getting.

Speaker 1: 2:33

Now a talk track that you will have heard me and a bunch of other people talk about with regards to NPS over the last few years is that we really don't. We say we don't care about the scores and we care more about the written feedback, and I will stand by that right. Ultimately, nps scoring doesn't really produce anything ultra meaningful other than the fact that everybody uses the same methodology to score NPS. So, in other words, besides, like the five-star CSAT rating, nps is one of those things that you can benchmark yourself against competitors and other vendors in a similar space. So there is some merit to the score. I tend to hate using it as an internal weather vane for how the business is doing because it's more complex than that, but ultimately we kind of go back to it as one of those measurables that we have in place. Anyway, I said I wasn't going to talk about the score, but here I am talking about the score. I am more interested in the written feedback that I get from an NPS survey, or any survey for that matter, because that is where the gold is Now.

Speaker 1: 3:59

The written feedback can come in several flavors. One benefit of the NPS survey is that the written feedback comes with its own sentiment analysis. In other words, you can easily tease out the detractor comments versus the promoter comments. Same with a CSAT survey. You can easily kind of pick out what the sentiment, overall sentiment of that feedback is versus other surveys. Where it's not so easy to tease out, and so you have to do some semblance of sentiment analysis where it's not so easy to tease out, and so you have to do some semblance of sentiment analysis. And by its nature, without going through and reading through every single comment, sentiment analysis is a hard thing to do. Ai is getting better at that, but it's still not kind of foolproof. It still misses things.

Speaker 1: 4:51

What I want to highlight here is some ideas for how to respond to written feedback from your customers in a meaningful way. Now, when we get I'm going to stick with NPS, just because it's an easy, easy example, right. But when we get NPS promoters, for instance, that's a relatively easy one, although there are a couple of missed opportunities that I see happening a lot with NPS promoters. Sometimes we ignore those responses altogether. We may send a thank you, like an automated thank you email, which is fine, you know, it's all well and good. Also, you know, consider sending your promoters a bit of swag. Consider sending them a handwritten card. I've talked about that a lot recently. Consider sending them an invitation to do a review on your review platform of choice. Consider inviting your promoters to do a bit of referral work for you, or write a blog post for you, or do a video testimonial for you.

Speaker 1: 6:02

There are all kinds of ways that you can tap into that energy of somebody being a promoter of your brand, and I would highly encourage you guys to go and do that in a proactive way and in a way that makes sense and in a way that's not super annoying. You don't want to bombard your promoters with all kinds of requests to do X, y, z, right, that comes across as a little bit desperate and overreaching. But figure out what you really value the most out of your promoters and go after it. Right, ask the question. A lot of us just don't. When we get a promoter we're like, hey, somebody likes us and then we kind of go off to the next thing. Capitalize on that.

Speaker 1: 6:47

As far as the comments go for promoters, the promoter comments are valuable in that you know they are a lot of times they're quotable and you can use what they're saying. Sometimes they will include some constructive feedback as well. But really the written feedback that is super valuable for me are in your neutral and your detractor comments, and that is also where the most amount of work is required after the survey has been responded to, and it's also the work that, I'll be honest, most of us don't follow up on. So I just want to present a couple of ideas for what you can do once you get that written feedback. And some of this is digital. Some of this is human but, as you know, most digital motions have some humanness behind them. So you know and I would also love to hear your own ideas as well, for you know the creative things that you're doing to engage with your detractors.

Speaker 1: 7:56

First and foremost. Detractors come in many different flavors and you may have already decided that you're going to survey your customer's executive team differently than your kind of end user base. And if you're doing that, that's awesome because you're getting executive MPS versus user MPS, which is very valuable. But ultimately, when somebody responds negatively and they leave a comment, which I always love to see, because they took the time to respond I think this is true for any survey response because they took the time to respond it is imperative that you take the time to also respond. Respond Ideally with a human, but at the least, very least, with an automated response that looks kind of human. So I'll give you an example right, if somebody sends a low NPS score to us right now, they will get an automated response from the CSM, where it looks like it's from the CSM or it looks like it's from the CSM, and it will acknowledge the feedback and it will ask them for a follow-up call. It's like hey, I'd love to discuss this in more detail. Can we set up some time to talk through it and for me to address your concerns? I think that's table stakes. I think if you're not doing that, go do it. You know, because it's not that difficult to put in place that kind of automation and it'll pay off in dividends, because you know, ultimately some people will respond to that. But also, if they've given you a negative survey response, that was their feedback, right? A lot of folks aren't inclined to give you further details after that. Those that do are the exception.

Speaker 1: 9:55

Now, this is where the tricky part comes in and this is where your creativity is going to be required, because there is an ultimate version of negative survey responses or your response to those responses. That is logistically difficult, operationally difficult, but pretty cool when it's in place and working. And I'll just paint the picture for you. So somebody responds negatively. There is some text feedback. Within that negative comment. You're able to parse out that that negative feedback is targeted towards either product or support or marketing whoever or sales, right? You're able to parse out what the feedback is about on a departmental basis and off the back of that, you're able to then track how you're communicating that feedback to those various departments and then what is being actioned against that feedback.

Speaker 1: 11:11

What this requires is not just the feedback mechanisms but the partnership with other leaders around the company to actually address some of that feedback. We'll use product as an example just because it's, you know, probably the most common version of this, where you run an NPS survey, you get some negative feedback or some positive feedback, because I mean, you don't want to just shovel the negative feedback over. You want to you know, make a part of my French, you want to make a shit sandwich out of it. Good feedback, negative feedback, good feedback. But you know, ultimately you want to provide that feedback in a curated way to product and you want to have a collaborative discussion about that feedback and then ideally, that turns into, maybe some alignment with what's already on the roadmap for development, or maybe it turns into some bug fixes that you can go after. Maybe it turns into items for future development. Maybe it relates to some.

Speaker 1: 12:20

If you have an ideas platform where you know customers can submit ideas, maybe there are some things that are already aligned with that feedback on that platform and you can you know you can then point that customer that provided that feedback to upvote that feature request there. But ultimately there's several flavors of how to connect that feedback to your product organization. But the trick is then coming back to the customer and saying I see that you had an issue with XYZ. Just so you know, we have it in our roadmap for development in Q3 or whatever it is to improve this feature, like that kind of dialogue where you are displaying to the customer that we heard your feedback. We didn't just ignore your feedback like every other vendor does. We took some action to speak with appropriate people internally and this is the result of that action.

Speaker 1: 13:21

Now, in a perfect, perfect world, you have certain customers and contacts tagged to certain feature requests and then, when those get developed, you can message your contacts and stuff like there's a lot of operational kind of infrastructure that you can build around this and you should build around this, and you know it requires kind of duct taping and paper clipping a bunch of different things together to make that work. But it's definitely possible. But I think at the very very least you have an initial automated response that goes out to the customer. That's kind of normal. But then if you follow up with something a little bit more meaningful that is obviously tailored to the feedback that was received, with some actionable insights into what is being done about it. That is absolute gold If you can operationalize that and if you can make a habit of doing that, because it shows that you have empathy, it shows that you've listened and it shows that you're doing something about it and that you actually care. If you're in a very competitive space, that can be a differentiator for you, because I guarantee you, nine times out of ten we don't see that kind of response. I mean, you're all used to it too. You know, if I asked you to raise your hand how many times you know if you've ever responded to an NPS survey because you know we all get them and you never hear anything in response every one of you would raise your hand. It's a thing. So by actually actioning your NPS responses or any survey response for that matter you can really differentiate yourself from your competitors and differentiate yourself as a brand that actually cares about the customer experience. And I'll leave you with one other tidbit here.

Speaker 1: 15:21

At one of my previous jobs we implemented NPS. It wasn't there before or it had been done like once. It was like a single shot NPS score. Here's what it is. Okay, great. It wasn't this quarterly or biannual cadence that you know that ideally you should be running, so we had nothing to compare against.

Speaker 1: 15:46

When we implemented it right off the bat, we had a decent response rate but an atrocious return rate because, you know, first version MVP, we wanted to get it out there we didn't really respond to all of the responses that came in. We responded to some, especially the larger accounts, but we didn't respond to everything. And so the next time we ran that survey with the same audience, we saw a dramatically you know lower response rate, because a lot of those folks are just like. I've already responded to this, I don't need to respond to it again. Yeah, at that point we made a bit of a change where we decided, hey look, we're going to practice what we preach, or I'm going to practice what I preach and we're going to respond to every darn NPS survey that comes back with something meaningful. And it became part of our operational cadence. We started doing that. The repeat respondents rate skyrocketed to where we had after about a year of doing it. We had, you know, a few people, or quite a few people, that had responded multiple times, because there was perceived value in actually responding to the survey because they knew they had acknowledgement that it was being read and actioned, and so it became an effective communication vehicle into their vendor.

Speaker 1: 17:24

Again, it's not easy. I'm not saying like all of you have the systems, capabilities, staffing, bandwidth, all that kind of stuff to do that. But if you can, in your own way, think about how you can treat the response as you would want to be treated when you responded, even in a little way, whether it's, you know, a handwritten note or a quick acknowledgement hey, saw your feedback about XYZ. This is where you know ChatGPT can come in really, really handy and craft responses for you Like get creative with it, because it doesn't have to take a lot of time, especially with all the AI tools that we have out there today. So this is something that's just been on my mind. I've had a couple questions about it recently, so I wanted to address it on this show. I really hope that it has been useful for you and I would love to hear from you what creative things you're doing to respond to your customers' survey responses.

Speaker 1: 18:26

We'll see you again next week. Thanks for joining me. Have a great week ahead. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital CX Podcast. If you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment down below. It really helps us to grow and provide value to a broader audience and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccesscom. I'm Alex Tergovich. Thanks so much for listening. I'll talk to you next week.