Every business wants its customers to love interacting with its product or service. When customers describe their experience using words like “engaging,” “intuitive,” and “streamlined,” you know you’re doing something right. The problem is, unless you’ve got secret mind-reading powers (and if you do, let’s chat, stat), the only way to find out how your customers really, truly feel about your product is to request, gather, and analyze critical customer experience (CX) feedback and data. Customer Success Managers (CSMs) know that surveys are an important tool for getting valuable insights. However, companies that embrace a multi-channel approach to collecting and responding to CX feedback are even better positioned to assess and act-on game-changing information quickly.
Let’s look at some of the Gainsight features that can help you precisely understand your CX journey and respond quickly and nimbly to whatever your customers are telling you.
Surveys: Just one piece of the CX puzzle
Fact: Not all surveys are created equal. Also true: Simply queueing up a survey doesn’t guarantee you’ll get feedback that’s helpful or actionable—or even that you’ll get any feedback at all (blink twice if you’ve ever ignored a request to complete a survey!).
A more effective approach to capturing key insights about your customer is to incorporate surveys with other existing channels. For example, Gainsight’s Timeline provides a historical repository of customer information that can help you pinpoint customer sentiment. Here’s how it works:
A customer uses Timeline to log calls, meetings, emails, and other communications during the customer lifecycle. Executives can quickly get up to speed on a customer account before an important call, and CSMs can familiarize themselves with accounts that might be passed down to them. Both examples illustrate how integrated channels and streamlined communication can boost efficiency and accelerate knowledge sharing across people and departments, thereby improving both the CX and CS journeys.
When it comes to further analyzing customer sentiment, Gainsight’s CX Center is built with Natural Language Processing (NLP) powered by IBM Watson so topics and keywords related to the customer experience can be surfaced. The CX Center also pulls in entries from Timeline to enrich your customer experience analysis.
Close the feedback loop with a little help from your CSM friends
At Gainsight, we believe in taking a holistic approach to collect customer feedback based on three important steps:
- Listen: Determine what’s “true” for your customers by gathering feedback and data through multiple channels
- Act: Close the loop on the various forms of feedback
- Analyze: Assess your product and processes and implement necessary changes
A CSM team is well-positioned to lead and navigate this three-step process. However, not all companies have internal tools or resources to carry out this approach. When that’s the case, a CS platform like Gainsight can do the heavy-lifting by providing an all-in-one solution to listen to, act on, and analyze customer feedback.
To understand this better, let’s consider again the use of surveys to elicit feedback. Gainsight’s Survey features provide access to all survey types that can be sent via email or directly in-product. Once you send a best-in-class customer feedback survey, Gainsight has various tools to enable you to close the loop and act on the feedback fast—and at scale.
- Journey Orchestrator: This robust feature lets you create automated outreaches that keep both Promoters and Detractors from falling through the cracks. Build a survey flow that closes the loop with Promoters by asking them to take further advocacy actions. In that same flow, you can also add a branch that surfaces Detractors. By incorporating human touches, those Detractors can trigger a Call-to-Action, prompting a CSM to reach out directly and mitigate any problems with that particular account.
- Playbooks: You always want to provide consistent processes based on best practices, and Playbooks makes it possible. Now your CSMs can act on customer feedback without having to recreate the wheel every time.
CX is critical for overall customer success
Gainsight experts understand that creating a healthy customer success strategy means keeping a laser-focus on customer experience—and vice versa. When CX and CS exist in a symbiotic relationship, it ensures that customers are on track to get value from your product continuously.
What can hinder this ongoing, open “exchange” between CX and CS? A common challenge for CSMs and other customer-facing teams is simply getting access to valuable customer experience data that can provide context to their broader initiatives. The solution? Create a centralized location for CX data that eliminates the silos between all of your CX efforts. Gainsight’s cloud-based CX Center provides this centralized view. It allows users to see data holistically and “slice and dice” it by product, customer, location, and more.
When your team is empowered to seek, gather, analyze, and act on customer feedback, your customers never feel like their feedback is disappearing into a black hole. We all know that such feelings can be a harbinger to unhappy customers and short-term relationships. With Gainsight’s integrated CS and CX applications, you can focus on the important work of fostering long-term relationships with many satisfied customers.
