By Chad Horenfeldt
“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” This is a quote by the former CEO of Netscape, Jim Barksdale and something that CS leaders need to constantly be thinking about. It’s not enough to have an opinion on what needs to change. To convince others that change is needed, especially at the executive level, you need data to back up your opinions.
Besides usage and contractual (renewal and upsell) data, some of the best information that is readily available to you can come directly from your customers. This is essentially what Voice of the Customer (VOC) is all about. It’s about listening to your customers and acting on that feedback to improve the product and overall customer experience.
There are many different ways to approach VOC but at the end of the day you need to start somewhere. I recently used a comprehensive customer survey that provided us with the information we needed from our customers so that we could better focus our efforts. This post will outline how you can quickly start this process and help influence change in your own organization and create an overall improved customer experience.
Getting Started: Tools And Resources
One of our first attempts at collecting customer feedback was through a simple NPS (net promoter score survey) to our clients that we served up within our application using Appcues. This is an effective strategy to give us a pulse on our customers but it didn’t give us enough feedback as there were barely any comments. We wanted our customers to provide more details on their challenges and what they enjoyed so I pushed to create a longer survey that we could send to a broader base of customer stakeholders.
I started by first getting executive alignment around the idea of the survey and created a brief on what it would include and why we were doing it. I made sure to involve the heads of product, marketing, and sales as I needed their assistance and buy-in to make this initiative a success. They would be direct beneficiaries of this data and it was a matter of communicating the benefits. We made sure that the questions we asked in the survey would service the needs of these functions without turning the survey into a bloated hodge podge of questions.
Once I had cross-functional alignment, we got down to business. Marketing offered help in terms of their survey tool, Qualtrix, as well as their marketing automation platform, Marketo, to send the survey. The marketing team also did a lot of the legwork of creating the email copy and executing the survey. It’s best to leverage marketing for their copy expertise as well as assisting with other elements to drive the highest survey response.
Building the Survey: Keep it Simple and Give Options
The survey itself can consist of many questions but you should have a theme that you are striving for. Our goal was to better understand how our customers felt towards our product, the different teams they interact with, and our company as a whole.
Some of the questions consisted of the following:
What features do you value the most and why?
How would you rate the ease or difficulty of doing business with our company?
How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague based solely on the following? (respondents could rate different areas of the business including support, sales, customer success, training, billing etc…)
Is there anything else you’d like our CEO to know?
We tried to provide options for our customers that would allow the ones that wanted to complete it very quickly with multiple choice questions versus those that wanted to provide more context in the open-ended questions. This would allow most respondents to complete the survey in under 5 minutes as well as providing others more time to express their opinions if they desired to do so.
Keep in mind that the more questions you add, the lower your response rate will be. There will be a tendency from the various stakeholders to add “just one more question”. You need to keep focused on what the purpose of your survey is and to prevent “survey creep”. Be ruthless here or all of your efforts will go to waste when you have lower than expected survey responses.
Execution: Sending the Survey and the Follow-up
Just putting the survey out there doesn’t mean that people will fill it out. You need a coordinated approach across your marketing and customer success teams to ensure that you maximize the number of respondents.
Here was our approach:
We sent an email blast out to the targeted list that we created. We sent a follow-up email a week later to those that had yet to respond. The email came from one of our executives as we assumed that having this come from a person rather than a generic email address would improve the response rate.
We promoted the survey in our customer community and we highlighted it using our in-app messaging tool.
After the initial email blasts, we instructed our CSMs to promote the survey in their day to day communications (email and meetings) to maximize results.
We also experimented with a small incentive for a select group of early respondents which was either a gift card or a donation to a charity of their choice. The charity option was very popular and a recommended approach.
You also need a plan for following up with each and every survey response. We created the messaging that we wanted our customer success managers and other CX leaders to use for both positive and negative survey responders. For the negative survey responders, we pushed for a follow-up meeting so we could get to the root cause of the feedback to ensure it was understood and we could act on it. I was involved with a number of these meetings and there were a few cases where the feedback from this survey definitely prevented future churn.
For the positive survey responders, we gave our customers the option to meet with us. If there was specific feedback we wanted to learn more about we were more direct about scheduling a meeting. We also leveraged this opportunity to ask them for a case study or other types of advocacy. It’s critical that you acknowledge those that have taken the time to share their opinions and let them know that you will be following up on their feedback.
You should also consider those people that didn’t complete the survey. This isn’t a critical component when you launch your first survey as you are just trying to stand up a new process but if you have customers that consistently don’t engage, you need to dive into why this is occurring. It may be that they don’t like surveys but there may be other issues that you need to consider.
You can’t just launch the survey and hope for the best. Have a plan on how you will communicate the survey as well as how you will follow up on the feedback. This will ensure that you maximize the impact of the survey and that your customers will be willing to complete the survey in the future.
The Impact: Gathering and Communicating the Results
The impact of the survey was better than I expected. It turned out that while the actual percentage response was much lower than other VOC efforts, the quality of the responses was much higher. There were some very clear trends that we took away from the survey that changed the overall strategy of the company. We shifted resources to focus on certain areas of our product and invested in additional training resources for our customers as an example.
The results by themselves were helpful but results alone aren’t enough. You need to get as many eyeballs on the results as possible so that other areas of your company are aware of what your customers are asking for. I presented the results at client health exec meetings, at CX and Sales leadership teams and in front of the entire company at our town halls. Because I had already had cross-functional alignment the different teams across the company supported the results and were ready to act on them. I also combined the survey results with other data I had on client churn reviews and from other surveys we had done. I had the data I needed to make real changes and this initiative is now a standard approach as part of our overall VOC plan.
Driving change in your company can be challenging. Look for ways that you can gather customer data and get cross-functional alignment to get everyone on board with the changes that are needed. Be the change maker in your organization!
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers customer success evaluations that are a great way to see what is working well and what needs improvement. For more information on our consulting services and training classes, please see TheSuccessLeague.io
Chad Horendfeldt - Chad is a customer success executive with 15+ years of experience building and developing high performing teams. Currently, he is the Head of Customer Success at Kustomer. Prior to Kustomer, Chad held CS leadership positions at Updater, Bluecore, Influitive, and Oracle (Eloqua). In addition to writing for The Success League, he also writes regularly on the topic of customer success on his blog The Enlightened Customer.