Your mission is to retain the customers at your base.You have successfully managed to identify and acquire these customers. But your base has been hit by enemy fire, and your customers are slowly leaving the camp. How do you stop this from happening?
From conducting market research to setting up campaigns – a lot of effort is put into converting marketing qualified leads (MQLs) into customers. And no one understands that better than marketers.
When a business starts losing these customers, it isn’t just a lost revenue opportunity. It’s weeks of work, huge amounts of campaign spend, and countless interactions with leads that go down the drain. Leads may come and go, but customers are supposed to be part of your company’s extended family.
So how do you convince your customers to stay? By using customer experience as ammo.
What is customer experience?
Customer experience (CX) is the aggregate of every interaction a customer has with an organization. From the customer’s first encounter with the business to the final act of making a purchase, every touchpoint within a customer journey contributes to the overall customer experience for an individual.
Providing a favorable customer experience is no small feat. It takes detailed collaboration throughout the cross-functional cycle to build a smooth customer journey.
The concept of customer experience can be a bit vague, considering that it encompasses multiple phases within a customer journey. The following factors play a role in a customer’s overall experience:
- How a prospect reacts to marketing campaigns
- What content is created and dispersed to them during the decision-making stage
- How they’re treated throughout the sales cycle
- How the product they’ve purchased performs and the subsequent customer service
While this may seem like a generic response to customer experience, it’s easier to break CX into smaller elements. Focusing on these elements helps enhance CX as a whole.
Customer experience stems from two key elements: the product and the customers. Each of these elements must work together to provide exceptional engagements for an overall positive experience.
The product forms a vital component of a customer’s experience. This is the reason an individual becomes a customer in the first place. When most people think of CX, strategies associated with product enhancement and implementation come to mind. The journey to the product and the product itself form the crux of any customer experience strategy within an organization.
Answering the following questions about the product helps businesses understand if they're on the right track:
- Does the product provide value or fulfill a need?
- Is the product user-friendly?
- How well does the product perform?
- What sets this product apart from the competition?
- Can this product be scaled up? If so, how can it continue to grow without diluting its value proposition?
The second element, customers, is a no-brainer. Understanding your customers equates to providing the best customer experience. The way a business interacts with customers matters. Dedicatedly supporting customers is crucial for continuous positive perception.
Customer-business relationships are a two-way street where customers have the upper hand. While customer acquisition comes with its own set of requirements, losing a customer due to a poor experience within the customer lifecycle hurts a company a lot more. If the product or service is considered to be the skeleton of what makes a good experience, the customer forms the soul.
These are the fundamental questions that any business team needs to constantly ask if they want to keep CX at the forefront of everything they do:
- How receptive are businesses to a customer’s needs?
- Are businesses proactive enough?
- Do they go out of their way to assist users?
- Are they catering to a particular niche?
- How well has the business managed to create a customer-centric culture?
- Are relevant teams equipped to aid customers at every stage of the sales funnel?
Importance of customer experience
If your business still doesn’t have a customer experience strategy, what are you even doing?
CX has surpassed being just a buzzword as it was decades ago to become a crucial vertical in every organization today. Keeping customer experience as the DNA for any business is the norm now, not the exception.
With so many options to choose from, customers have all the power in today’s competitive marketplace – not sellers.
When competing brands offer products with price points, features, and qualities that hardly differentiate them, the customer will choose the brand that provides something that cannot be filled by only the product; the customer experience. This is what makes a customer’s experience with your brand so crucial. It’s up to you to provide a reason for customers to choose your brand over the others.
A positive customer experience creates a crucial relationship between the customer and the brand that ultimately boosts brand loyalty and trust, reduces customer attrition, creates happy customers who advocate for your brand, and increases overall revenue.
Still not convinced? Here are a few statistics that show why good CX is important for businesses:
- 34% of consumers will never buy from a brand after just one bad experience.
- 66% of customers say they’ll pay more for a great experience.
- 56% of consumers say that the overall enjoyment of their experience is important in their decision to buy a product or service.
The opportunities to surprise and delight customers are endless. If you create unique and personalized experiences for them, they’ll likely share those experiences with friends, family, and review sites.
Happy customers are the best brand advocates. Word of mouth is one of the easiest and most effective forms of marketing enabled by customers. Provide a wow-worthy experience, and the customer will do the rest.
However, worrying about the customers who’ve had poor experiences isn’t enough. You must work hard to ensure that even the “somewhat satisfied customers” have something to remember. After all, the goal of CX isn’t just providing a pleasant experience to a customer — it’s ensuring that customers can achieve their goals seamlessly.
Mike Weir
Chief Revenue Officer, G2
Want to learn more about Experience Management Software? Explore Experience Management products.
Impact of bad customer experience
“Yeah, CX seems great, but we’ll have to invest too much time and money on yet another strategy. Can’t we just make up for it by focusing on our sales cycle and customer acquisition?”
You can, but you’ll lose more money and customers in the process. What makes you think that other businesses aren’t already ramping up their sales efforts?
There are hundreds of software providers out there that offer similar products. Most vendors might not be identical, but they’re definitely fraternal twins within the industry – selling products at similar price points, sharing the same messaging, and tackling a common pain point.
What can be different is the impression a business makes on a customer. Every time an individual makes a purchase, they would’ve already interacted with several teams within a company. If a customer feels discomfort during any of these interactions, the product doesn’t seem worth it anymore. And with so many options available in the market today, jumping ship isn’t too hard for customers to do.
A bad experience does more than leave a bitter taste in the mouth. It can cost an organization a lot of money.
89%
of customers switch to a competitor following a poor customer experience.
Source: Customer Thermometer
Difference between customer experience and customer service
Since these terms are commonly used together, it’s easy to confuse customer experience and customer service. Great customer service is an element of a positive customer experience, but the terms are certainly not the same.
Customer experience encompasses a customer’s entire journey with a brand, while customer service is one specific touchpoint of that journey. The biggest difference between the two terms is that the customer experience is proactive while customer service is reactive.
Customer experience anticipates customer’s needs and pain points well before they’re raised as complaints. It requires consistent journey analysis and constant feedback to ensure that the process hits all the right marks. This is why customer experience is proactive.
Customer support or customer service is provided upon request. It isn’t anticipated and can’t be predicted. The key principle here is to resolve any issue a customer may encounter. Employees and service professionals provide customer service when the customers face a problem, have questions, or just need assistance. This is prompted by the customer, and the reaction strategy must be executed properly to ensure a happy customer.
By creating a proactive service strategy, you prove to your customers that you know what they need and are willing to do anything to provide that to them, even before they ask.
How to measure customer experience
Regularly measuring your customers’ perception of your brand is crucial for relevancy and longevity in the marketplace. Let’s walk you through the most common ways to measure customer experience.
Reviews
The number of times that reading a review has saved people from spending extra bucks on something that wasn’t good is too high to count.
People don’t realize how much reviews affect their daily decision-making process. From reading reviews on Amazon to checking out what critics have to say about the food in a new restaurant, we don’t buy it unless someone else tries it.
Unsurprisingly, reviews have become the go-to for software as well. We won’t watch a movie unless the ratings are good; spending thousands of dollars on tech will require more thorough research.
Review sites are incredibly valuable for a customer’s journey. Regardless of writing the reviews, 92% of all customers read online reviews. Crowdsourcing opinions on various review websites can be a great metric for businesses that want qualitative data in the form of candid reviews.
Reviews pinpoint specific instances that were enjoyable or unpleasant to customers. This helps companies figure out what they need to tackle and how to determine future strategies. Moreover, good reviews are great tools of social proof and act as a testament to your product’s capabilities.
Tip: Creating a profile on a trusted review platform allows businesses to start reading what customers have to say and how they feel about the product.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
There is a heated debate on the value of NPS, but at a basic level, NPS gives you a snapshot of overall customer advocacy. Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures how likely a customer is to recommend a brand. It’s a good metric to have, especially for customer success teams in an organization, helping them carve their customer advocacy program. This is typically asked on a scale of 0-10 and paired with a question like:
“How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?”
Respondents who chose 9 or 10 are classified as “Promoters,” meaning they’re loyal to the brand and will actively recommend it to others.
“Passives” give a score of 7 or 8. These people are satisfied with the brand but have some unmemorable experiences and could be partial to competitors.
Respondents who give scores between 0 and 6 are called “Detractors”. These people are displeased with the brand and their experiences with it and will most likely share their negative experiences with others.
However, like most metrics that revolve around ratings, a single number may mean something different to different people and different circumstances. The absolute value of a score isn’t always what it appears to be.
Customer effort score (CES)
CES measures the amount of effort a customer has to put in to get a problem fixed, use a product or service, or get a question answered. These questions are measured on a scale of “very easy” to “very hard”.
This type of question is typically asked after a customer has interacted significantly with a brand. It’s a good indicator of how user-friendly the product was and how easy it was to obtain that product. This kind of information empowers teams to adjust or rethink the way processes are set up for customers and improve them.
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
CSAT measures how satisfied your customers are. Unlike NPS that encourages users to share their satisfaction or dissatisfaction levels with others, CSAT only focuses on how happy your customers are with you. The CSAT score can be measured by one or more variations of this question that appears at the end of a customer feedback survey:
“How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the service you received?”
Customer attrition rate
Customer attrition or customer churn is the phenomenon where customers abandon a business. The percentage of customers who discontinue using a company’s products or services during a particular time period is called a customer attrition rate.
Customer churn rate formula:
(Number of customers lost by the end of the time period) ÷ (the total number of customers at the beginning of the time period) x 100
The resulting number represents the percentage of customers lost. By comparing the percentages over time, brands will see a trend in customers gained or churned.
15 customer experience strategies
There’s a customer experience strategy for every business out there. Here are 15 strategies that can help you kickstart your CX journey:
1. Guess who? Know thy customer
Every customer is different. You’ve heard this countless times.
How an individual approaches a business is also very different. Each customer has their set of needs, problems, and backgrounds. Collecting personal information, demographic and geographic data, and insight on purchase power can be compiled to curate a holistic customer profile. This information can be procured with the help of customer data platforms.
It’s impossible to create a good customer experience if you don’t know your customer’s likes and dislikes. Getting your hands on qualitative and quantitative data gives you enough room to work with and produce an excellent experience for your target audience.
2. Determine your business goals
Understanding your customers is incredibly important. So is understanding your business. This is often mentioned in any strategy listicle, but there’s a reason for it.
Some businesses still struggle to understand what they want to do, how they aim to get there, and what results they’re looking to achieve. This goes beyond, “I want to sell a product and make 2x the revenue I made last year.”
As a stakeholder in any business, ask yourself the following questions:
- What does our business do?
- How well-received is our product in the market today?
- What is our current customer base size? By what percentage did our customer base grow or shrink since last year?
- How does the business sound to others? Do we fill any gap in the market?
- Do we need to go in a different direction? If so, will we alienate our existing customers?
- Do we have the capital to make changes in our product or marketing?
3. Getting CXOs on board
This goes for any initiative or strategy implemented within an organization. However, putting your best foot forward in the CX world means getting the upper management’s backing on this matter. Everyone needs to be on the same page. It becomes a futile exercise if one team has a bunch of great ideas, but they don’t align with what the higher-ups have in mind.
Creating a framework and setting it in place helps avoid any chances of miscommunication from both sides. This is where understanding the current business offerings and determining its goals comes in handy, especially when trying to formulate a CX strategy that keeps both parties happy.
4. Measure the ROI from delivering great customer experience
Implementing a CX strategy is great, but it’s equally important to see if it truly works.
You know that your business is offering better customer experience if your results improve. One way of validating this is by seeing the return on investment (ROI) for the CX practices you’ve executed. Keep a few tangible targets in mind and correlate them to a specific CX goal. If you see an increase in the number of customers, conversions, or just traffic in general, you know you’re doing something right.
5. Envision the product story backward
When companies think of customers, they think of individuals buying the end product. As a result, every CX decision revolves around the final product. Take a step back and look at how the overall journey fares. If the destination is the product, what does the customer’s journey to reach that point look like?
Enter customer journey mapping.
A customer journey is the sum of several touchpoints. No matter how well-thought-out a particular touchpoint may be, if the overall journey is weak, the probability of a customer completing the journey will also be weak. Customer drop-offs are the result of poor experiences in one or more touchpoints. This is where customer journey mapping really helps. Customer journey mapping aids businesses in understanding how a user would move across different channels.
With a journey map, CX experts are able to visualize every step of a customer’s journey. This puts them directly in the shoes of a consumer and anticipates which stages of the process could be unconducive to movement. Situations like a form with too many fields or a queue that takes too long to move are incidents that can be predicted with the help of a customer journey map and subsequently avoided or optimized to prevent such an occurrence.
Customer journey analytics assesses how a customer engages with a business within a customer journey. It provides a comprehensive view of every customer interaction across separate channels and helps detect pain points from a customer’s point of view.
6. Taking feedback: Actively listen to your customers
If customers aren’t happy with something, they’ll tell you.
The number of insights businesses can get from their customer base is enormous. As the end-user, consumers interact with a product more intimately than the product team that configures the platform. This means that customers end up seeing a lot more than a vendor would. As a result, every little detail about the product, its shortcomings, and what makes it better than other variants in the market are factors that customers observe and possess information about.
Customers are quite vocal too. They’re the ones spending money on your product. It’s only likely that they have something to say about their investment. With any investment, a person wants to see things improve over time. These suggestions and complaints are given in the form of feedback to the company. Gathering all this feedback in the form of reviews, surveys, or even in the form of goodwill can help businesses look at their current offerings in a new light.
With any stable relationship, someone needs to listen. That’s where businesses can step up to maintain a good relationship with their customers.
7. Competitor analysis: Size up the competition
There should be an FAQ section for competitors.
Throughout the lifetime of any company worth its salt, there will be competitors along the way that’ll only continue to grow in number. In an already crowded market, there isn’t much room for error. Businesses look toward their counterparts to see what they’re doing differently and take inspiration from them. Knowing what gaps that other vendors aren’t filling in the market gives businesses a competitive advantage.
Conducting a robust competitive analysis gives information on competitors, a feel of what the market looks like, and what trends have taken over the industry.
While the scope of a competitor analysis may vary from organization to organization, here are a few basic questions that should be covered in any assessment process:
- What kind of experience are they offering to their customers?
- Are their customers happy? Why or why not?
- What is their messaging and business proposition? How different or similar is it to ours?
- What teams have they set up to improve their current CX? Do they have a separate CX team in place or multiple stakeholders working on this front?
- Do they use social proof? What kind of social proof do they give importance to (customer reviews, analyst reports, awards and accolades, funding news, etc.)?
- Who is their biggest champion? Are they customers or influencers?
- By what percentage has their customer base grown in the last year?
- How can their customer base be segmented? Who is their biggest and smallest client?
8. Conflict resolution: Where’s the help desk when you need one?
Even the best-laid plans have their share of hiccups.
There’s a reason why amusement parks have help desks at every corner, even though visitors are also supplied with maps, informational brochures, and clear signages. Assuming that the customer is smart enough to “figure it out” or that your process is fail-proof is a dangerous assumption to make.
No matter how well-thought-out your journey may be, no business can factor in all the possible external variables. There’s bound to be some conflict that requires troubleshooting. It helps to have a guide or a little help whenever needed. Helplines, customer support teams, and AI-powered chatbots act as tour guides for the lost and uninformed.
A great customer experience has timely conflict resolution. No one likes hearing “Your call is important to us” looping for several minutes. Not only does this frustrate a user, but also gives the impression that their issue doesn’t mean much for the business. Hearing a customer out and helping them escape a sticky situation makes them feel valued.
9. Improve your customer service experience
We’ve established that customer service is different from customer experience. However, good customer service plays a crucial role in providing a good customer experience. In a restaurant, it doesn’t matter if the food tastes good or not if the staff serving the customer doesn’t even serve the meal on time.
Customer service doesn’t offer consumers anything tangible. The customers like to believe that they’re paying for quality service. Good customer service isn’t very complex; it’s just timely assistance with no strings attached. Being attentive to customers’ needs and addressing them as swiftly as possible gives any business a gold star for customer service. It’s a simple strategy that goes a long way in improving customer satisfaction and experience.
10. Stand out from the crowd with your brand personality
“We’re a company that solves this issue through our new-age, digital-first tech platform.”
Now, where have we heard that before?
Here’s a great piece of copywriting advice. When you talk about the features of your product and replace it with your competitor’s product name, does it fit?
If it does, you’re in trouble. You risk sounding exactly like another company.
It’s a crowded market out there, and most businesses aim to tackle similar problems with their solutions. It gets hard to stand out when all that can be said about your company is already another company’s website content.
So how do you distinguish twins from each other? By their personality.
If someone asks you what's the point of branding, this is it. Brand recall is what differentiates an iPhone from other cell phones. Taking a long hard look at what makes your company unique is a great way to build a brand identity that customers can associate with. This impacts CX as the customer expectations change according to how they perceive a brand.
How your product is priced, the features it offers, and the reputation it holds within the market can all be justified by brand perception and your core personality.
11. Automate tasks with AI
What is considered fast today could be made even faster tomorrow.
Selling a platform said to reduce turnaround time (TAT) that takes customers several days just to hit the checkout button or get an issue resolved is just ironic.
Consumers don’t like to be kept waiting. And why would they? When AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) are set to solve problems and products are marketed to be quicker than the others, customers expect speed during the journey as well.
Businesses should consider using AI to automate pivotal tasks within a customer journey and respond to service requests. Digital self-service allows companies to provide online support to customers without involving any interaction with a company representative. Auto-responses to inquiries allow your customer support team to tackle bigger issues rather than spend precious time addressing straightforward situations.
AI automation also promises the coveted personalization that everyone seems to crave.
Tip: According to Oracle, successful personalization leverages data and content and requires intelligence to help marketers deliver relevant experiences in real-time.
12. Are you a bot? Creating a human experience
AI automation is truly a godsend. But it still can’t beat human intervention. There’s something different about talking to an actual person as opposed to a series of automated replies.
There’s a reason why helplines are still a thing in today’s world. For the most part, automation eradicates obstacles and takes less time than if a human were assigned to tackle every task. However, some customers may have specifically unique requests or questions that an FAQ page or a chatbot may not be able to answer.
Personalizing interactions with customers comforts them, knowing that their requests aren’t going to be buried in a sea of automated responses. Sometimes automation isn’t always faster than the good old manual intervention. Human experience, at its core, is built on emotional connections. Technology aims to solve a problem but emotion is what drives that problem.
This was predominantly seen during the pandemic. During such a crisis, an automated response seems cold, mechanical, and uncaring. When customers can’t pay for the monthly subscription of a product due to unavoidable circumstances, businesses that are were more understanding offered discounts or postponed payments until further notice.
This is where human connection and common sense prevail and come in handy for situations that can’t otherwise be predicted and accounted for by a system. Human experience aids in customer relationship management and helps create a loyal customer base.
13. Speak in your customer’s language
It’s not just automation either; nothing turns customers off than having to sit and listen to a formulaic sales pitch that’s been reused several times. Users don’t care about how many modules or platforms you offer. They care about solving their pain point as quickly as possible.
Beating around the bush by droning on about case studies that aren’t even relevant to the industry or solution a customer is looking for is counterintuitive and wastes everybody’s time. Similarly, using technical jargon with a customer whose line of work doesn’t involve working directly with technology, will only confuse them. It doesn’t make your business sound smart. It just makes it seem too complex for what a customer feels is a very simple problem statement.
Observe what kind of words decision-makers use when they talk about their problem or their line of work. Artists want paint with a good color payoff. Start yammering about the composition of each color pigment, and they’ll go ahead and buy a standard set of acrylic paints somewhere else.
The following set of questions can help your team adjust the way they communicate with customers:
- What are the customers looking for?
- What is currently bothering them?
- What’s their budget? Is it flexible? Can we work around this budget?
- Did they understand our product offering? Do they need more information?
- Have they consumed content on our company and product? What form of content can they easily digest?
- What’s the time frame they’re looking at? Is there any scope for a stretch here?
14. Adopt an omnichannel strategy
The world is interconnected with online channels. Customers interact with businesses through multichannels. Most businesses have now realized the importance of offering a mobile experience in addition to a desktop experience. But omnichannel experiences are a little more nuanced than that.
Customer touchpoints aren't limited to the typical journey that takes place from a website and ends at the checkout stage. The entry and exit points can occur at any segment within the journey. Whether customers begin their journey from an email campaign, an ad campaign, a search engine, or even social media, their onboarding and offboarding must be seamless. Your process cannot be easier from one source and difficult from another. If you had two entrances in your house but one was blocked by a tree, you might as well say that you have one entrance only.
Don’t risk making any potential source redundant only because it wasn’t planned better to accommodate customer movement.
15. Good user experience equals great customer experience
User experience (UX) isn’t the same as customer experience (CX), but has a direct impact on customer experience.
UX represents the sum total of a user's emotional and cognitive experience after visiting a company's website or app. It’s centered around digital interactions while maintaining a consistent feel across all touchpoints within a journey. With most interactions occurring on a digital platform these days, optimizing UX improves the digital customer experience.
Slow loading times, unclear navigation across a website, long forms, and unusual dashboard layouts are just a few examples of bad UX. This, in turn, affects how a customer’s overall experience fares. Often a customer might drop off feeling frustrated and confused.
It isn’t just our attention spans that have dwindled. Our tolerance levels for disruptions have also reduced over the years. If something’s not getting customers faster to their final destination, it has to go.
What is customer experience management?
Customer experience management (CEM) is the collection of practices that oversee owning CX strategies and actively improving them. It involves research to discover who your customers are, what they need, and where their pain points lie.
CEM is a dynamic practice that observes customer interactions and works on designing a better experience for them. It’s a part of the larger experience management field that looks after all channels and aspects related to experience. User experience (UX), customer experience (CX), and now human experience (HX) constitute the spectrum of experience management. It’s become a huge industry. Several companies have built experience management software to proactively address any incoming issues and reduce support costs.
Top 5 experience management software
Experience management software integrates the response from the target audience and provides accessible insights to close a feedback loop. CX-specific solutions analyze customer sentiment and provide actionable customer insights to relevant teams or stakeholders. These stakeholders perform tasks that can improve a customer's overall experience by closing loop actions based on the customer response and feedback collected earlier.
The following list contains real user reviews for the top five customer journey analytics software in the market. To qualify for inclusion in the Experience Management category, a product must:
- Connect with other data warehouses
- Categorize experience data collected across various touchpoints within the customer journey
- Deliver all aspects of an enterprise feedback management solution
- Yield real-time actionable insights from across the customer journey to pertinent stakeholders
- Provide cross-functional channels of communication that enable stakeholders to share input with leaders
- Take action based on respondent sentiment to close feedback loops.
*Below are the five leading experience management software from G2's Spring 2021 Grid® Report. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.
1. Qualtrics Customer Experience
Qualtrics Customer XM is a customer experience platform that collects data from online and offline channels to understand each customer’s needs at every moment. It delivers predictive insights tailored to each stakeholder and has action planning tools that use this insight to take action on various feedback loops.
What users like:
“It provides Customer Experience (CX) Analysts an excellent tool for creating surveys and analyzing customer feedback. It has different libraries for different types of surveys, which already comes with default questions. You can modify these default questions into whatever you need. The addition or removal of conditions to the questions in the survey is very easy, which results in a great flow and transition. After you finish your survey, it even makes recommendations based on the type of your questions. For example, if you included too many open-ended text questions, it recommends you limit those types of questions to a certain amount. It warns you that having too many open-ended text questions usually results in lower completion rates for the survey.”
— Qualtrics Customer Experience Review, Mehmet Soner C.
What users dislike:
“Limited number of survey responses and dashboard viewer licenses. We're actively scaling our program, and both the dashboard license and response cap is something we'll need to work around to make it a cost-effective solution.”
— Qualtrics Customer Experience Review, Ben A.
2. Birdeye
Birdeye is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine. Athena is an advanced insights software that lets businesses understand the pain points faced by customers and enable teams to execute decisive actions. It monitors sentiment levels from customer feedback and discovers trending topics within the operating industry.
What users like:
“It’s an easy and prompt method to generate reviews for our company. It determines the level of customer satisfaction, determines if they will refer us to their friends and neighbors, enables daily posting of Google and Facebook reviews for our review and response. It took just a few weeks to get trained to use the program. Birdeye has offered weekly training time with staff and cell phone access off site to those reviews or customer feedback that need immediate attention.”
— Birdeye Review, Jerry J.
What users dislike:
“I wish that more info could flow into Birdeye. We have a public email address (info, sales, etc.) that we would love to be able to respond to from our Birdeye Account. We currently use another ticket-based source to respond to communications, but being able to do everything from Birdeye would be great. Birdeye recently integrated Google Messaging, which was a huge plus. This was one more separate app that we don't have to access.”
— Birdeye Review, Demetrice R.
3. Reputation
Reputation is a Reputation Experience Platform (RXP) that turns feedback data into insights for companies to understand their customers better. It tracks consumer sentiment over time and enables businesses to analyze feedback and performance and improve their CX strategy.
What users like:
“Having a centralized location to manage all of our online reviews has enabled me to reply to significantly more of them. I am able to reach more of our patients and address their concerns with the help of our management team, thanks to Reputation.com's interface. The interface itself is clean and easy to read, with intuitive ways to measure review statistics and trends. The map of reputation trends is particularly helpful, showing what geographical areas we need to concentrate our efforts on and letting us pinpoint offices and areas that need special attention and patient care.”
— Reputation Review, Cassie G.
What users dislike:
“There is SO much to the platform that many times, "you don't know what you don't know," and it's a challenge to determine the features and reporting that would work best for the organization. Customizing dashboards, reports, and surveys can be a challenge to implement independently, but the account representatives are good and willing to help.”
— Reputation Review, Arthur C.
4. AskNicely
AskNicely connects real-time customer feedback with customizable client surveys and empowers teams to track any customer experience metric, including NPS, 5-Star, CSAT, or Customer Effort Score.
What users like:
“A very intuitive and helpful platform, supported by one of the most friendly service teams. We had a great time on our video conferences setting up AskNicely and getting our first surveys out. You can tweak, massage, and modify the surveys to your heart's content and get instant and continuous responses. I would recommend this to any company trying to get honest and continuous feedback from your real users, not just your direct contacts at organizations.”
— AskNicely Review, Isaac H.
What users dislike:
“Some cell phones aren't receiving the SMS surveys, and support doesn't know why. This is concerning because I have no way of telling which clients didn't receive the survey, and so I'm struggling with how to solve it.”
— AskNicely Review, Rheya I.
5. SurveySparrow
SurveySparrow is a complete omnichannel experience management platform that brings together customer experience and employee experience technologies, such as Chat-like Surveys that switch from static to dynamic conversations, NPS, and enables custom CSS to add your own personal touch to every survey.
What users like:
“How simple it is; It’s an excellent tool for monitoring in general. The focus that I will give it will be to evaluate human resources and for feedback on your performance. The quality of the product design is attractive to users. I must mention the attention that the person who contacted me had, he has a great way of communicating and great patience. He seems to me a person capable of serving any type of person with the quality of communication, as well as the ability to resolve any questions. Survey participants love the presentation and how intuitive it is. The ability to customize it is a very positive point and makes the platform shine in a unique way.”
— SurveySparrow Review, Jorge O.
What users dislike:
“When I share the survey on a web page, it takes a bit of loading! The data collected is not well structured (like column names and closed answers coding). There are some question type limitations when using chatbots instead of classic surveys.”
— SurveySparrow Review, Zakaria B.
Leads may come, and leads may go, but customers should stay on forever
Acquiring a new customer is far more costly than retaining an existing one. Customer retention is synonymous with customer experience. Providing superior customer experience does more than just affect your bottom line – it increases customer engagement, improves customer loyalty, and the longevity of your product within the market.
Understand how conversion rate optimization can help drive more conversions in your customer acquisition strategy.
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Ninisha Pradhan
Ninisha is a former Content Marketing Specialist at G2. She graduated from R.V College of Engineering, Bangalore, and holds a Bachelor's degree in Engineering. Before G2, Ninisha worked at a FinTech company as an Associate Marketing Manager, where she led Content and Social Media Marketing, and Analyst Relations. When she's not reading up on Marketing, she's busy creating music, videos, and a bunch of sweet treats.