It’s a well-known truth: social media has heightened customer expectations. In fact, a recent study revealed that 42% of customers who complain on social media expect a response within an hour. And they expect the same turnaround time whenever they complain—whether day or night.
The best strategy for addressing social customers’ rising demands is to identify and manage customer dissatisfaction before it hits the web. Many brands have taken an important first step by implementing post-interaction surveys to let customers voice perceptions about their experiences. However, companies need to take this practice a step further—with a closed loop alerting (CLA) process that triggers real-time alerts every time any customer leaves negative feedback.
Why Every Company Needs to Close the Loop with Unhappy Customers
With CLA processes, organizations can quickly learn if a customer has left a negative survey response and take steps to address the customer’s concern. Resolving the issue—with both the customer and front-line team member responsible for the interaction—“closes the loop.”
A CLA approach yields significant business benefits. Among them:
- Surprising and delighting dissatisfied customers: A CLA alert is a signal to a front-line employee or manager that a customer may need follow-up contact. Most customers are grateful for a genuine response to their complaints. Effective CLA can generate significant goodwill among a company’s most vulnerable customer segment and demonstrate a clear commitment to customer service.
- Enhancing front-line team performance: CLA technologies link customer survey responses directly to the employee responsible for the interaction. Brands gain actionable and recurring insight on how each front-line employees engages with customers. Using this knowledge, companies can deliver targeted coaching to individual employees or teams to reduce issues and increase customer happiness.
- Identifying one-time or systemic issues: With CLA technology, brands can also gain real-time insight into how well their entire front-line organization is performing against customer experience standards. This provides clarity on whether a specific issue raised by a customer is a one-off concern or part of a more pervasive pattern. After uncovering systemic issues, leaders can take strategic steps to address day-to-day operational issues and empower their teams to deliver higher-quality customer experiences.
More Powerful Customer Insight Is on the Horizon
CLA is powerful today—but upcoming technology advances can help brands keep pace with escalating customer expectations. Here are three up-and-coming CLA evolutions:
- Tying to open-ended feedback: Traditional CLA practices have relied on quantitative survey input. Sophisticated technologies are emerging that trigger alerts based on qualitative, spoken-word feedback left by customers. This is a significant plus for companies seeking to maximize value of voice of the customer (VoC) programs.
- Making customer follow-up less labor intensive: Email has been the primary alert distribution method, but multi-modal alerts are on the rise. Brands will soon be able use email, SMS, and IVR to reach the employees who need to close the loop with customers. This is especially valuable for mobile teams that may have front-line employees or managers at distributed sites or out in the field.
- Engaging multiple teams in alert activity: The current best practice is sending a customer alert to the manager of the front-line team member responsible for the questionable interaction with the customer. However, a manager may not always be the best person to resolve a customers’ concern. New technologies will allow managers to distribute alerts to individuals or teams—and track these resolution attempts—to address issues swiftly.
A Must for Every Customer-Centric Company
Today, a single customer has the power to challenge even the hardiest of brands with a single negative tweet, post, or comment. Each year, consumers complain about brands more than 879 million times on social media. That equates to more than 100,000 complaints each hour.
To guard against this onslaught of social complaints, organizations need to closed loop alerting to address customer concerns as soon as they happen. With prompt complaint resolution, companies can do more than protect their reputations—they can also curb customer defections and inspire customers who voiced their unhappiness to become brand loyalists.
Of all the customer life stages, focusing on risk (because it can lead to defection) is an excellent strategy. One of the useful risk-mitigation methods I’ve long advocated is identifying, and resolving otherwise unexpressed complaints, because only a small percentage of customers with problems or complaints will actually communicate them to the vendor.
Thanks so much for your comment, Michael. Good to hear that you are an advocate of reaching out to at-risk customers.
In our experience, as effective as following-up with dissatisfied customers has proven to be, many companies are still struggling to do this effectively. They are missing key opportunities to retain customers and/or identify and correct systemic issues causing broader dissatisfaction. Companies with more mature CLA processes can start to look at ways of uncovering latent customer dissatisfaction and use this insight to adapt and improve their CX processes.
We also find that while customer recovery is a major benefit of CLA, following up with unhappy customers is a great way to understand the CX journey from customers’ eyes. This can also help companies better understand the behaviors of customers who have concerns, but don’t articulate them.
Excellent article, James. Picked up some useful points here. Social media has indeed, heightened customer expectations. Thanks, Niraj (Founder at hiverhq.com)