You will never grow your business if you don’t do these 3 things

The way forward for customer experience (CX) is all about growth. We recently asked our customers and broader contacts what they consider to be the most significant factor in their CX programs, what they consider to be their No. 1 challenge or the thing that keeps them up at night — and some of the answers surprised us.

Many of them have identified customer experience as critical to success and a key competitive advantage—we expected that response. Many have cut costs, leaving service and sales experience as key differentiators. These teams focus on motion and building capabilities and can exhibit a direct link between improving CX scores and company KPIs.

We didn’t expect what they told us about their biggest challenges. Perhaps you can address these pain points in your own CX program.

We expected to listen to that they’d too much data, too little motion, and too little time to implement the actions required based on that data. These pain points are rated in the top five challenges, but we were told that 1) engaging customers to supply meaningful feedback, aka response rates, and 2) motivating team members to take responsibility for their performance topped the list. Survey fatigue is real—customers are bored with constant requests, and staff often dismiss feedback as irrelevant or out of their control.

So what are the three most significant strategies to assist you meet these challenges and achieve what we call “feedback for growth”?

1. Implementing activity-based accountability

The first key strategy is to act with accountability, so it’s all as much as your team. Your CX approach should eliminate all the guesswork about the “why,” “what,” “who,” and “how” of what happened in each experience. Individual team members have to know what motion is required and how their behavior impacts customer well-being. To improve customer response rates and generate at least 50 words per response, there are a few vital keys:

1. Make sure the content is consistent with your brand and seems like a virtual conversation.
2. Keep it short – it shouldn’t take greater than three minutes.
3. Only ask questions relevant to the purpose of your visit.
4. Make sure the tone of your survey questions is authentic, empathetic, and shows gratitude for their time and input.
5. Let them complete a survey or reply to feedback questions every time and nonetheless they need.

The results you get by following these easy steps will help you understand how they really felt, and you can measure the impact of each behavior on loyalty and advocacy. For one customer (a specialist retailer with 400 locations), we identified seven key behaviors that created the ideal experience. The customer wanted staff to recommend the right additional items. The top 20% of stores had a 34% higher additional rate and achieved 143% higher year-on-year comparable sales growth in comparison with the bottom 20%. Happy customers buy more – and they love the service experience!

2. Engage your teams

As mentioned, growth feedback will only occur when your teams are motivated to repeatedly improve. Customer feedback collected via video, voice, or text will help you tie results to specific actions for team members, in addition to develop e-learning opportunities. It also reinforces why it matters. When employees see that results matter to them and feel accountable for those results, they are more more likely to take motion.

For example, one international client in the home appliance industry entered a query that asked, “Based on the expertise, friendliness, knowledge, and advice of the team member who served you, how likely would you be to serve them again?” We compared the results to sales conversion rates (i.e., how many shoppers became buyers) and found that the top performers on this query had a 36% higher conversion rate.

The key to growth is addressing what is likely to be getting in the way, whether it’s skills, confidence or competence, and resolving the issues that are stopping teams from fully engaging.

3. Support comprehensive development

The third advice is to maneuver beyond tracking results and focus on the behaviors that drive results. Leverage your CX program to amass latest customers, retain existing ones, increase average spend per customer, improve conversion rates, increase referrals, and increase positive social media reviews to draw more latest customers. When you can discover the key behaviors that directly impact customer loyalty or dissatisfaction, you can move from chasing results to focusing solely on the actions required to drive improvement. You can learn and apply proven best practices, discover average results, and see what’s missing between what some call “vanilla” experiences and your “Wow!” service, and you can more effectively deal with negative reviews.

As an example of how this approach drives growth, for one of our automotive services clients, we compared the top 20% and bottom 20% to their annual sales and came upon where their latest customers were coming from (the (*3*)), their NPS scores, and their Google rankings. The top 20% had 24% higher annual sales, 78% of their latest customers got here from referrals, and they mentioned seeing a positive review. They had an NPS of 96 in comparison with 64 for the bottom 20% and a Google rating of 4.8 out of 5.0.

The key is to focus on actionable feedback, hold each person accountable for their behaviors, and link program outcomes to resources to handle skills and focus on what you want more of—recognize your best practices and focus on behaviors greater than outcomes (which are results). Remember, the key to getting more customers to reply is how you personalize your survey questions by customer type, making them conversational and giving them a real voice to inform you what’s most significant to them. Finally, growth is about understanding the impact of consistently achieving all of your key standards.