Do you really understand your customers?
This is a follow up to our blogpost last week
Traditionally, there have been many ways to view the customer. We’d think about who they are, how to segment them, how they feel about your brand and how best you can serve them. But today’s different.
A massive crisis like COVID-19 changes all of those factors. In this crisis, how they are feeling colors every interaction and has changed for virtually every customer. Their lives have been turned upside down. They’re concerned for their health, lockdown is stressing every relationship they have, parents are adjusting to Zoom school, adult children are concerned for their parents, the economy, masks, and on, and on. In our world of modern CX sensibilities, we’ve never seen anything like this. To manage this well, we’re going to have to think about the customer differently.
As modern brands, executives and support pros, we know that we have to give each customer a great experience. Striving for the top rating in every interaction, we focus on that one to one moment. We seek to understand each customer and get them what they need, with a sprinkle of delight. Servicing them and making them feel special at the same time.
As your teams focus on each of those hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of customer interactions a month, artifacts of these interactions are being left in the data of support tickets, surveys, and reviews. The collection of all customer communications, from systems like Zendesk, Intercom or others, holds secrets in the patterns of communications that each single customer interaction can hide. These secrets can help us understand our customers, better.
At OdinAnswers we call these hidden patterns Customer Signals. They can tell us things through their rates of change, variations and connections with other signals or metrics. In managing through the COVID 19 crisis, there are 5 customer signals that can help us understand where our customers are coming from, and help us support them better through this crisis and to our next normal in the weeks and months ahead.
The 5 customer signals provide visibility into your customers, teams and the relationship between them. These signals are COVID-19, Concern/Distress, Trust, Cancellation/Returns, and Service Experience. In these five we can see a clear reflection of how our customers are doing and how our teams are supporting them when they need you most. We’ve taken the example of a major brand with thousands of support tickets & transactional reviews a week to illustrate.
COVID-19
The signal for the crisis itself is looking for any and all mentions of the crisis, such as virus, COVID, Corona, etc. What you’re looking for is how much conversation is coming through about it. While your business may sell shoes or menswear, during a crisis these things come through. It’s not logical, you may ask yourself, “Why would this topic possibly come up?” The answer is that it comes up when it’s on your customers’ minds. By measuring it and tracking it, you can begin to have a sense of how it’s going. In a real example here, we can see the surge, going from 0% to over 20% of all calls. By understanding this signal, you can prepare your teams with the answers your customers need. It can also be a direct factor in decisions your customers are making about your product or service such as cancellations or pricing. Knowing this, you can equip your teams to deal with these issues in constructive, sensitive ways.
Concern/Distress
In this difficult time, the next signal is Concern/Distress, which measures the levels of anxiety and frustration your customers are experiencing due to these events. As discussed above, this is often a function of the customer’s personal situation and not the particulars of the service experience, though that can be the case (See signal for Service Experience) below.
As your customers live through this crisis, their attention and patience are being consumed on every front, so they’re arriving for support in a different frame of mind than usual. As we can see in the chart, Concern/Distress has nearly doubled from its baseline. By understanding this we can take measures to prepare our teams. Customers appreciate being heard in difficult times. Perhaps your teams can respond in more empathetic or understanding ways.
Trust
The next signal is Trust. Trust is anchored in the types of responses and interactions your customers have with the team. Customers that trust you are thankful, appreciative and feel well supported. Because this time is so volatile for your customers, as your teams and all the decisions you’re facing as business policies continue to shift, there is a very high risk of losing your customers’ trust with one misstep. By tracking the signals for Trust you can understand where things stand in normal times, and then how they’re changing. We can see in the example that the Trust signal is typically in a tight band. This client has been managing the situation very well as we see an increase in Trust communicated by their customers as the events unfolded through March and April. This is a really important signal that speaks to long-term customer happiness.
Returns/Cancellations
Your customers are highly stressed and concerned about their own jobs, those of their spouses and the economy in general right now. It’s time for them to tighten their belts. While understandable, you need to understand how their decisions are going to impact your business’s revenue.
While actual cancellations and non-payments are the ultimate indicators, they’re lagging and don’t provide the preview that could help us begin to adjust. The signal for Cancellations/Returns is a combination of the leading indicators as customers begin to inquire about terms, refund or cancellation policies and such. Understanding the baseline for this, and its change can help to understand the potential impact and begin reacting faster. Only by measuring the signal can you prepare the response. Perhaps temporarily reduced pricing or a payment holiday are solutions to avoid cancellations? Be prepared.
Service Experience
The final signal is the most straightforward, but rounds out the set. Your customer’s assessment of how you’re doing for them. Their tracking score over time, be it NPS, CSAT or other, it provides additional context with the four other signals. In the final example, we see that in spite of significant increases in Concern/Distress and Returns/Cancellations, the customer’s assessment of their Service Experience remained high. So their investment in the customer experience and navigation of these challenging times maintained their customer’s trust and support.
By tracking these 5 key customer signals, your business can have visibility into the changing dynamics that are impacting your customers, teams, and overall business. By measuring and tracking these signals, you’re using the renewable energy of your customer’s feedback to make your business smarter.
By instrumenting these signals, you can see when changes begin to happen in order to better target your resources to navigate these challenging times.
Using the ideas of 5 signals you can develop a simple process to generate these signals by exporting and analyzing the data in your existing systems to see where you stand, OdinAnswers has launched a free weekly report to help you do this. If you’re interested you can learn more at get.odinanswers.com/helping.
Andy Greenawalt
CEO
OdinAnswers
Don’t forget our Free COVID-19 Report. Get it here.
