Are You Linking Feedback to the Actual Experience?

Debbie Braney, Glassbox’s Vice President of Marketing, deciphers the customer feedback puzzle and delves into effective strategies for showcasing the impact of data-driven approaches in the market.

When you fix an issue brought up by a customer’s feedback, do you also measure the business metrics associated with this workflow? It’s important. Here’s why: After resolving the issue, you can examine the before-and-after metrics on both fronts – customer and business KPIs – to demonstrate impact.

According to Debbie Braney, VP of Marketing at Glassbox, to effectively measure the impact of customer experience (CX) initiatives, it is essential to have a comprehensive grasp of the business workflows, specifically the critical moments that significantly influence both KPIs.

Branley also talks about demystifying customer feedback and specific CX goals that BFSI marketers should set.

“Being able to connect feedback to that customer’s real experience and quickly understand the scale of a CX issue are the two keys to cracking the code on customer feedback and making it invaluable to businesses.”

Excerpts from the interview:

How can content and intent planning boost demand generation?

Generating inbound demand is one of the most scalable and cost-effective strategies any organisation can deploy, and content is at its core.

A strong content strategy is built on intent signals, often in the form of search terms and volumes. When you understand WHAT people are searching for, you can easily define content topics to attract organic visitors. When you layer in HOW OFTEN people seek that information, you can then prioritise the content to be created. Additionally, intent signals based on external content consumption help you understand which terms or topics will likely attract an audience and convert customers.

What is the main challenge with demystifying customer feedback? 

Customer feedback is essential for businesses looking to meet or exceed customer expectations in a competitive environment. But unfortunately, the sentiments delivered through traditional customer feedback mechanisms (like surveys, reviews or NPS/CSAT ratings) are rarely actionable for businesses.

For example, imagine seeing this review: “1 star – I spent 20 minutes trying to make a deposit, and it never worked. I’m done with Bank of XYZ.” What’s valuable is understanding the impact this issue has on a customer. However, what can the bank do about it? They don’t know who had this problem, what they actually experienced, whether it was an app or a connectivity problem – and most importantly, how many customers experienced the same problem.

Connecting feedback to that customer’s real experience and quickly understanding the scale of a CX issue are the two keys to cracking the code on customer feedback and making it invaluable to businesses.

What are some specific CX goals that BFSI marketers should set?

Any team’s goals should be aligned with the organisation’s primary objectives and expectations of marketing, which vary. That said, most marketing organisations are focused on customer acquisition or retention – or sometimes a combination of both. Metrics that tend to indicate both strong marketing performance and strong customer experience include:

Conversion rates – When an experience is easy and clear for the customer, they’re more likely to complete it, so in many scenarios, conversion rates are also an indicator of good CX.

Customer tenure – Happy customers stay. It’s that simple.

Customer satisfaction over time – Customer satisfaction ratings such as NPS, CSAT or ratings on review sites reflect a customer’s sentiment over their accumulated experience with your brand. So this can be an important way to understand the strength of your lifecycle marketing or engagement efforts.

How can marketers measure the impact of CX initiatives – towards revenue or brand building?

The key to measuring the impact of CX initiatives is clearly understanding the business workflows – the moments that matter – with both the customer and business KPIs that are impacted by those workflows.

For example, if customer survey feedback tells me customers struggle to complete the online loan application process, I need to do two things. First, I need to diagnose and fix the issue with the loan application workflow. But I also want to measure the business metrics associated with this workflow. Once I’ve completed the fix, I can examine the before-and-after metrics on both fronts to demonstrate impact.

What advice would you give marketing teams to use real-time data to make marketing decisions?

Real-time data is a huge advantage in enabling marketing teams to be more responsive to opportunities and obstacles impacting their performance. But as important as the timeliness of data – is the ability to eliminate data silos. Marketers rely on data from many sources (marketing automation, CRM, social platforms, etc.). And while some organisations have successfully aggregated that data into a single view, relatively few can say they have correlated all of that data so that they understand the cause-and-effect of performance changes in one channel or one campaign on customer experience, revenue or other critical business metrics.

Busting those data silos can be accomplished with sophisticated data engineering projects or simply by consolidating and prioritising tools that natively aggregate and correlate data or have the integrations to do so. Once you’re able to connect marketing data with critical business outcomes in real-time, you’ll be in a position to do true data-driven marketing.

Talk to us about one impactful Glassbox product with the most potential for the BFSI industry. 

Financial institutions have a blend of old and new technology in their stack and complex organisational structures that can hinder initiatives like customer experience, which require complete, usable data and cross-functional collaboration.

Glassbox’s Digital Experience Intelligence platform captures, analyses and visualises every aspect of the digital customer journey – from how they navigate, to errors and struggles they encounter, to the feedback they provide. This empowers product, marketing, and engineering teams (and more) to gain a deep understanding of customer behaviour, technical performance and business performance and make decisions that maximise the performance of their digital channels.