As we continue to adapt to the conditions caused by COVID-19, businesses and institutions are finding it more important than ever to stay connected in an unobtrusive, meaningful way. Pulse surveys can help you do this.

Customer experience surveys are at their core a communication method – designed to be quick for customers to answer, and easy for you to interpret. Our pre-built Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and Customer Effort Score (CES) survey templates measure sentiment systematically, but tracking those particular metrics may not be your top priority right now.

In our previous post on improving the customer experience, we went over how streamlining support and onboarding processes can help you retain customers during difficult times.

In this post, we’ll focus on how to adjust your customer experience program to be appropriate for the current situation. We’ll also speak to the importance of monitoring sentiment as you transition your company into uncharted territory.

We started Delighted to help businesses deliver great experiences by listening to their customers and using those insights to improve. A critical element to delivering on our mission is ensuring we provide world-class experiences on every platform, so our customers can connect with their customers at the right place and time.

Today, we are excited to launch a brand new way to gather feedback with Delighted – directly in your apps with our native mobile SDK for iOS. Now, you’ll be able to understand your iOS app users like never before.

In challenging and uncertain times, startups and established corporations alike face painful decisions as they pivot to accommodate unexpected circumstances. Staffing requirements get evaluated, product roadmaps further prioritized, tools cut, and marketing spend trimmed.

However, there is one area that absolutely should not be compromised: the customer experience.

For entrepreneurs starting out in online retail, Squarespace often pops up as the solution for establishing their ecommerce store and growing their brand. In fact, millions of people have already chosen Squarespace to build their online presence.

Why? Squarespace makes creating an impactful, optimized ecommerce store easy. The best-in-class web templates showcase your brand and its products in a way that entrepreneurs and customers love.

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.