According to Harvard Business review ‘CX has become the new marketing. It influences brand perceptions and impacts business performance just as strongly as traditional marketing once did. A good customer experience makes a person five times more likely to recommend a company and more likely to purchase in the future'.
CX is not new to Stridon. Client happiness and ‘doing a great job’ has always been important to us, and we believe that ‘almost’ (because we’re human and not perfect 😊) all of our client interactions are positive - and we’ve received plenty of anecdotal feedback along the way to support this. However, 2021 was the year that we decided to formalise the process and ask our clients what they think about us.
Why? Because if you don’t know, how can you improve?
As a business, customer satisfaction and ensuring clients have a positive experience at every interaction point with Stridon is so important. It’s at the core of what we do in order to drive continuous service improvement, and ultimately to ensure that the experience we deliver to our customers meets the necessary standards. If our clients are expecting X, then we aim to deliver X, Y, and Z.
Our CX team initiated the use of capturing customer satisfaction (CSAT) statistics earlier this year. Up until then, we knew that Stridon had a good reputation with stakeholders and contacts within our client organisations – in fact, the business has grown purely on recommendation – however, we understood the need to formulate a process so we could gather meaningful data - whether it’s good, neutral, or negative – it’s vital to track and trend our customer satisfaction, incident management, and performance.
Feedback represents the emotion at the time of the interaction
Our customer feedback system captures feedback, via email, from our client straight after an incident is resolved by our support desk. It asks them to tell us how that interaction felt using smiley faces, and we want to capture that feedback straight away while the emotions are raw. And we ask our client management to champion the initiative with their teams, so they know how important it is to tell us what they think. So far, the response rate is at 55% which is - according to What Is a Good CSAT Score? monkeylearn.com - considered excellent, the average across all industries is about 15%.
Fortunately, the number of negative or neutral ‘smiley faces’ received so far have been in single figures, and for the most part, we score 100% happy ‘smiley faces’ each month. Because we have linked our CSAT tool SmileBack to a Microsoft Teams channel, managers can pick up and react to feedback as soon as our customers provide it. We encourage our teams to address any neutral or negative feedback head-on, so we talk to our clients and find out why they felt the way they did. ‘Investigating, resolving and improving’ is the process we follow. It means we are working pro-actively to improve our service.
“By asking clients for simple feedback after every support desk interaction means that we are completely in tune with our customers’ needs. We know exactly what emotion our client was feeling at that moment of interaction with Stridon – and that is exactly what we want to know”, says Nick King, Customer Success Manager at Stridon
It’s not just about us
CSAT makes up part of the monthly reporting that we provide for our client key stakeholders. We also use that customer satisfaction data to provide insights for our client executive at the Quarterly Business Reviews. It’s about clients asking themselves: “how is Stridon doing for us?”. And they have the data to help them make a judgment.
That is as important for us as it is for them.
Are we customer-obsessed?
Well, according to the HubSpot qualities to determine whether you are customer obsessed… it’s official….we’re obsessed 😊
- We prioritise customer retention over acquisition
- We focus on quality over quantity
- We align every department with customer success
- We utilise proactive customer service
- We are driven by customer feedback
- And we analyse customer data routinely
What’s next for the CX team?
Stridon’s client base is built through recommendation, so we know that our clients have referred us to their peers. Our next project this year is to understand our Net Promoter Score (NPS) – how we are benchmarked in terms of quality of services compared to others in the industry – so we can continue to build upon our service offering and high standards of customer care.
Watch this space....
