Committed to providing businesses of every size with an easy-to-use customer experience platform for collecting, managing, and acting on customer feedback, Delighted is happy to announce our latest integration with customer service platform, Gladly.

Gladly empowers customer care teams to provide “radically personal” customer service by aggregating conversations from multiple channels, from voice to messaging, in one customer timeline.

Consumers experience your brand in many different ways, whether by using your product and interacting with customer support, or through word-of-mouth on channels outside of your control. And with each new interaction, their perception of your brand can change, potentially leading to a new customer or a lost one.

Welcome to a new era of marketing and service in which your brand is defined by those who experience it.”

– Brian Solis, Principal Analyst and Futurist, Altimeter

At Delighted, our goal is to provide businesses of all sizes with one easy-to-use customer experience (CX) platform for collecting and acting on customer feedback. Our many integrations simplify the process.

In light of this, we’re excited to announce our latest integration with Friendbuy. Now you can easily display personalized referral links to you promoters, directly from the Delighted survey experience. Entice your top advocates to share your brand with their friends and family.

When it comes to sending Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, timing is everything. Selecting the precise time to solicit feedback from your customers can have a huge impact on both the quality and quantity of the responses you receive. If you send your NPS survey too early, your customers may not have a full story to tell. If you survey too late, you could lose the raw emotion felt during the experience, as well as those critical details that tend to fade away over time.

We’ve previously written about why you should be following up with detractors. This is standard practice for anyone running a successful NPS program, but we often see companies overlook the massive upside of leveraging promoters to their advantage.

A promoter, by definition, is a loyal enthusiast of your brand. They will give your business an NPS score of 9 or 10 which means they are “very” to “extremely” likely to refer your brand to friends and family. Essentially, promoters are your biggest fans and can amplify your company’s strengths, drive referrals, coach new users, and even help guide the product roadmap.

Often used as a barometer for brand health, Net Promoter Score surveys measure customer loyalty by identifying customers as promoters, passives, and detractors by asking:

“How likely are you to recommend ABC Company?”

Answers are then given on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the “very likely” to recommend. Those who answer 9 or 10 are called “promoters,” and they are your brand’s biggest fans. Passives are customers who answer 7 or 8. Passive customers are not likely to hinder your business with negative word-of-mouth, nor are they likely to recommend your business.

Back in 2015, Forrester Research uncovered that customer experience was the number one priority for business and technology leaders. Fast forward almost 5 years and CX is still top of mind for brands looking to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Considering that it costs up to 6 times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one, the immediate and long-term ROI of customer experience is encouraging many businesses to incorporate CX metrics and benchmarks into their definitions of brand health and success. This focus on customer experience is yielding some impressive returns:

How do you fix something that’s not working?

For many businesses, identifying a problem and going to market with its solution is often difficult. On the surface, what might appear as the problem may actually be only a symptom of a much larger, underlying issue. More often than not, many brands get caught up in fixing these symptoms by addressing the issues that are easily visible, without actually identifying and remediating the root cause. Thus, the resulting solutions are often short-sighted and ineffective, with similar or new symptoms reappearing as customer needs change and businesses grow.

ROX is the new customer experience ROI.

Let’s get right into it — how customers perceive your brand can influence the success of your business more than ever before. Many brands are investing heavily in customer experience (CX) and, as we explore below, the numbers don’t lie — those allocated resources can yield some serious returns.

Seamless and personal, the omnichannel retail experience, when done correctly, is built entirely around accessibility and customer experience. As simple as that sounds, omnichannel retail is the result of melding dozens of customer touchpoints and activities into a non-linear customer journey.

Those who have mastered omnichannel have a holistic understanding of their customers in terms of what their needs are, and how they want those needs fulfilled.

With retail stores filing for bankruptcy and closing left and right (Barney’s, Forever 21, Toys R Us, Sears, etc.), it’s evident that retail shopping is going through a change: the so-called “retail apocalypse.”

It’s also fair to say that a mix of factors — the rise of ecommerce plus the increased operational costs of leasing land for a traditional brick-and-mortar store — have a lot to do with it.

A recent Walker ecommerce study reveals that by 2020, customer experience will emerge as a leading ecommerce brand differentiator.

Brands will have to differentiate themselves not based on price and product (as they have in the past), but rather on the experience that they provide to customers in both their physical and online retail stores.

Historically, the backbone of retail has been predicated around selling goods from a physical location. In the pre-internet days, department, warehouse, discount, big box, and mom-and-pop stores were where consumers would purchase goods for personal use.

Retail customer experience was predicated around these physical elements and touchpoints: Are the employees helpful? Does the store carry the products customers are looking for? Does their return policy make it easy for customers to easily exchange the product if it doesn’t match expectations?

Delighted Kiosk, our newest survey experience, collects point-of-service customer feedback at physical retail locations in real-time. Like the rest of Delighted’s customer experience products, Kiosk features simple setup and easily syncs with your existing Delighted account and dashboard, so all of your customer feedback is in one place.

The value of a strong Net Promoter Score (NPS) is that it can indicate if your business is delivering on the promises that it’s making to customers. While there are many reasons and methods to measure customer experience (CX), keeping tabs on the perception of your customers via the Net Promoter methodology can be incredibly valuable for benchmarking the health of your business. For instance, high NPS scores positively correlate to customer retention, referral acquisition, and strong brand awareness.