The Importance of Real-Time Feedback in a Customer Experience Platform

How critical is the customer experience for your business? It’s often the differentiator between you and your competitors. One negative interaction could create churn, as 52% of people said they switch after just one bad experience.

Your company needs a way to manage this holistically. A customer experience platform provides an excellent solution. When it can deliver real-time feedback, its value is even greater!

In this article, you’ll learn what a customer experience platform is. Other topics include interpreting real-time feedback and its benefits. Then review best practices for implementation. At the end, you’ll receive action items to put a solution in place.

What Is a Customer Experience Platform?

Building long-term relationships with your customers combats churn. It also helps you grow customer lifetime value. In a world where consumers have many choices and high expectations, your brand needs to stand out. You’ll need a solution to manage, monitor, and improve customer experiences.

A customer experience platform enables you to do that. Within such a system, you’ll have tools that provide insights into customer behavior and preferences. This technology can play a crucial role in how you continue to delight customers. You can also react to interactions faster.

Customer experience platforms consist of many features. They give you better control and visibility into customer interactions. It’s insight across locations and channels. It tracks many moments involved in customer interactions. This delivers important business intelligence specific to each customer.

Its key features include:

• Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) software: Measure and track this metric associated with how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to a friend or colleague.
• Customer engagement capabilities: This feature collects data from the many customer touchpoints. It can provide insights into behaviors and preferences. The analysis of this data allows you to make meaningful adjustments across the customer experience.
• Customer feedback solutions: Feedback from customers should inform interactions. And this feature helps you do that. It allows you to request and receive real-time customer comments. The solution analyzes these for sentiment. As you generate more data, you can apply predictive analytics to identify trends.
• Customer retention software: Another key feature of a customer experience platform is strengthening loyalty. Once you know NPS® scores, you can better incentivize and personalize deals. It can boost loyalty. Customer retention software features should be part of the solution you choose.

All these tools in one platform make it easy to manage all aspects of the customer relationship. A turnkey solution improves efficiency and productivity as well. You may be able to eliminate manual tasks too. Best of all is the ability to understand and address real-time feedback.

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Understanding Real-Time Feedback

How much more valuable would customer feedback be if it was in real-time? A lag in customer sentiment means that you can only be reactive. Real-time feedback includes the collection and analysis of—and your response to—what customers are saying immediately or very soon after you receive it.

It differs from traditional feedback methods. Those usually occur much later after the interaction or sale. By the time you receive it, the customer has a defined position, whether positive or negative.

Feedback in the form of reviews like those on Google or other third-party platforms is valuable. They act as social proof to those considering your brand. Most of the time, these aren’t happening in real-time.

The more data you gather from real-time feedback, the more relevant you can respond. The response can be to that specific customer or within your entire customer experience strategy. Data reveals patterns after analysis in the customer experience platform. From this, you can make meaningful changes.

For example, if customers continue to find your checkout process inconvenient, you should review the process. It’s taking feedback and actually doing something with it that supports enhanced customer experiences.

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How Can You Get Real-Time Customer Feedback?

There are several options for enabling real-time customer feedback:

• In-app surveys: Push surveys after any interaction (e.g., a purchase or customer service contact) to customers using your app. You can immediately gauge their experience. You can include a simple NPS® question or customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey.
• Feedback widgets: Strategically place these within the customer journey. People can leave feedback without disrupting the overall experience. This is valuable because you receive customer feedback about many different touchpoints.
• Live chat feedback: Chat has become a convenient and preferred way for customers to get help and ask questions. As soon as the session ends, a survey can pop up to measure how the customer felt about the interaction.
• Email surveys: When a customer visits in-store or makes a purchase online, follow up with an email right away. By engaging people moments after the interaction, you can get their real-time impression of the interaction.

Benefits of Real-Time Feedback in a Customer Experience Platform

The Feedback Is More Accurate and Reliable

Since the interaction has just occurred, you’re getting the raw emotions of a user. They can be more explicit in explaining why the experience was positive or negative. Those details allow you to be more specific in addressing it.

Immediate Feedback Requests Often Have Better Response Rates

It can be challenging to solicit opinions from your customers. By giving them an easy way to do it in real-time, you could see response rates increase. It’s about making it easy for customers to respond, which makes in-app and live chat some of the best channels.

Instantly Resolve Some Issues

If real-time feedback details a major issue, you can respond to it quickly. By showing customers you take their experiences seriously, you can turn a negative into a positive. Addressing the issue reduces the escalation of emotions someone might feel.

Customers appreciate it when brands want their input. Those quick responses support loyalty. Research suggests that customers are 2.4 times more likely to stay with a business when there is fast resolution.

Acting of Feedback Offers Potential for Growth and More Revenue

If you have access to real-time feedback and act on it, your customers have better experiences. You can also see growth and revenue benefits. Companies that center strategies around customer experience can achieve this.

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Best Practices for Implementing a Customer Experience Platform

Customer experience platforms offer many advantages. Now, it’s time to consider how to deploy one. Adopting any software requires an implementation strategy. For a smooth integration, here are some best practices:

Create an Implementation Strategy

Before work begins, document your strategy. It should include who’s responsible for what. Also, note the technical aspects of the implementation. Doing so gets all parties on the same page.

You can form a working group of different stakeholders to hash out the workflow. Also, include any resources from your software partner.

Determine Integration Needs

You may want to connect your customer relationship management (CRM) system or other applications. Data may need to be exchanged between these solutions. Learn how this will work and what’s involved.

Map Out the Customer Journey

Know the touchpoints for customers. Then insert feedback options into these moments. It can be at any interaction that you deem important to the customer journey.

If you have an existing document, update it and align it to the features in your new software.

Choose How You’ll Measure Implementation Success

You’ll be able to track many metrics in the software, from NPS® to other customer satisfaction key performance indicators (KPIs).

You also need to define what success means for implementation. It could involve user statistics and their feedback on ease of use or gaps in functionality. Decide how often you’ll measure these and what you would consider success.

Organize Training for All Users

The platform may have various users, from customer success managers to marketing. Make sure each team has access to training specific to how they’ll use the system.

Learn About Customization Options

As you work through implementation, ask questions about customizing some features. Each business and industry is unique, so you all prioritize workflows or capabilities differently.

Ensure the Platform Is Secure and Compliant

This software may include confidential customer data. As a result, be cognizant of the security measures used by the system. You want to ensure that the best cybersecurity measures are in place. They can reduce the risk of a customer data breach. You’ll also have peace of mind about complying with applicable regulations.

Conduct Testing Before Your Go-Live

The last part of implementation is testing. Include several days of this with different scenarios to identify any final issues. Once you’ve completed this, it’s time to set your go-live date.

How You Can Get Started Using Customer Experience Platforms Right Now

If you’re ready to elevate customer experiences through technology-enabled solutions, start your journey with these tips:

• Explore customer experience platform options. Request demos, view walkthroughs, and define what features they have.
• Review how you currently receive feedback from customers. Identify the gaps and determine if your strategy has any real-time components.
• Look at your churn rate. You can track these with customer experience software.
• If your churn rate is increasing, you should investigate as to why.
• Read what users are saying about different solutions on the market. There will be pros and cons to any system.
• Decide on the most essential features you want in a software solution for customer experience.