This post is a contribution by Brandon Sanders, Former Acquisition Marketing Manager for HubSpot, and current Growth Marketer for Stash.

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

– Sam Walton, Founder of Walmart and Sam’s Club

Think about Walton’s quote for a minute. 

Whether your business is a startup or in growth or scale mode, attracting, engaging, and delighting your ideal audience is key to not only surviving, but thriving. Why? 80% of future profits come from 20% of current customers. 

Having the right tools to make your customers happy – fast – is critical for all scaling organizations. Especially as companies around the world are recognizing and achieving the benefit of prioritizing the customer experience. 

ActiveCampaign is a powerful platform with a myriad of automation and CRM tools to help customize, organize, track, and report on all stages of the customer lifecycle – from marketing engagement to closing a customer deal and supporting them thereafter. 

As of today, you can automatically send Delighted surveys at any (and every) part of the customer journey directly through ActiveCampaign. 

We sat down with Michael Bair, SVP of Customer Experience at FIGS to learn how his career learnings helped him build a flourishing CX program at the leading direct-to-consumer healthcare apparel and lifestyle brand for healthcare professionals.

Read the full FIGS case study here. 

Can you tell us how you got started in customer experience?

I was lucky enough to take a non-traditional path. I spent my first seven years in sales at a Fortune 50 bank and then moved into customer service. When I first started in customer service, I thought to myself, “This is my calling, this is what I love doing.” And over my career, I realized it was even more than that. Not only did I want to serve customers, I wanted to serve the very best people in the world.

Have you ever sent or received an annual employee experience survey that asks questions such as “How satisfied are you with your physical workspace?” or “How likely are you to recommend this company to your friend?” 

Employee experience surveys are common, though recent studies have shown that, in actuality, many companies have not made employee engagement a priority [1]. 

Now, more than ever, organizations are shifting their experience models from a “need to work” to a “want to work” mindset to capture and keep the best talent while competing with companies that are doing the same [2]. In other words, a once-a-year survey is no longer enough to understand your employees’ needs, stay competitive, retain talent, and maintain successful output.

Collecting and analyzing survey data is critical for pinpointing where you can improve your business. It’s encouraging to see a high number of positive responses, but what if some of those positive statements are unconsciously biased? What if some of your “yes” responses should actually be “no?” 

The truth is, it happens often. And acquiescence bias is likely to blame. 

When collecting survey data from customers, it’s important to do everything possible to avoid getting biased answers. When you count on customer feedback for actionable insights, biased answers will cause you to take the wrong actions – and taking the wrong actions can have serious consequences for your business.

All businesses rely on customer loyalty for brand recognition and revenue growth. How often they come back to purchase products and services, how dedicated they are to your brand, and whether they are happy with the customer service matters to the success of your company. And, the first step to retaining customers is by understanding and utilizing insights from Voice of the Customer (VoC) data. 

In this post, we’ll explore the importance of actionable VoC feedback, common VoC methodologies, impactful VoC questions to ask your customer, and review how all of it can make a significant, positive impact on your business.

Delighted’s goal has always been to be the fastest and easiest way to gather customer feedback, which depends on us enabling you, our customers, to do everything yourselves. That way, you can get it done fast, and get it done right. But as Delighted has evolved, our feature set has exploded (did you catch that we’ve released three new survey types in the past three weeks??). There’s more to Delighted than meets the eye.

That’s why we’re excited to announce our brand new Delighted Core Certification program: a free learning course and exam that takes you through all of the ins and outs of Delighted so you can become your organization’s CX rockstar. You’ll also get a badge to share that validates your customer experience management expertise (within your company, the CX community, and the world!).

As our customers expand their experience management programs to multiple touchpoints across the customer lifecycle, they’ve let us know that they’d like a bit more flexibility in the rating scales at their disposal.

That’s why, right on the heels of our new eNPS and PMF surveys, we’re excited to announce two more survey templates to help you optimize how you collect feedback and measure your customer experience:

1. A 3-point Smiley Customer Satisfaction Score survey (CSAT-3)
2. A 7-point Customer Effort Score survey (CES-7)

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These two survey templates supplement our existing 5-point CSAT and CES surveys.

There’s no sugarcoating the fact that achieving and maintaining product/market fit is a constant struggle. And it doesn’t matter what stage of growth you’re in – no startup lucks into PMF, and no enterprise holds onto it forever.

To support you in making your product experience a cornerstone of your brand along with your customer and employee experience, we’re thrilled to announce the newest survey template to our lineup: Product/Market Fit (PMF) surveys. 

Also known as the “Sean Ellis test,” PMF surveys ask users a simple question:

“How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?”

Customers answer on a 3-point negative scale. The more people who answer “Very disappointed,” the stickier your product is, and the closer you are to product/market fit.

Delighted PMF surveys are not the magic bullet to achieving product/market fit, but they will make the journey that much easier – the Delighted way.

At the end of the day, do your employees feel a sense of pride in the work they’ve accomplished? Do they feel motivated to reopen their laptops the next day to keep pursuing and achieving their goals? Do they feel productive, valued, and recognized for their contributions?

The answers to these questions reveal how satisfied your employees are. And while you want to understand what makes each of your employees happy and motivated, it’s also critical that you understand the overall level of satisfaction your employees feel at work, too. 

Guest contribution by Benjamin Granger, Head of EX Advisory Services I Adjunct Faculty at the Qualtrics XM Institute.

Employee surveys are some of the most effective ways to understand employee attitudes, beliefs, and feelings.

That’s why it’s critical to understand the structure of employee surveys and how to create impactful ones for your organization. 

Guest contribution by Christopher Beck, Product Manager at MediaMath

Simply put, product/market fit is the ability of a product to satisfy the needs of a good market. 

For example, Uber and Lyft can fit the needs of people who want an easily accessible method of transportation on demand. These are users who do not have the patience to call up a cab company and wait for them to find a driver in your area – these users also may not want human interaction.

The failure of a product to understand consumers and the external factors that affect their decisions is a failure to find the right product/market fit. If there is no market for your product or if the market demand isn’t strong enough, it’s effectively dead in the water: no one will use it, and even worse, no one will pay for it.

Guest contribution by Benjamin Granger, Head of EX Advisory Services I Adjunct Faculty at the Qualtrics XM Institute.

In a world where buzzwords seem to fluctuate daily, employee engagement remains one of the hottest topics in HR after over two decades in the spotlight. And there’s a good reason for that.

What is employee engagement? 

Engagement is an attitude that employees form about their organization and their work. 

It’s no secret that Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a leading customer experience metric, used by hundreds of businesses around the world to measure customer loyalty and brand perception. Quick-to-implement and easy-to-analyze, NPS is the gold standard for tracking and acting on feedback – and at Delighted, we know it well.

That’s why we thought it was time to dive into the world of employee experience and use the same NPS logic towards bridging experience gaps, internally.

We’re excited to introduce a powerful new metric available to all Delighted users: Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) surveys.

Guest contribution by Dmytro Zaichenko Marketing Specialist at Mailtrap

Many companies ask their customers for feedback with email surveys, often after a product has been received or a service has been completed. Ideally, your customers see your request, open the email survey, and provide their feedback.

Though the flow sounds simple enough, in practice, there are many nuanced approaches you can try to get your customer to open the email in the first place. Most important of all is the email survey subject line. Let’s go over 7 proven strategies for crafting email survey subject lines to increase your open and survey completion rates.

Email survey subject line importance

The email subject line is the second-most critical influencer of email open rates. For email surveys, it’s arguably the most important factor you continually refine over time.