How to Use Conversational Data and NPS Surveys to Create Customer Evangelists

For many years, customer satisfaction has been measured using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. This survey asks customers to rate how likely they are to recommend a company to a friend or colleague. To determine customer loyalty, many companies look to the NPS score as a benchmark for measuring success. Companies that achieve a high NPS score are often seen as industry leaders.

There is a major caveat to using the NPS as a metric for customer loyalty. The NPS is only capturing the customers who are willing to participate in the survey and provide honest feedback. This means that the NPS score is only capturing a fraction of your total customer base. What about the rest of your customers? How do you know if they are satisfied? What do they think about your products and services? How do you know what they want in the future?

To understand how you can convert your customers into loyal evangelists and encourage them to reach out to others, you must look at the complete end-to-end customer experience. You need to capture and analyze all of your customer conversations-whether in your website or app, on a phone call, or in a video conference in order to assess the needs and wants of your customers.

As most companies are aware, positive word-of-mouth referrals from happy customers are the most effective way to drive new business. Customers who have had a positive experience with your company will tell their friends and colleagues about their experience. They will also be much more likely to provide honest feedback about your company. If your customer is satisfied with your product or service, they will be much more willing to share their experiences with others.

It is challenging to ensure that a customer always has a positive experience with your company. You can’t control every interaction a customer has, and there will always be instances where you disappoint a customer or fall short of their expectations. How can you ensure that your customers are satisfied with your product or service and willing to share their experiences with others?

A traditional NPS survey asks customers to rate their likelihood to recommend a company on a 10-point scale (with 10 being “extremely likely”). This approach is effective in understanding how customers feel about a product or service after they have used it. It allows you to assess customer satisfaction in a non-confrontational way, and it captures their thoughts and feelings after they have used your product or service.

The biggest challenge with the NPS is that it only captures customers who are willing to participate in the survey. Customers who are dissatisfied with your product or service will likely not participate in the survey, skewing the results. There are also customers who aren’t satisfied but aren’t willing to provide you with survey feedback. As a result, the NPS only tells you part of the story about how your customers are feeling about your product or service.

Happy customers are more likely to recommend your company to others, and your company’s reputation is greatly enhanced by positive word-of-mouth referrals. For many companies, turning a happy customer into an evangelist is seen as a matter of luck. Some companies believe that they are simply fortunate to have one or two customers who refer others. But this is not the case. By capturing and analyzing all of your customer conversations, you can make a concerted effort to identify positive, satisfied customers and nurture them into evangelists.

After identifying segments of happy customers in your business, you must actively engage with them, communicating with them on a regular basis. This may be in the form of personalized nurture campaigns that educate the customer of a new product or service features relevant to their specific needs, or high-quality account management. This communication provides a direct line to understanding the needs and wants of a happy customer. But this is only one part of the puzzle.

Proactive and personalized notifications, alerts, and communications can be made on your website or within your app. This is a proactive approach to reaching out to customers to understand their needs and ensure that they are satisfied with your product or service. For example, if you are running a loyalty program, you can notify customers when they have earned enough points to receive a reward. You can also send communications when there is relevant information for the customer.

For example, a customer who recently made a purchase could be notified of warranty notices, recalls, product manuals, and other relevant information. For companies that provide SaaS products, you can alert customers when there is an update to your product. In a more proactive approach, you can send personalized communications and notifications to customers after they have visited your website or app.

Email blasts can be amazing, or generic, untargeted, and downright terrible. Nobody likes receiving an email that says "FIRST NAME, LAST NAME". It's impersonal and you're just another name in a list. You should be able to target your customers better. You should be able to send emails directly to the right people at the right time.

The personalized nature of an email is even more important when you're running a promotion or event. When you can send emails directly to people who have taken action on your site (i.e. they've added an item to their cart, they've registered for a webinar, they've joined your email list), you're giving people the right type of incentive at the right time.

Personalization can go even further with conversational data and conversational forms. What if the customer requested information on your company's security or compliance features in the last call? Did they mention a specific competitor? These insights can be pushed from your AI call and meeting capture solution into your marketing and transactional email systems, to drive more personalized outreach.

Proactively listening to the conversation can help you identify issues in your company. At many companies, it can be hard to stay on top of product issues. You may not know about all of the issues customers are facing until they call your support team. By proactively analyzing all of your customers’ conversations, you can catch issues before they get out of control. You can then reach out to other affected customers with timely and relevant fixes and other information. This allows you to resolve issues more quickly, and it can save you money in the long run.

Problem resolution is one of the key aspects of customer support. For many companies, problem resolution is often reactive. This is not the most effective way to resolve problems, nor is it the most cost-effective. By capturing and analyzing your customer interactions and their conversations with your sales and support staff, you can proactively identify potential issues before they escalate.

Community is a word that gets thrown around a lot in the tech industry. The truth is that community building is not easy. There are many factors that go into creating a strong community of customers, and it often takes time and effort to achieve this. One of the keys to achieving a successful community is providing your community with the ability to self-organize.

Community-powered tools such as forums, websites, and wikis give customers the ability to express their opinions on the product or service. By providing the right tools, you can facilitate a vibrant community and give your customers a platform to communicate with one another. Seeding your community with the right content, whether it is questions and answers, troubleshooting guides, or tips and tricks, will empower your customers to engage with one another. Insights on what content to build can be gleaned from customer conversations that are recorded in your AI call and meeting recording solutions.

Social media is a common platform for your customers to talk about your company. But social media is also a place where you can listen to conversations that are relevant to your business. This is a great way to gather insights into what's important to your customers and what's not. As a result, you can make proactive decisions to meet the needs of your customer base. For example, if you're in the consumer retail space, you can monitor social media channels for feedback on product quality and customer service. You can then address these concerns in real-time, creating a more engaged customer base that's more interested in your company.

Once you have captured your customers’ conversations, you can use them to create an AI-informed content strategy. You can use the data to tailor your marketing and support content, allowing you to have a more personalized conversation with your customers. You can also use this data to gain insights into the wants and needs of your customers. This allows you to better understand the problems and opportunities that your customers face and respond accordingly.

Not only can you use this conversational data to gain insights into your business and customers, but you can also use it to identify trends in your industry. Are customers talking about a new set of important product capabilities, a new competitor, or a new customer service issue? Having this information will allow you to react quickly to industry changes and remain competitive.

You should be working to continue the conversation beyond the initial sale or transaction. Reaching out to customers after their initial purchase is crucial. This allows you to continue the conversation that you started during your initial sale. You can then keep your customers engaged and build on the relationship you established during the sale. You can also monitor for any potential issues. This type of customer engagement is crucial if you want to differentiate yourself from competitors. In addition, by taking the time to reach out to your customers, you're showing that you care about their success and you're invested in maintaining a long-term relationship.

Some companies are hesitant to request feedback from their customers. They feel that customers will be put off by the request, or they don't know how to include feedback requests in their current processes. Here are a few ways you can go about getting feedback from your customers.

1. Make the request at the right time

This will depend on your relationship with the customer and the nature of your business. For example, if you sell software for a business, you might be able to reach out to them when they first start using your product. You can get an idea of how they're using the product, how they feel about it, what they like, what they don't like, etc. And if there are any issues, you can get them worked out before they become a problem.

2. Be clear about your reason for reaching out

If you are asking for feedback, tell your customers why you are doing so. This will help set their expectations and help them be better prepared to give you the feedback you need.

3. Make it easy for your customers to give you feedback

If your customers aren't giving you feedback, it's probably because they feel like it's a pain to do so. If you make it easy for them to provide feedback (either on the website, in-app, or via check-in calls or meetings), they'll be more likely to do so. This will help you capture their feedback in a way that allows you to take action on it.

The best way to better understand your customers is to listen to them. You can do this through traditional surveys and NPS surveys, but you can also tap into the conversations that your customers are having with your sales reps, support team, an account success team, and others in your business. It's important to do this in a way that allows you to gain insights from the data, so you can stay competitive and meet your customers’ needs. And you don't need to be a large company to do this. By leveraging an AI call and meeting capture and analysis solution such as Hyperia, you can capture and learn from your customers’ conversations in real-time, at scale. This will allow you to stay on top of industry trends, product issues, and customer needs. In turn, you can address these issues in real-time and create a more engaged customer base becomes your company's best evangelists.