Your sales and marketing teams work hard to get you in front of potential buyers, and then to turn them into customers. So once you’ve won over an internal champion, you’re golden, right? Well, maybe.
But what about if that person leaves and moves onto a different company? Does your product go with them? Your goal should be to solidify your relationship with your internal champions so they will want to work with you wherever they go next. Here are three “Voice of the Customer” practices that can help you do this:
1. Automate & Approach Reviews Like NPS Responses
Leveraging automation is just smart business, especially as there have been record rates of employee resignations and labor shortages. At Uberflip, we automate our Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, keeping everything auto-generated until a customer has been identified as requiring personal outreach. For example, we’ll have someone on the team reach out directly to detractors, whereas promoters might be contacted and invited to leave a review or a testimonial.
Still, NPS scores aren’t everything. In fact, we’ve found the process to be a bit flawed. What’s worked better for us has been applying the same philosophy above to reviews. If we were to get a negative review, for example, we would have a customer success member contact the reviewer and find out more information to see if we can rectify it. If we get a positive review, we would contact them and ask about providing a testimonial or specific feedback about what’s been going so well. This has proven to be very useful, compared to using NPS alone.
Related Article: Voice of the Customer: What Is It and Why Does It Matter for CX?
2. Go for Targeted Surveys
If you really want to know where you’re thriving versus what areas of your business need help, incentivize customers to fill out very specific surveys. Even the previous point about mining reviews for customer insights and opportunities falls short when it comes to specificity. Most people are more general in their reviews and, even if they happen to get detailed, they might not be detailed about the key area in which you’re seeking feedback.
So, at Uberflip, we use Pendo to send targeted feature-specific questionnaires throughout our application. If you’re not a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company like we are, the mechanisms you use might differ, but the general approach can be the same. The goal is to get extremely granular about something you’re evaluating in your own product, so that you can update it to better meet customer needs.
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For example, we recently have looked at elevating our call-to-action (CTA) feature, so we created a targeted survey that asks customers to tell us about their experiences using CTAs. We asked what they’ve liked, what they haven’t liked, and what the impact has been of using them at their business. The results will be a much better barometer of customers’ satisfaction using our application, while also instructing us about how we can improve our CTA feature.
Pro tip: Always incentivize customers to fill out surveys. They’re busy, and they’ll be much more receptive if you make it worth their while.
Related Article: Is Your Voice of the Customer Program Silent?
3. Embrace an Ambassador Program
At Uberflip, we have a customer loyalty/ambassador program that we call Customer LUV. It’s an opt-in program, and we make sure it offers plenty of upside for the customers who join (whether it’s providing feedback directly to our product team, being submitted for a speaking opportunity alongside our executives, etc.). Ultimately, our Customer LUV network is a trusted network of customers we can rely on to ask specific questions (like the point about targeted surveys above) or to weigh in on upcoming events (e.g. which speakers we would like to invite for a future webinar).
If you do your job well in customer success, your internal champions are likely to take you with them to their next role. And, the best way to do your job well? By leaning into Voice of the Customer programs that keep customer insights front and center, informing all that you do.
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