The speed of mobile feedback from customers is increasing as mobile marketing adoption spreads, according to Medallia’s recent release of its annual Customer Benchmark Research Study.
Michelle de Haaff, vice president of marketing for Medallia, told Loyalty360 that there were many interesting findings in the benchmark study.
“The speed at which end customers are using to provide companies with feedback using their mobile devices (via email, SMS, on websites, etc.) has increased in alignment with the general market adoption of mobile,” she said. “An almost 60% increase from 2012. It then makes it critical to have feedback mechanisms that are mobile optimized, i.e. with mobile look and feel, and that are short and easy (as abandonment is more and more driven by abandonment on mobile).”
What’s more, de Haaf explained that the continued move to mobile will impact marketers, customer experience professionals, and consumers.
“Marketers and Customer Experience managers need to think about everything they do online as being engaged with via mobile (advertising, brand marketing, feedback, etc.),” she added, “and they need to think about the optimal experience for mobile (simple, transparent, easy to navigate, etc.).”
Medallia’s Benchmark Study shows that organizations where employees, from the C-suite to the frontline, engage with customer experience feedback simply achieve greater customer satisfaction.
Here are some other key study findings:
- Frequent employee engagement drives satisfaction
- Frequent frontline engagement with voice of the customer data is associated with Net Promoter Scores (NPS) that are up to 20 points higher on average
- Companies whose employees access customer feedback “on-the-go” via mobile devices achieve an NPS 11 points higher on average than companies whose employees don’t
- Companies that take action have more satisfied customers
- Companies in the top quartile in terms of customer satisfaction close the loop with unhappy customer “detractors” 62% more than “laggard” companies, those in the bottom quartile
- Consumers are increasingly giving feedback via mobile
- Customer feedback provided on mobile devices surged up to 60% of total feedback provided in 2013
“The other interesting element we found is the difference in the actions organizations take to recover at-risk customers and how companies that do take action have a significantly higher NPS,” de Haaf said. “Most companies with high NPS identify all of their detractors, alert their teams, and have invested in the resources to recover them. Laggards generally only detect strong detractors with alerts triggered if the score is very low (i.e. 5 or below, 4 or below or 3 or below), and may not have the customer-centric culture or enough resources to recover them.”
What’s more, de Haaf said customer recovery works.
“The companies that do invest in recovery are leaders in terms of customer satisfaction and fall in the top quartile when it comes to satisfaction scores compared to companies that either recover infrequently or not at all,” she said.
Customer recovery can take many forms.
“Medallia facilitates recovery workflows for sales, call center, frontline, manager and leader teams to engage in,” she added. “They can be as simple as a call center manager reaching out to a customer via phone or email after they have a bad experience and give negative feedback. In those cases, the teams are seeking more feedback, merely apologizing for the issue or rectifying the issue right there on the spot. It could also be a more sophisticated workflow that triggers process and product changes and actions to get customers involved in those “re-engineering” projects.”