This week, we split the group as usual into those with an SMB interest (less than $50k ACV) and those with an Enterprise interest and then we dove right in to your questions—you guys had loads to discuss about how to build closed-loop feedback programs for customer engagement. 

Here’s what was top of mind this week… 

SMB 

Big thanks to this week’s SMB facilitator Emily Campos. 

❓ QUESTIONS ❓

Brian Hartley asked: How are you actually communicating with the customers about your efforts to resolve the feedback that you have received?

Sara Bochino wanted to know how people are packaging feedback to their executives, and how they’re holding those leaders accountable.

Kelly Hook was looking for examples of collection methods—she’s using Pendo, as well as in-app feedback / score gathering. She was looking for tips on the most efficient ways to collect and collate feedback. 

Lilith Antunovic wondered how statistically relevant the whole NPS thing is anyway... How much should we be relying on NPS? She’s a little doubtful about how much the data really reflects true sentiment.  Plus, how are people presenting NPS to customers, and when—what’s the best frequency?

Finally, since NPS doesn’t tell you the ‘why’… Emily was keen to understand how others are getting further and deeper insights into high or low ratings. 

💡 KEY SMB TAKEAWAYS 💡

• NPS can really be both a leading and a lagging measure for CS. It’s lagging with respect to an individual customer and their specific health and sentiment, but certainly leading when applied across the entire customer base to help you discover how to create change that positively impacts overall sentiment, loyalty, and ultimately renewals. 
• Overall, it’s pretty difficult to make customer feedback ‘real’ for the executive team, and without their buy-in, a customer-feedback program is often doomed from the start. Being able to aggregate customer feedback in a succinct way that ties to financial performance is a great way to build awareness and priority around this. When you work to identify what is meaningful to your executive team and tie customer feedback into both OKR and voice-of-the-customer processes, you’re able to more efficiently close the loop internally on customer feedback.
• Facilitator Emily Campos’s big takeaway from the SMB discussion was something that Joseph Schmitt’s company does: They integrate all NPS feedback into a public Slack channel, so the entire company has visibility into it. Emily thought this was a great way to keep customer sentiment top of mind and create an atmosphere of customer-centricity across the whole organization.

🥳 SMB ROCKSTARS 🥳

Shout-out to our SMB NPS rockstars Lauren Culbertson, Chris Jones, Joseph Schmitt and Kelly Hook. Thanks for your valuable contributions to the discussion; you’re part of the reason the Gain Grow Retain community is so strong! 

ENTERPRISE

Jay Nathan was this week’s facilitator for the Enterprise breakout group. 

❓ QUESTIONS ❓

We had a ton of questions and discussion points within the Enterprise breakout during this session! Here are some of the highlights:

Andreas Knoefel was interested to learn how others are closing the feedback loop between the customer and the product team, specifically—and which tools people are using for this.

Jim Jones asked a great question: How do you drive the culture change and change management requires for real closed-loop feedback? He also had a great tactical question: Should we be running different NPS surveys for different key stakeholders? 

David Ellin was curious to hear about the lessons the rest of the group have learned from running CSAT, and what people would do differently. 

Scott Hopper wondered how many iterations to expect to get NPS to a ‘well-oiled’ process.

Mariano Obludzyner was looking for advice on how best to follow-up with detractors, while Phyllis needed some tips on getting customers to respond and share feedback in the first place. 

💡 KEY ENTERPRISE TAKEAWAYS 💡

• Never forget that NPS is just part of an overall strategy and should be paired with an overall Customer Effort Score.
• Jeremy Donaldson’s suggestion was to meet with the customer to ensure the survey is white listed, explain why they should care, and close the loop on the feedback the next month.
• Kristi Faltorusso shared a program on the GGR community.
• Effie Mansdorf suggested adding a way to automatically set up a meeting with their CSM if a customer has a negative response—through Calendly for example. This also goes for automatically connecting promoters to the exec team!  
• Ben Elseroad had a great suggestion, especially for those struggling to gather the feedback: Follow up is key, so send automated responses with the results, regardless of whether a user participated. When they know “you hear them”, the responses will come through thick and fast next time.

🥳 ENTERPRISE ROCKSTARS 🥳

Kudos to David Ellin, Jeremy Donaldson and Brian LaFaille for their valuable contributions this week! You help make Gain Grow Retain the awesome community we all love. 

🔍 RESOURCES 🔍

Here are some of the great resources you guys shared this week:

• Profiting From Customer Experience whitepaper from Clicktools
• Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers from HBR
• The Fallacy of the Net Promoter Score by Cambridge University 
• How to Measure Customer Experience (CX) in 2020 by Jay Nathan

Until next time—let’s Gain, Grow, Retain!