Customer service is a vital part of obtaining and retaining business.
In fact, 73 percent of buyers indicate that Customer Experience is an important factor in their purchasing decisions. To ensure they are servicing their customers in the best way possible, many brands are looking towards Customer Recovery Loops to prevent customer churn and improve CX.
As with any new initiative, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what success would look like before getting started. As a business, you want to have smart, realistic goals in place that give you something tangible to aim for and continually measure against, to ensure genuine progress is being made.
That said, in the world of CX, some indicators of success are easier to track than others. Measuring the effectiveness of your Customer Recovery Loop may seem tricky, so here are five ways to check if your Customer Recovery Loop is working for you.
1. Repeat customers
Far too often, brands have their data siloed, meaning that they’re not getting the full picture when analysing the success of their Recovery Loop. The technology now exists to enable companies to link their customer feedback with any existing data they hold, including key things like purchase history, to provide a single view of the customer.
If you can establish that your unhappy customers have continued to buy from your business after going through a recovery loop, that’s proof of its success – and a big win for your company! Companies need to ensure they’re using all the information at their disposal when checking if a strategy is working.
2. Reduced customer churn and complaints
It’s no secret that complaints can hit a business hard, particularly those that are escalated to regulatory bodies. It’s vitally important to take preventative measures as soon as possible to stop these problems from escalating further. By intervening and taking action promptly, brands can mitigate the cost of such penalties.
With that in mind, it’s best practice for companies to take note of their typical customer churn rates, complaint numbers and, if applicable, regulatory ratings. From there, it’s possible to set goals for improvements and give yourself targets to aim for. Half the battle with analysing the success of your Customer Recovery Loop is simply understanding the key metrics that represent success and tracking improvement against them. If you can track trends in the data that show customer churn or complaints are decreasing since your Recovery Loop was implemented, that’s a sure-fire sign it’s working.
3. Scoring higher
There are lots of different metrics that companies will use to judge success across different aspects of the business. Often, these will differ depending on the industry or business you’re working in, the people you’re reporting in to or even the stage of the customer journey you’re monitoring. Regardless of what your preferred metric is, what matters is to take note of the numbers when you first decide to deploy a Recovery Loop.
Ultimately, what’s important to everyone in the business is seeing those scores go up – whether they’re Customer Satisfaction or Net Promoter Score matters not; improved scores will positively impact the bottom line.
4. Reducing cost
One of the main considerations when justifying any business decision is cost – companies want to see a return on their investment. While it needn’t be expensive, a Recovery Loop is still an investment, and customer service teams will still want to see the financial benefits of their decision. Cost per contact and call handling times can be significantly reduced by capturing feedback in real-time, proactively keeping customers informed, and putting preventative measures in place for reoccurrence.
By empowering frontline staff with the right information and the tools they need to assist customers effectively, they can reduce the average handling time and cost of each call. Over time, this could lead to fewer calls and greater savings.
5. Better-engaged employees
The key to great customer service is that happy employees lead to happy customers and vice-versa. So much so, that McKinsey & Company has reported that companies that make a concerted effort to improve their CX also see employee engagement rates rise 20 percent on average. Frontline call centre staff will often be who a customer first engages with, so it’s important to get it right. First impressions are everything. If customers are coming to the brand with a problem, they need to be greeted with empathetic and knowledgeable staff to help them – but it’s up to the business to arm them with the tools they need!
At the beginning of your journey, capturing the voice of your employees as well as your customers in real-time can often add meaningful context to your customer feedback. For instance, if a customer complains that their payment was taken late, whilst your employee flags that the billing process is manual and time consuming, you have some context. This information can be used not just to improve the customer experience but to help out staff as well. Measuring employee satisfaction scores, staff retention, and productivity can help to see if the changes you’re making are having the desired impact. If not, you are then in a position to tweak accordingly.
In summary, checking whether or not your Customer Recovery Loop is working comes down to planning and metrics. You need to get a sense of the key metrics that measure the success of a Recovery Loop for your business. From there, you’ll have the base stats to compare and a benchmark to aim for, so that you can confidently say your Customer Recovery Loop is effective.