Please Email Me: The Customer Feedback Episode

Ethan Beute:
Customer feedback. Collecting customer feedback and using it well is one of two foundations for exceptional customer experience. If we’re not doing this well, it is so difficult to create and deliver a better experience. It’s also difficult to know that what we’re trying is actually working, where we know what to really lean in on and double down on versus what to scrap and try to fix again. The other foundation, by the way, is employee experience, employee engagement, and yes, employee feedback. My name is Ethan Beute. I’m chief evangelist at BombBomb, coauthor of the bestselling book, Rehumanize Your Business, host of The Customer Experience Podcast and host of the CX series on B2B growth, and I want your feedback.

Ethan Beute:
Email me Ethan, E-T-H-A-N, @bombbomb.com. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Again, my name is Ethan Beute. Last name is spelled B-E-U-T-E. I’m pretty sure I’m still the only Ethan Beute on LinkedIn so you can find me there. Connect and message me. Or you can reach out on your preferred podcast player, subscribe, leave a rating, leave a review. It’s so helpful, not just for other people, I know it helps improve the profile of this show, but it also helps me know what’s working, know what’s not, know what you want more of, know what you want less of. This is a really interesting format.

Ethan Beute:
So customer feedback, you are a customer of this show by virtue of the fact that you’re listening to it and I’d love your feedback. But customer feedback is a great place. If you’re listening to this show and other shows like it because you don’t have a formal CX function in your organization, or you don’t have specific CX initiatives, or maybe you’re in a role or a department that’s somewhat adjacent to customer experience, and some of the places it typically sprouts out of which is typically customer success, and you want to learn more. One of the best places you can start in improving customer experience is with the customer feedback you already have. You already have what you need to get started on this journey and on this mission.

Ethan Beute:
You just need to collect it maybe more effectively, certainly organize it more effectively, use it cross-departmentally, and make some specific actions and then watch for what happens as a result. Customer feedback is the way. You’re probably collecting customer feedback right now in a variety of ways, obviously online reviews, and online ratings, right? But you also have some verbatims that might go with some of those surveys. You might have customer satisfaction surveys that go out after their interactions with your company or with your support team. You probably have an NPS initiative or net promoter score.

Ethan Beute:
Not only do you get these scores and you’re able to do a lot with them quantitatively, for example, look at them by customer type or subscription type or industry or any of a variety of other factors, you can also look at the verbatim feedback because that thing is structured in a great, great way. On a scale of one to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product or service? Then why did you give us that number? The language people use to justify the number, their word choice, the tone, the feeling. It’s really funny, a seven is seven, right? That’s a passive, it’s not a promoter. It’s not a detractor. It’s a passive.

Ethan Beute:
But that seven comment might make it really feel like a 10, and you wonder, gosh, why didn’t they give us a nine or a 10? They seem to love X, Y, or Z about what we do or about us or about our team members, et cetera. Or that seven might actually feel more like a three or a four, and it’s like, wow, I’m surprised that they didn’t land in the detractor set because they seem very frustrated or very confused or very disappointed.

Ethan Beute:
Beyond this, you have social media commenting and reactions. You have unsolicited feedback that comes in by phone, by email, and by other channels. You have anecdotal stories and evidence coming out of your customer-facing teams. Some of that stuff is so valuable. Don’t let it just be a quick mention in a Slack channel. Don’t let it just be a passing comment on a Zoom call. Collect it, organize it, make meaning out of it, try to intersect it with product usage data or other sources of insights about your customers. What did they seem to feel? What did they seem to think? What are they saying? What are they doing? You have this available.

Ethan Beute:
Put together a cross-functional team if it’s too big for one person to do. Make the bad good. Find points of confusion, friction, frustration, cancellation, disappointment, and find those points and work to make those points better. Make the good better. Things that are working, do more of them. Again, keep an eye on those feedback channels to see what’s working and what isn’t. I know that’s a little bit of a simplified approach, but I don’t want people sitting on the sideline saying, “I know that customer experience is important. I’m just not sure where to start.” You have what you need and we have these conversations all the time on the show.

Ethan Beute:
Here are a couple episodes that have already released help you, episode 81 with Aaron Weiche of GatherUp. Aaron provides very specific recommendations on how to collect customer feedback more effectively and what to do with it. In fact, that’s what GatherUp helps companies do. More recently, just released episode 93 with Joe Huber of Sprout Social. He’s in a community-building role so of course, he talks about what community is, how to build community, how to create conversations and how to close the loop internally. When we create community, we allow our customers not just to talk to us and for us to talk to our customers, but we also let customers talk to customers and we can learn from that as well. But we can only learn if we collect that and close the loop, bring it back into the organization.

Ethan Beute:
So episodes 81 and 93 are episodes you can listen to today. Coming up very soon, episode 99 with Ian Luck of CustomerGauge. We talk a lot about account sentiment, monetized NPS, and unsiloing data, unsiloing this feedback so that more people can do their work more effectively in creating and delivering better experiences for customers. A few episodes after that on episode 104 with Stacy Sherman of Doing CX Right, we have an extensive conversation that really blends customer experience and employee experience and employee engagement. When we talk about feedback on that episode, we talk about both customer feedback and employee feedback. We talk about collecting it and using it as we’re developing or enhancing our products and services.

Ethan Beute:
We talk about closing the loop with the people who take care to give us their feedback, tell their stories, describe their experiences. Again, whether they’re employees or customers, we have to close that loop with them. Do we appreciate it? Are we doing something with it? What’s the result of them giving their time and energy and taking the initiative to provide that feedback? Then how do we close that loop internally and externally? How do we let customers know what’s going on internally? How do we let employees know what’s going on externally?

Ethan Beute:
So customer feedback is obviously incredibly useful in the customer experience effort. As a customer of this podcast, first, thank you so much. I sincerely appreciate you listening to this. I want you to reach out to me, ethan@bombbomb.com, or reach out to me on LinkedIn, Ethan Beute, E-T-H-A-N B-E-U-T-E on LinkedIn, connect, add a note to that connection request, message me. What do you like? What do you dislike? What are some of your favorite episodes? What do you have questions about? How can I make this show more useful for you?

Ethan Beute:
Of course, another way you can do that that’s helpful for me, it’s helpful for the show, it’s helpful in improving the podcast is going out to your preferred player, subscribing to the show if you’re not subscribed already, leave a rating and a review. The ratings are obviously very much appreciated, and the review in particular adds that color. That is the verbatim feedback that goes along with the NPS score, right? So in addition to the star, give a little bit of context. If this is a five-star show, why is it a five-star show? If it’s a three-star show, why do you think it’s a three-star show? What do you want more of? What could be better?

Ethan Beute:
I want your feedback. I appreciate you so much. If you ever want to go deeper, if you want to see video clips, if you want to see short write-ups, if you want links to some of the things we talk about in some of the episodes, you can always visit bombbomb.com/podcast, B-O-M-B-B-O-M-B.com/podcast. There, you have access to every episode and you can get to know the guests and the material a little bit better. Thank you so much for listening to The Customer Experience Podcast or the CX series on B2B growth. I welcome your feedback and I hope you have a great day.