So, what makes employee experience the No.1 concern in bettering customer service?

Well, employees, especially the front-line staff, serve not just as a medium of engagement between the product and the customers but also represent your brand and the philosophy behind your brand – how your employees treat customers is a fair reflection of how you treat them.

With that being said, what can brands do to fix the employee experience?

Research has shown that the Net Promoter Score®, also known as NPS®, acts as a growth indicator for an organization. In fact, businesses which are leaders in the Net Promoter System grow at more than twice the rate of their competitors. Therefore, by using NPS as a foundation, a business can significantly boost growth and profits.



What is the Net Promoter Score?
The Net Promoter Score is a metric designed to measure customer loyalty. It is said to be one of the most important metrics for a business to measure loyalty, paving way for ultimate professional success. It tracks how customers spread the word about a brand to their peers, friends, and family. The developers of the NPS say that this representation results in free word-of-mouth marketing for a business.

Deploying Net Promoter Surveys
Some businesses implemented Net Promoter Surveys as a way to drastically improve relationships with their customers. It provides significant feedback – the perspective of customers – thereby empowering companies with enough data to easily track customer loyalty as a metric. These Net Promoter Surveys gather information that companies can then act on in order to increase their NPS.

Empathy Is Key To Customer Delight


Search Instagram for #retailtherapy. As of April 21, 2015, there were 595,502 posts. Shopping is not a chore anymore. Some don’t even plan for it. More often than not, it’s driven by pure impulse. And pretty much, almost always is considered a mood lifter.

So as a retailer, the question you need to ask yourselves is, ‘are we making this mood-lifting experience delightful?’

If yes, do you know what the biggest contributor to providing a complete customer experience is? It’s the feeling of empathy.

Four Effective Tips To Bring Empathy Into Your Game


Empathetic sales representatives add that competitive advantage to traditional brick and mortar retailers. With that being said, how do you instill a sense of empathy in them?

Here are some valuable tips.

1. Help customers find the products they are looking for.

2. Understand their frustration at the unavailability of products.

3. Apologize and assure to notify them or even taking the next step and deliver the product to their doorstep when it becomes available.

4. Greet your regular customers by their first name at the billing counter and give them customized offers.

A large set of customers love the personal interaction and the human factor while dealing with their brands. Thus the onus is on you now to recognize your customers’ needs and doing something about it. And when you do that, your customers will reward you with their loyalty and also become strong advocates of your brand.

Why do customers choose your brand? One of the reasons is that there’s something about their personality that resonates with your brand. There’s an underlying connection that maps you with their personality.

This is one of the key ingredients to create a delighted set of customers by leveraging this connection. Just like brands, customers are unique and have a persona of their own. Customers would like this persona to be acknowledged, flattered and catered to. This is a potential opportunity for brands to explore as they’re willing to pay a premium for customer delight.

Customer Delight At The Corner Store

Have you, as a little child, been to that petty store at the corner of your street to buy candies?

What makes you remember the old man in the petty store to this date? It is very likely that the storekeeper would have, at some point, asked you a question or two about yourself; your school, some recent film that you’d seen or a cricket match. It goes beyond the transactional side of business and you experience a connection with the seller. It is simply because of the connection that happened due to things that you like.

How to Improve Customer Service & Why
Everybody loves a smile. Everybody hates a snarl. Your customers are no exception.

In Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram, Karla Saaranen describes Leopold Café in Mumbai as the “best place to be treated like dirt”. While an establishment as iconic as Leopold might be able to get away with a bit of rudeness here and there, it’s wise to know that almost nobody pays to be treated like dirt. In a world filled with an assortment of stresses, people place a premium on being treated like human beings. Fail to do that, you are doing a great deal of service to your competitor.

At CloudCherry, we believe customers are our backbone and value employees and influencers who make customers their top priority. This year, we came up with an idea to award such talented CX experts. The CX Champion Contest was all about nominating the best CX superheroes who go above and beyond their limits to surprise the customer and make them feel happy about the brand or business. There was a $1000 dollar cash prize along with recognition from leadership team, bragging rights for a long time and off course a special surprise worthy of a champion.

We received 100+ nominations that made us aware of real talent being recognised at organisations. Peer-to-peer recognition is a key factor at driving motivation within a company and the CX champion contest showed us that how well people who perform are admired by others. Our criteria were to choose the best above the rest. We asked for CX stories that were inspiring in certain ways where a CX lover (who may or may not be a part of the customer support team) had gone beyond expectations to make a customer feel important. Solving out their issues or creating a better deal or making a small change from the backend to make the customer’s problem addressed in no time at all.

Going through these nominations, we found that only choosing one story would be an injustice to the best ones that deserve real recognition, and hence, we finalized 3.

Gartner reports from 2018 that 52% of marketers with CX responsibility expect their budgets to remain the same or decrease. However, expectations with the importance of CX is continuing to grow. 23% of B2B CMO’s see CX as a top 3 objective. So how do Marketers that assume CX responsibility address this with less budget without giving up important technology needed for other aspects of Marketing? This research appears to demonstrate a clear truth: it is often easier to say something than to do it. So how do business leaders start developing a customer experience strategy that keeps the engine of marketing running with the least amount of friction? The answer to me is easy – do nothing without input from customers and as a marketer stop spamming your potential customers and engage with them. Our customers are in control, not us.

What have proverbs got to do with NPS®?
Let me explain. In a customer-facing business, making sure that you deliver on your customers’ expectations and exceed them in time is a key differentiator. And NPS® is a very potent tool to educate you about how your customers feel about your brand. Unless, every employee in your organization feels the power that lies within the “Ultimate Question”, its success is not guaranteed. As the leader of the pack, it is your responsibility to ensure that this is communicated well and regularly. The metaphorical expression that proverbs rely on is bound to make a deep impact on your employees, who are familiar with these adages already! Hence, this.

Considering how often phrases like “A stitch in time saves nine” or “Black sheep of the family” come in handy, this post is bound to make a difference to all you thought leaders and inspiration-generators. Let us know how well this fares with your employees in your next huddle with them!

We often hear leaders say, “We want our people to have a better service mindset.”

What is a mindset?
Here is one example. People often describe other people as either ‘glass half full’ or ‘glass half empty’. What they are referring to is a mindset, a fundamental way to view the world.

Mindset includes a person’s attitudes and assumptions, values, beliefs, preferences, standards, and judgments. These are the family points-of-view that filter our perceptions and create meaning in our lives. These familiar reference points are learned throughout our lives, and may not be easily changed.

So how can we foster a better service mindset, at home, in the community, and at work? Many leaders made the mistake of simply sending people for training and hoping to see some magical result, only to realize that the change – if any – is short lived.

If you want a better service mindset to permeate your organization’s culture, then much more than training is needed; a total and enduring commitment is required.

Why?
Because changing mindset means showing people another point of view, sharing a different perspective, a teaching them a better way of thinking and behaving. You need to show people what a service mindset looks like, hear what it sounds like, and help them discover what this new way of thinking and behaving feels like. This requires teaching, demonstrating, encouraging, and reinforcing with an eco-system to support these attitudes, beliefs and behaviors consistently over time.

Over many years of working with leaders and organizations, I have found the following 4 Es to be paramount in cultivating better service mindset: Empathy, Education, Eco-system, and Encouragement.

“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion” – Dale Carnegie.

Emotion plays a critical role in our daily lives. Be it in shaping our relationships or day-to-day brand choices, we look for a connect at some level. And companies that tap into this emotion and get it right are usually the ones customers flock to. They are also the ones to turn customers into loyal, lifelong evangelists.

To ace customer loyalty, however, any brand requires a deep understanding of customer sentiment. How do you make your customers feel at every interaction? Are they happy, sad, ecstatic or frustrated? And do you have the right means to decode this emotion?

The common drawbacks with most systems designed to unravel customer sentiment are that the process can be time-consuming, leading to inaccurate outcomes. Also, given the level of subjectivity involved, the technology associated with decoding emotion has to be continuously adaptable and dynamic.

“There’s a big difference between a satisfied customer and a loyal customer. Never settle for ‘satisfied’” – Shep Hyken.

With a plethora of brands vying for the customer’s attention span, loyalty is definitely hard-earned in today’s marketspace. It takes a lot of time and effort to turn a customer into a fan, a follower, and someone who would willingly publicize your brand’s name to the outside world.

Winning the trust and confidence of customers means improving your Net Promoter Score – the standard measure of customer loyalty. The idea is simple: create more promoters (brand advocates) than detractors (unhappy customers) to witness an upsurge in your NPS.

So, how do you tap into your NPS program and improve the score? What are some of the most effective ways of improving customer loyalty?

What differentiates you from your competitors? How can you stand out from the crowd?

Look hard into what your organization provides: your products and services, your delivery systems, your employee’s attitudes and the way you build relationships with customers. But what truly differentiates your organization from the rest?

Customers today are not just buying product and services, they are expecting an experience. For example, customers visit Starbucks not just for the coffee, but also for the comfy chairs, great smells, trendy people, and free WiFi. Starbucks’ goal is to be the “Third Place” in our daily lives, another place you visit regularly, just like home and work. They understand what differentiates them is the best possible customer experience.

Sad to say, many organizations still miss the point. Service is not about what you do. Service is your customer’s experience from what you do.
To illustrate the importance of the customers’ experience, I share my colleague’s recent experience at a local spa.

Insights shine a light on hidden opportunities. CX insights can help you connect experience to your business goals, beat the competition and deliver a consistently delightful experience to your customers. Gaining insight is essential to your success.

At CloudCherry, we want to disrupt the customer experience industry. There’s a lot of noise out there about what CX teams should be doing. But rarely do platforms actually deliver on the thought leadership they put out through their PR efforts. Did you know – every time a buzzword is used, an influencer gets their wings?

Thought leadership is nice, but action is better. Here are five insights that your CX platform is probably not equipped to gather (but should be)

Journey-based insights
Everyone is talking about journeys. Everyone! But 99% of enterprises don’t bring those journeys into their CX programs. Most journey mapping exercises start out great with gathering everyone in a room, brainstorming touchpoints and designing a visual journey of how customers move through their interactions with your company.

However, that’s often where it stops. If you’re lucky, you might get your design team to take the sticky notes off the wall and put together a well-designed map. Most teams will never look at their journey map again – and very few companies will actually use it to inform their CX strategy.

Here’s how this needs to change. Your journey map is the most critical document your CX team has available to you. It helps you understand the context around your customer’s interactions with your company. It should frame every decision and every conversation you have with your customers. For example, as customers are becoming familiar with your product or service, you can send them relevant information at each stage in the journey to move them forward. Even better, you can see how each conversation resonates through NPS and CSAT feedback. The only way to do that is to bring your journey into your CEM so that you can coordinate activities along the journey.

Journey insights move your team from running surveys to having real-time, contextual conversations with your customers.

As more and more companies have started to enter marketspaces around the globe, it translates to a wider range of options for customers. If they are displeased with the products/services you are providing, they will most likely go to your competitors. However, if your business is able to consistently delight customers and exceed their expectations, it will have a significantly positive impact on revenue and profitability.

Exceeding Customer Expectations is easier when you listen
To consistently exceed customer expectations, a business must be aware of what their customers want. You have to take into account all the feedback customers provide, whether solicited or unsolicited. And by listening to what they have to say, you can improve your offerings in such a way that you not only cement the loyalty of existing customers but also attract customers from competing brands through positive word-of-mouth marketing.

You can derive valuable insight on your customers by getting to know what they expect from your brand, and also by asking them questions on how your competitors are any better or different. For example, if you run a restaurant and you come to know that your competitors are doing something different that customers like, get a tangible insight from this that can directly contribute to shaping the customer experience.

It goes without saying that engaged employees not only deliver better results, but they are the roots of a world-class company culture and in turn lead to happier customers.

Simply put, employee experience and engagement should precede customer experience. Even before you start caring about your customers, you need to retrospect whether those working for you are happy and motivated first and foremost.

How do you create a milieu in your organization that breeds a strong culture of employee happiness? While there are a lot of intricate factors that go into building employee engagement, it’s hard to create a process-driven approach for it. Because, hey, employees are, at the end of the day, as human as you or me!

Emotion is what binds an employee to your organization at the grass root level. Lively workplaces, constant recreation, enticing paychecks and stunning individual talent – you get all this right and you’d still be grappling with employee churn on a regular basis.

So, what is the most important thing you need to be doing for your employees?

Calculating Your Net Promoter Score® When Using Relationship and Transactional Surveys
Calculating your NPS® is pretty straightforward – until you start mixing types of surveys. Keeping your NPS® separate for all your surveys is the key to this potential confusion. Combining relationship and transactional results is like trying to mix apples and oranges in terms of consistency.

Thus, your company’s NPS® will be determined by relationship surveys, whereas every transactional survey should have its own score. This is because transactional surveys are investigating different areas of your business. For example, a customer could give you a poor score on their browsing experience, but might give you a really good score in customer service or even in a relationship survey.

Relationship or Transactional NPS® Surveys?
As we’ve already hinted, using both types of surveys will deliver the best results. A relationship survey will tell you how loyal your customers are but will also tell you where you need to investigate further – by conducting transactional surveys.

Transactional surveys can then be used to assess the different touchpoints and find ways of improving the experience. However, conducting a relationship survey first is critical because it will streamline the whole process so you don’t end up conducting a bunch of transactional surveys you don’t need.

Promoters and detractors are terms that have been popularized by the Net Promoter Score® metric, which is used to measure customer loyalty. Promoters are highly satisfied and loyal customers who act as evangelists for your brand, while detractors are displeased customers who not only will abandon ship as soon as they can but will also let everyone know why they are displeased with your business and its products and/or services. But let’s take a closer look at these two categories of customers and how they can help your business thrive or cause it to crash and burn.

You can’t decide where you’re going if you don’t take stock of where you are. An amazing customer experience won’t just happen by accident. To assess your readiness for CX improvement, look to the CX Maturity Model.

In thousands of interviews across industries, with companies of every possible size, we started to notice certain CX patterns emerging. Here’s how to find those patterns in your own organization, so you can assess your CX readiness and take action.

The Six Competencies
In a study done by Forrester, they concluded that a firm must master six specific CX competencies before they can achieve exceptional CX. Those competencies are:

Research – understand customers in-depth by using both qualitative methods, like interviews, and quantitative methods, like web analytics
Prioritization – identify and rank most important customer journeys and interactions, and allocate company resources based on those priorities
Design – use research to guide CX design through the ideation, prototyping, testing, and refining processes
Enablement – provide employees and partners with the right resources to deliver CX, through training, information, tools, and ongoing support across all touchpoints
Measurement – quantify the quality of customer experiences through well-defined metrics that portray actionable insights
Culture – create a system of shared values and behaviors that focus employees on delivering great CX through reinforcement and incentivization

NPS® as part of Customer Experience Management
If you are measuring NPS, chances are that you care for your customers and want to make a positive impact on their lives.

But NPS is a part of a larger spectrum – Customer Experience Management. While NPS only sticks to customer loyalty, customer experience involves every single aspect of the customer journey – right from how the customer feels at your entrance to how much the customer likes your ambience, service, music and even the staff uniform, engulfing every minute detail that the customer experiences and feels.

Therefore, brands can effectively leverage their Net Promoter Score programs only if they are cognizant as to how this score impacts the overall customer experience.

Let’s say you have an overall NPS of 30. But what can you do with this score as such? It tells you where you stand in the market, amongst your other competitors, but beyond that, knowing your NPS® doesn’t really make a difference, does it? Instead, knowing the ‘WHY’ behind your NPS®, the ‘WHY’ behind your promoters, detractors and passives is what can truly propel your brand to understand customer aspirations, which in turn allows for you to create customer-centric strategies and policies.

What do Detractors hate about your Business? Is it the ambience or the staff service or anything else? At the same time, what is the precise reason you have ‘X’ % of promoters? And what differentiates you as a brand – is it your product or the ambience or your frontline employees?

You can’t find answers to these questions by simply tracking NPS®. With a Customer Experience Management platform, however, you have the opportunity to broaden the wings of your NPS® program, obtain deep and relevant insights based on the customer’s feedback and not feel inhibited by one-off numbers and scores.

Texting has become as second nature an activity to humans as eating or sleeping. This is especially true when there are over 6 billion text messages sent per day in the U.S (Forrester) with 97% of Americans texting at least once per day (Pew Internet).

So definitely these are unbelievably enticing times for businesses and organizations to leverage the power and popularity of SMSes to collect customer feedback, enable a two-way communication channel and get customer issues addressed in the shortest possible time.

Another point to be noted is that when it comes to soliciting customer feedback, SMSes represent a compact and flexible means to go about the process. So, how can businesses leverage this customer feedback channel and listen to their customers effectively?

An effective customer journey map relies on data-driven research and depicts various steps of the customers’ experience, recorded from the customers’ perspective. A unique feature of customer journey maps is that it is rarely linear as it has become second nature for customers to switch channels even in the middle of a purchase.

For instance, a customer might research about your product online, then visit your store to compare prices and then again go online to order the product via your mobile app. Else, he might research on your mobile app, go to your store to check quality and price, go home and order the product from his laptop. Channel-hopping has become the norm!

Here’s what you need to keep in mind while designing a customer journey map.

• Depict the customers’ experience with your brand in a step-by-step format
• Include every single channel and touchpoint – both online as well as offline
• Create the map from the customers’ perspective and not from the brand’s
• Collaborate with other departments such as Sales, Marketing, etc to get a wider and more holistic perspective

How can I improve my NPS®?
Improving Net Promoter Score is as important as measuring it. While there’s a mosaic of factors that define the growth of your NPS, here are 5 simple ones that you can start implementing right away.

1. Follow up free text question:
Understanding the importance of tracking, measuring and analysing the NPS can redefine your brand’s image in that it provides you insights that you can then address. The only point to remember though is that merely asking the Net Promoter question to your customers won’t do anyone any good as it just shows you how many detractors, passives and promoters you have. There’s no diagnosis of what the problem is or how it can be tackled. Asking an open ended/free text follow up question (What is the reason for the score you’ve given us…/ What are the areas that you think we can improve on…) brings you closer to your customers and helps you identify the best and worst aspects of your business.

2. Go everywhere
Omni-channel is your mantra. This isn’t a techno mumbo-jumbo. This is where the world is headed and you need to be there already! By expanding your presence, you make yourself more available to your customers. Your customers aren’t all alike and they are active on myriad channels on which you need to approach them for feedback. Identify which channel is most active in which segment and request for NPS feedback from those customers on that channel. Omni-channel does not mean you harass all your customers on all possible channels. It means that you maximize your response rates by cleverly tackling this problem via multiple channels. Treat octogenarians differently from millennials. Understand, empathise and customize.

3. Be Consistent
Nothing irks a customer as unreliability. You may have an out of the world customer service at your showroom, but if your call centre is doing a shoddy job at resolving issues then you’ve lost the battle already! What customers seek is dependability and consistency. Define your brand image and deliver your brand promise across all touchpoints consistently. No matter how simple it is, consistency trumps extravagance. Every customer touchpoint has to be just as responsive as the other. This communicates to them that you care and once they are made aware of that, transferring their trust into your brand will no longer be a challenge.

4. Shift in company culture:
If you are treating NPS as a question that is tracked and monitored by a set of people, then you have it all wrong. Sorry but that’s the worst way to measure NPS. Instead, make it a company-wide endeavour to improve NPS. Every single employee is responsible for the improvement of NPS and rightly so! When each employee feels the need to build customer loyalty, irrespective of what role of department he is in, then your entire organization will begin to reflect a culture of customer centricity which will invariably translate into improved NPS!

5. Customize, customize, customize
Customize your follow up questions. You can’t ask promoters the same question that you would ask detractors. Find out from your happy customers how you could make their experience with you even more happy. Ask your detractors what their biggest concern with your brand was and how they think it can be resolved. Customize incentives to your customers too. Give your promoters more reasons to market your brand and incentivize your detractors such that they revisit you at least one more time so you can change their perception about your brand. Give your passives just that extra nudge to get them to enter the promoter zone. No two customers can be treated alike and shouldn’t be either!

There are. As we already discussed, multiple ways to improve your Net Promoter Score. We’ve listed out 5 of the simplest measures to take to see a change in your score. Let us know in the comments section if you have any others to add to this list!

A CEM platform is nothing without a little help from its friends. And we at CloudCherry say this as a full-featured CEM platform ourselves. We’ve invested a ton of time and energy into building the easiest, quickest integrations with the tools our clients already rely on.

And here’s why.

Businesses collect and store a lot of customer data during normal operations, but it’s stored across multiple teams, systems, and servers. For example, the development team is storing user logs that show errors, time spent in the app and a ton of other useful information. Customer support has years of customer conversations stored in their help desk. Marketing collects customer engagement data in various operational platforms. Each department only has eyes on a tiny slice of the total data that’s being collected.

The problem with all of this data being segregated is that businesses can’t access it for use in their CEM programs. Successful CEM programs require breaking down silos for a complete view of the customer.

Providing good customer service is one of the most important priorities for many business owners. In this regard, it is crucial for all employers to use customer satisfaction software tools to improve their operations. These tools are one way to enhance the experience for your customers and make sure they get all of the information they need. The following are the top reasons why you should invest in customer satisfaction software for your company:
1. It Simplifies your Reporting
2. Evaluate your Employees’ Performance
3. Identify Growth Opportunities
4. Overcome Obstacles

We’ve, to an extent, come to a point where the only way businesses can differentiate themselves from their competition is through the customer experience they provide. The more sooner companies realize this, the more innovations we can see in this direction as businesses look for new and exciting ways to cater to their customers.

Investing in technology for this purpose, is therefore, the most basic need in order to innovate and improvise on existing customer interaction channels/platforms. That being said, prior knowledge of the latest tech trends is a absolute necessity if your company wants to go down this path.

Here we list the top 3 technology trends altering the course of how customers could possibly interact/engage with companies.
1. Artificial Intelligence
2. Big Data That’s Useful
3. Omni-channel Platform through Cross-Device Recognition

Once your company has decided to move forward with Net Promoter ScoreSM measurement, the next step is to purchase a solid software for this purpose. You will need a quality software program to accurately and efficiently collect survey responses. There are some key features to look for when choosing a Net Promoter Score software program. Some of them are listed below.
1. Automatic Sending Function
2. Enable Live Reporting
3. Security
4. Automated Service Recovery

What is a CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software provides useful information such as the amount of money that a customer has spent, how long they have been a customer, or what they usually buy at your establishment. What they do not offer, though, is information about the customers’ experiences, sentiments, and other contextual information that can help to color in the history of the customer’s relationship with a brand.

This is where customer experience management software (a CEM) is helpful.

What is a CEM?

What is a CEM? A CEM focuses on the customer journey from the perspective of the customer. It brings in a whole new layer of data, including how a customer feels and why they do the things they do. The problem is that CEMs offer a fairly anonymized sense of a customer – they don’t connect the customer experience to a real person with all the valuable context of who they are.