How to turn reviews into revenue: Making the most of positive customer feedback

Source: MarketingTech The rise of online communities, peer review sites and social media has forever changed the impact of the customer voice. Customer feedback has evolved from something owned and managed by customer service teams to a force that influences every department across an organisation: product, HR, finance, IT, and marketing. Marketing agencies are experiencing this shift more acutely than most as often, in these types of companies, all these functions fall within a single person’s responsibilities – anyone from the CEO, the agency’s own marketing lead or even the office manager. In many cases, you’ll find the same person ticking off jobs that belong to very disparate job sets: everything from tracking leads to scheduling invoices, issuing marketing communications to chasing late payments. Running between tasks to put out one fire after another, it’s not difficult to see why customer feedback can fall to the bottom of the pile. It’s a classic case of the cobbler’s children having no shoes – agency heads and their teams advise clients on best practice but struggle to find the time to define their own approach to customer feedback.

A new currency

Not managing to engage with positive feedback could be costing marketing agencies:

  • New leads – customer testimonials = customer referrals
  • A greater number of sales – 88% of customers have been influenced by an online review when making a buying decision
  • Higher profit margins – highly-engaged customers spend 60% more per transaction

Missing out on the extra potential is one thing but, in the age of social media, failing to act in the face of a negative response could spell a serious nosedive to the bottom line for any business. It’s a new currency. Customer service experiences have a long-lasting impact with 24% continuing to seek out vendors for two or more years after a good experience. The distaste for bad customer service, however, has a bigger impact that can last even longer. The same survey found that 39% of customers continue to avoid vendors two years or more after a bad experience. Social media drives the majority of reviews and comments on customer service experiences. Unfortunately, it’s the bad experiences that drive the kind of viral social communications that brands would ordinarily crave.  45% of customers share bad service experiences on social media, surpassing the 30% who post about good ones.

Directing the roadmap

Feedback should always be welcome. Inviting and actioning feedback shows customers that their business is being taken seriously and that their custom matters to a company. Beyond just the financials, it can be an important health check for performance against a number of internal and external metrics; it takes satisfied customers and happy employees to create a positive brand image. However, even with all this wonderful information, many companies fail to utilise and manage their feedback to further propel themselves ahead of their competition. Tech-led approaches like ‘the lean start-up’ and DevOps have infiltrated mainstream business culture and entrepreneurship, particularly in small to mid-sized agencies, advocating iterative product development models fuelled by customer insight. In this way, customer feedback can be used to inform the roadmap, arming companies with the confidence to launch new services, safe in the knowledge of product-market-fit. Some organisations, like Salesforce, have taken this a step further by co-creating new offerings with their customer base. Last year, this led to more than 50 new ideas for product development, signposting opportunities for new revenue streams through services that have already been endorsed by loyal customers.

Where to start

But this level of engagement can’t be manufactured overnight. Surprisingly, 60-80% of customers who describe themselves as satisfied do not go back to do more business with the company that initially made them happy. Often, it’s due to the lack of connection. It takes time to create genuine loyalty – resources that small to mid-sized sized businesses often don’t have. And managing customer feedback can be daunting, especially as the functionality needed to tackle such a big task can often lie amidst a mix of the company’s existing tools and platforms. The first step is understanding where you’re starting from. Small to mid-sized agencies looking to leverage customer insight for growth need to have full view of the customer lifecycle, the sales pipeline and the finances. Only then will they be able to develop the holistic strategy required to drive engagement and loyalty from customers.

What brands are built on

A company’s approach to customer feedback is an important consideration in the company’s culture, brand image, and communications strategy. Failing to make it a priority could risk alienating existing customers, losing the engagement of current employees and countering the brand image that other aspects of marketing have worked so hard to achieve.

Transforming customer experience into an actionable marketing strategy: A guide

Source: MarketingTech The workforce as we know it is changing and companies must be ready to adapt to fast change as we become ever more tech-centric. However, despite the digital noise there is one element that will always remain a constant requirement for success; delivering an excellent customer experience (CX) and maintaining a well-received brand image. In our highly connected ‘always on’ digital world, CX combined with word of mouth is potentially one of the most powerful marketing tools for brands today, backed up by a study that shows 92% of consumers believe suggestions from people they know over any other form of advertising. Advancing technology is now allowing for these opinions to be voiced on a global scale across the likes of social media and review sites. With this opportunity to reach a wealth of potential new customers, brands which make themselves personable and their service customer-centric can work to set themselves apart from competitors, without the need for extremely elaborate marketing strategies.

CX at its best

Some successful brands are where they are today through the power of word of mouth alone, as opposed to costly advertising. One clear example is online clothing and shoe retailer, Zappos. The company has developed a reputation of having excellent service and with its ability to please customers achieved through first hand customer insights. The website has ensured that consumers are now loyal and return to buy products – ultimately driving customer retention and an increase in profit. Ensuring customers enjoy experiences with a brand, the way businesses market themselves as well as the way they develop customer care campaigns can all help to create a sense of understanding and community  amongst customers. For example, taking the time to make communication unintrusive, human and resonate more personally can be a key driver of quality CX. According to a survey on content marketing, the majority (80%) said delivering personalised content, for example personalised emails targeted to suit individual experiences is more effective than delivering ‘unpersonalised’ content to visitors. As a result of this, the customers that receive personalised content will most likely continue to use your product/service and endorse your business to others. A great example of this executed effectively is Netflix’s email campaigns. Despite being one of the largest companies worldwide, Netflix has mastered the tactic of personal recommendations and suggests shows that are similar to what their customers have previously watched. As long as the brand has enough data to provide insights on this, this is a great way to be proactive in making the customer experience efficient, easy and seamless, which ultimately helps to nurture loyalty, as well as short-term sales.

Turning CX into actionable insights

Social media now also plays a particularly crucial role for brands looking to market themselves through good customer journeys. For many, it is now a core marketing channel with the potential to reach a wealth of new customers and can also be used as a research tool for understanding the problems in the customer journey and improving their experience. However, the solutions readily available to businesses now mean that these satisfied customer insights can now be taken one step further, to be measured and then developed into new ways to market their service. The sheer volume of conversations taking place on platforms like Twitter and popular review sites make them an effective way for marketers to not only reach customers, but also enables for positive customer experiences to be published and interacted with. Integrating tools into these channels then also allows these insights to be turned into a research opportunity, highlighting customers pain points and allowing companies to improve overall experience. The more customer insights a business receives about their product or service, the more you learn and understand your customers patterns and trends associated with your business. With customer insights coming through as data in a variety of forms – mainly structured and unstructured, businesses can put the insights together, whether it be big or small and gain a clearer picture of your customers’ way of thinking and how they can dramatically enhance and boost customer experience. There are however, some challenges that brands can be faced with when it comes to using customer experience to inform their marketing strategy. Companies can often spend a lot of time gathering and measuring customer insight data they receive and meticulously mapping all customer pain points to try and tailor their marketing to overcome these customer perceptions. Using solutions to make this process as efficient as possible can help brands to maximise the opportunity to turn CX into new avenues for growth. Through the likes of analytics tools, which offer insights into the sentiment of direct engagements with a brand from the public across various digital channels and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, companies can gather and measure their interactions with current and potential customers, understand them more effectively and ultimately use organic insights of endorsement and satisfaction to fuel their marketing approach. With technological advancements increasing daily, it is becoming a lot easier for companies to weave in their customer insights and turn this into an intelligent marketing strategy. Brands must now realise the influence that customer experiences has on consumer decision-making today, if they are to succeed in using it to market themselves in our increasingly digital world.