Before we dive in, first a quick introduction: What is Customer Success?
Traditionally companies have been set up with a Customer Service or Account Management department.
The active management of clients has often led to reactive customer interactions where the client has highlighted an issue, and it’s up to the Customer Service team to fix the problem.
Whilst treatment of customers using this method has worked for the most part, more and more companies are realising that employing a proactive approach to customer service often leads to lower churn and higher customer satisfaction.
Customer Success fills this proactive role, providing a way to gauge how your clients are using your goods and services and anticipating needs before they happen.
Customer Success is a relatively new department for many growing businesses.
Siloed Feedback analysis
We know feedback is an important driver in understanding customer satisfaction, but what new Customer Success teams may find is that all this feedback is distributed across many different departments.
The UX team might be completing in-depth hour long qualitative interviews on specific design features, the customer service team might be recording thousands of help tickets, the marketing team may have people replying to their tweets or their newsletters offering feedback.
All of this can be incredibly overwhelming to sort through and calculate. It’s often given to a data scientist whose job is to sift through the data in order to find any hidden gems. This method doesn’t really get to the crux of the problem though.
Your feedback is messy, the data is held in different environments, and you need a way to reorganise and alert the right team to the right feedback.
Collaborate together with good data hygiene
If you’re at the early stage of your development, feedback data can be effectively managed by using a shared spreadsheet.
But as soon as you start to get 100s of feedback, this method starts to become more cumbersome than helpful, and a way of gathering data together that’s accessible to different departments can collectively save time and energy usually spent on deep diving into customer feedback.
Having a way where multiple teams can sit within an account and only receive feedback that’s relevant to them, whilst having an overarching customer success team manage the overall trends and highlight any concerns is a more effective way of dealing with your feedback, together, in one place.
Systems and Process for reviewing and Analysing Feedback Data
Having your feedback from different sources in one place is an important step for any Customer Success team. Sampling feedback by picking from a range of sources enriches your data collection and leads to better validated results.
A survey might help provide answers thanks to its direct questions, however it may miss that the same customer got in touch with support recently highlighting a particular issue with the service or product that you offer. Getting ahead of these issues as they stack up is a crucial part of reducing churn.
By combining these different sources of feedback, you’re able to get a more holistic view along your customer’s journey on what are their pain points, and what needs to be highlighted as important.
If a customer does churn, you’re able to view their whole customer journey in one place, giving you the ability to single out any red flags or patterns that wouldn’t be highlighted using just an exit survey or support ticket in isolation.
Standardise feedback and give Ownership back to the right departments
Using context attributes in your feedback collection that are relevant, and then using them to segment and cohort your data is the next step to better feedback analysis.
Take for example a support ticket that covers 3 different issues: Wanting to unsubscribe from the weekly newsletter as it’s feeling repetitive, help with how to complete a task, and reporting an issue with your product or service.
You could feasibly split these topics up into Marketing, Customer Service and the Product teams.
By not using a context attribute or text analysis to find these attributes, you’ll find that this feedback may get lost in one of the three departments, making the whole process terribly inefficient.
Summary
For the Customer Success team, increasing retention and reducing customer churn is the ultimate goal.
Though churn and retention rates may be lagging indicators, being able to consolidate data by organising feedback from various sources, then empowering the right department to take ownership of the feedback will lead to better customer insights, smoother collaboration between departments, and a healthier balance sheet.
Understanding feedback shouldn’t be just for Data Experts
Find out how Feedier can help your Customer Success team organise your data sources and take ownership of your feedback by contacting our sales team for a product demo
Originally published at https://feedier.com on May 6, 2021.
