Without these 3 things you will never grow your business

July 25, 2024

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The future of customer experience (CX) is all about growth. We recently asked our customers and other contacts what they consider to be the most important factor in their CX programs and what they think is the biggest challenge or thing that keeps them awake at night – and some of the answers surprised us.

Many of them said that customer experience is critical to success and creates a key competitive advantage – this was the response we expected. Many have reduced costs and retained service and sales experiences as key differentiators. These teams are focused on action and building capabilities and can demonstrate a direct link between improving CX outcomes and business KPIs.

What we didn't expect was what they told us about their biggest challenges. Perhaps you can relate to these pain points in your own CX program.

We expected them to have too much data, not enough action, and not enough time to take the actions needed based on that data. These pain points are ranked among the top five challenges, but they told us that 1) engaging customers in meaningful feedback (also known as response rates) and 2) motivating team members to take ownership of their results moved to the top of the list. Survey fatigue is real—customers are fed up with constant requests, and employees often dismiss feedback as irrelevant or out of their control.

So what are the three key strategies to help you overcome these challenges and achieve what we call “feedback for growth”?

Related: The only way to win customers is to become their first choice. Here's how.

1. Implement action-oriented accountability

The first key strategy is to take action with accountability. So it's about your team. Your CX approach should eliminate any guesswork about the “why,” “what,” “who,” and “how” of what happened in each experience. Individual team members need to know what actions are required and how their behavior makes customers feel. To improve customer response rates and generate at least 50 words per feedback response, there are a few important keys:

Make sure it's on brand and feels like a virtual conversation.
Keep it short, it should not take longer than three minutes.
Only ask questions that are relevant to the purpose of the visit.
Make sure the tone of your survey questions is authentic, empathetic, and expresses an appreciation for participants’ time and contribution.
Allow them to complete the survey or feedback response when and how they want.

The results you get after these simple steps will help you understand how they really felt and you can measure the impact of each behavior on loyalty and recommendation. For one client (a specialty retailer with 400 stores), we identified seven key behaviors that created the ideal experience. The customer wanted staff to recommend appropriate add-ons. The top 20% of stores had a 34% higher add-on rate and achieved 143% higher year-on-year sales growth than the bottom 20%. Happy customers buy more – and they love the service experience!

Related: 4 Secrets to Increasing Sales Growth Every Manager Must Know

2. Involve your teams

As mentioned, feedback for further development will only happen if your teams are motivated to keep improving. Customer feedback captured via video, voice or text helps you link results to specific actions for your team members and develop e-learning opportunities. It also underscores why it's important. When employees see the relevance to them and feel accountable for those results, they are more likely to take action.

For example, an international home goods client asked, “Given the expertise, friendliness, knowledge, and advice of the team member who served you, how willing would you be to be served by that team member again?” We compared the results to sales conversion rates (i.e., how many customers became buyers) and found that top performers had a 36% higher conversion rate on this question.

The key to growth is to address the potential barriers, be they skills, confidence or competencies, and address the issues that prevent teams from fully engaging.

Related: Business growth relies on the right customer feedback. Here's how to get it.

3. Enable comprehensive growth

The third recommendation is to go beyond tracking reviews and focus on the behaviors that drive results. Use your CX program to acquire new customers, retain existing customers, increase average spend per customer, improve conversion rates, increase referrals, and encourage positive reviews on social media to acquire more new customers. If you can identify the key behaviors that directly impact customer loyalty or dissatisfaction, you can move away from chasing reviews and focus only on the actions needed to improve. You can learn from and leverage proven best practices, identify middle-of-the-road reviews and see what's missing between what some call “normal” experiences and your “wow!” service, and you can address negative feedback more effectively.

As an example of how this approach drives growth, for one of our auto service clients, we compared the top 20% and bottom 20%'s results with their annual revenue and found out where their new customers came from (the so-called “path to purchase”), as well as their NPS scores and Google reviews. The top 20% had 24% higher annual revenue, 78% of new customers came through referrals, and they reported seeing a positive review. They had an NPS score of 96 versus 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 individual accountable for their behavior by linking program results to resources to teach skills, and focus on what you want to accomplish more of—identify your best practices and focus more on behaviors than scores (which are results). Remember, the key to getting more customers to respond is how you personalize the survey questions by customer type, make them conversational, and give them a real voice to tell you what matters most to them. Finally, growth is about understanding the impact of consistently achieving all of the key standards.