What do I do with all this customer feedback??

Hiiiii Readers!

Really excited to be writing this newsie from the Parisi Udvar Hotel in Budapest. I haven’t been to Budapest since 2015, and it’s one of my fav cities in Europe. 

My grandparents emigrated from Hungary in the 1940s, so Budapest feels like home. Great food, stunning architecture, and priced well. Why get yelled at in French when you can eat kakaós and goulash in peace?

Beats me. 

Spending the next nine days in Budapest split between this Hyatt property, the Ritz Carlton, and the Hilton. Oh, and all hotels + flights paid with points!

I might need to do an issue about all things points and miles even though it has nothing at all to do with CX... Thoughts? 🤣

In other similar news, this kiddo is more well-traveled at one years old than I was at 20, and I’m living for his energy.

Before we start, I wanted to thank all of you for the great feedback on last week’s newsie on all things tools—I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your feedback! 

Second: last weekend, I shared a few slides of the presentation I made for our Jones Road in-store team about CX, and I got a ton of folks asking for the full preso in this newsie. I also got a special shoutout from the legend Bobbi Brown. 😍

Here it is: JRB in-store CX Deck 

This week, I’ll be chatting about the ideal CX feedback loop.

I’ll be splitting this into four parts:

1. Why even bother collecting feedback?

2. Fine, but which feedback should I focus on?

3. Okay cool, but how do I collect this feedback? 

4. Who do I send all this information to?

Let’s dive right in.

1. Why even bother collecting feedback?

Customer Service teams resolve issues and then watch it happen over and over again—like Groundhog Day, but with less Bill Murray comedic relief. 

Customer Experience teams, by contrast, watch the shit hit the fan and collect feedback while they are resolving it. They then pass that along to the correct folks to ensure it never happens again.

The role of an excellent CX team is to collect a ton of data, both qualitative and quantitative. They should be able to answer questions like “Do customers like X product constantly?” and “Would the customer vibe with this marketing activation, or is it really f**king stupid?”

The role of a CX team is to be the voice of the customer in every conversation. We generally see CX teams fail to earn their keep by doing one of two things:

A: They don’t collect enough info and therefore don’t have the answers to essential questions.B: They collect a ton of info but don’t synthesize it and get it to the right person on the team. 

2. Fine, but which feedback should I focus on?

Now that I’ve (hopefully) convinced you of the importance of collecting customer feedback, let’s talk about which feedback you should be focusing on.

When I think about customer feedback, the most important thing to answer is: “Okay, now what?”

Having feedback that can be acted on is essential.

Not in a sassy and snarky kinda way, but more so asking, “how does having this data help us?”

Understand the potential action and reaction to the data to make sure you are collecting valuable data and not just tagging every email/ticket many times.

Now, I’m not picky— the data can be qualitative or quantitative, as long as you are learning something that can be actionable at some point.

Data can either answer a question you have, or bring forth a potential question. E.g., at Jones Road: Why do so many people see an issue with a specific shade of Miracle Balm?

For example, if 10 customers reach out in a span of a few minutes about the same issue, you might very well be onto some more significant issue, but could it be a new product that was just delivered and it’s 10 out of 40,000 customers that ordered it? 😏

Here are 4 non-negotiable things to always collect data on:

1. Product Issues—Quality: While at OLIPOP, we had a customer reaching out saying that their Vintage Cola tasted exactly like Root Beer. We reached out to Ops and Supply Chain, and they said it is “physically impossible that there was a mess up because they were produced on different days.” Okay, cool. But this customer ordered Vintage Cola 10+ times and certainly knows what it should taste like. 🤣

We collected some more incidents over the next few hours with similar concerns. We pressed Ops to look into it… and it turns out we indeed had a few pallets of a beverage charmingly (internally) nicknamed “Whoops Beer” that we were (mostly) able to catch before it shipped to hundreds of stores nationwide.

2. Product Issues—Retention: Your product is the best; everyone loves it. Blah blah blah. I’ve never seen a product that every single customer loves.

You might have a 90% retention rate, but it’s still important to hear out those who hate your product.

Do you know why?

Because, honestly, it might not be a product issue, but rather an expectations issue. You may not have explained how to use it properly or sold them on overhyped benefits or features, and they are now disappointed.

Now, these are not the only pieces of feedback to collect, and it depends on the brand and space you are in, but this should give you the general idea.

3. Shipping & 3PL: As you scale your DTC operation, you’ll start seeing more and more mispicks, missing items, and some other wonky sh*t that I hardly want to talk to you about (lest we trigger some folks here 😭). It gets challenging to keep track of what feels like an increase vs. what is an increase percentage-wise.

It’s imperative to tag each and every one of these issues so you can pull them into a weekly report.

“Ok, but who should I share it with?” 

MARK, I’LL GET TO IT, I PROMISE. xo

3. Shipping—miscellaneous: If you are using Wonderment (the sponsor of this newsie), you should be taken care of in this department. If you haven’t got around to signing up yet, it’s vital to keep tabs on courier delays, especially if you are shipping with multiple carriers.

Are you seeing an uptick in shipping times with one courier vs another? Are customers reaching out to say their package has been marked as delivered, but they can’t find it?

Tag all of this so you can ascertain if there is a pattern starting to emerge—you want to be able to catch trends before the problem gets out of hand. 

3, Okay cool, but how do I do this? 

Just about every CX helpdesk gives you the ability to tag tickets or conversations, and that is generally the easiest way to gather customer trends.

Export them weekly or bi-weekly from your helpdesk and match some of these trends with order volume etc from that time frame to give you a better idea of scale.

When it comes to qualitative feedback, I highly recommend running NPS surveys. I think anyone not running these is leaving a ton of super-valuable customer feedback on the table. You’d be blown away as to what we learn from our NPS surveys alone across the entire business.

4. Who do I send all this information to?

When you are thinking about where to send this info, it is essential to realize a couple of  things:

A. The presentation that you send to the entire company about CX gets ignored by half the team and skimmed by the other half.

B. People are generally only receptive to data sent to them when it is sent exclusively to them in a way that the resulting action items are tailored to their respective positions in the org.

Keeping this in mind, here is a basic framework I recommend:

To start, you definitely want to create a basic weekly or biweekly CX deck to share with the broader team on some larger trends such as response time this week, top tags used, some NPS feedback, CSAT, etc.

Second, think about who would be taking action based on the feedback you put together and send that feedback directly to them. In our case, I’d want to share QA issues with the product or QA team, 3PL/shipping issues with ops/supply chain/3PL, and broader qualitative data with the whole team but primarily with marketing and product.

Share your CX deck on the general channel, and send that separate, individualized feedback to those teams.

In our case, we’ve added some of the marketing squad to our NPS channel so they can see all of that themselves, and we also flag more significant issues in real-time.

In some instances (the Olipop “Whoops Beer” incident, for example), you definitely want to share it in real-time, while other more minor issues can be aggregated over time and shared weekly or biweekly.

I do have a CX deck template that I have shared weekly at OLIPOP and now share at Jones Road. If that would be helpful to any of you, please drop me a line!

For next week’s newsie, I have a few ideas brewing. Can you please let me know what you’d want to learn more about?

A: How to attract great CX talent + what to look for in choosing who to hireB: Segmentation and Retention—email + SMSC: Outsourcing CXD: Something else (TELL ME!)D: Something else (TELL ME!)

Thank you so much for following along and supporting this newsletter. I put hours into writing this and stress over editing and formatting. I sincerely hope all the work shows through. 🥺If you are feeling generous and kind, feel free to share the newsie with a friend who might be interested.Until next week, 

Eli 💚

P.S. I recently recorded a podcast with Teal sharing in-depth the thought process I went through while navigating my unorthodox career progression. If you are interested in listening, feel free to check it out here.