Everything about the customer is changing including their motivations, connections, and expectations. There has never been more volatility in recent times, so in order to respond to these changes, companies need to reach out, listen and respond in an agile fashion. This is what we’ve been reading in materials on Customer Experience from sources such as Bain, Qualtrics, KPMG, and more. And we agree, times have changed there is no denying that, but reaching out, listening and responding is not new for VistaVu. A feedback loop is a key element in understanding what customers need and the experience that your teams need to deliver.
Feedback Loops
Our Customer Experience focus at VistaVu has been a journey over several years. Our first step was to seek regular feedback by collecting NPS and CSAT information from customers several years ago [CEO Jory Lamb talks about these early days on this journey here]. Opening up this feedback loop can be a daunting task because it’s impossible to action every comment. However, those actions that you do take will help you to build trust and further your relationship with your customers. This will then open the door to more open communication. With the feedback you get our recommendation is to watch your trends.
A single comment could be someone’s bad day, but multiple comments indicates something needs your time and attention. The follow-up interactions help us further understand the specific issue that customers are telling us needs to be improved. After each quarterly NPS survey we respond with initiatives to address feedback. This can be as simple as tweaks to processes our teams are currently using, improving ticket details, or larger initiatives like standing up a PMO organization to improve project management consistency. Looking ahead we are now focused on getting even higher engagement rates in order to gain a more comprehensive view of our customers and their individual experiences.
Deep Relationships – Creation of Customer Engagement Executives
In 2018 we created the Customer Engagement Executive role (CEE) to help deepen the relationships we had with our customer, better understand their strategic business needs, and the value they are looking to us to deliver. The CEE’s meet with their assigned customers on a monthly or bi-weekly basis to discuss how customers can further leverage their technology investments and the strategic priorities their companies have. We then reflect on how we can help them by looking at things such as optimizing processes, automation projects, or embracing parts of the product they currently aren’t using. To read more about what it’s like to be a CEE read Ami Burn’s story here.
In addition to our CEE’s, we also separated our consulting team to form a dedicated consulting group for our existing customers – The Customer Success Team. This provided our customers with dedicated resources that focus on post go live projects and support issues. We also added a coordinator role to help ensure that requests keep moving along.
Dedicated Focus on the Experience
In 2020 we’ve taken yet another big step and dedicated Senior resources to focus specifically on the customer experience, continuous improvement and building an extensive strategy around CX. Initiatives for this year included a focus on Internal Enablement, Customer Journey Mapping and Customer Advocacy. We’ve worked with our teams to document standards, create templates, and revise processes to foster consistency, efficiency and repeatability. Our customer journey map activities help us to better understand the overall journey for the customer from Looking to Optimizing and identifies all the moments of truth both positive and negative that has impacted on their experience.
We also created a forum for some of our customers to come together, learn from each other, identify areas of product improvements, and coordinate with SAP on collaborative initiatives. Feedback from the group helps drive conversations and provides a roadmap of initiatives for us to work on. We then take all these great learnings to our broader customer base in our bi-weekly customer communications.
In between our big steps we continue to make agile changes responding to our customer feedback and iterating for continuous improvement. Nailing your customers experience is a team effort. There is never one right thing or wrong thing that makes the difference, it’s everything that is combined and what that overall experience leaves us feeling.
Looking forward
We continue to grow our programs and enable our teams to deliver remarkable experiences for our customers along their journey. We don’t always get it right, but we look at these situations to bring information to the table to help constantly make us better. In 2021 we will continue to develop in many areas that were new for us this year and take yet more steps forward along this CX journey constantly iterating one how we do things and checking in with our customers.
Learn more from our CEO Jory Lamb on how the VistaVu team has implemented programs such as the Customer Council and CEE’s to make it easier for customer to help each other in his blog ‘When Customers Connect; Everyone Wins.’
Written by Lezli Giguere, VP Customer Experience at VistaVu Solutions
As the VP of Customer Experience, Lezli and her team have been focused on introducing programs to increase VistaVu’s understanding of our customer’s journey as well as new initiatives for continuous improvement. The mission is to deliver value to our customers and an experience they want to share.
