CX as a Growth Driver

Hi Team!

Happy Thursday.

I am taking a quick weekend vacation for the first time in a while. The bittersweet part is that it’s the first time since our son Noah was born 3+ years ago that we are traveling without him.

God, he loved Tulum the last time we took him. 

I’ve done my fair share of travel (36 countries), and this is the first time I am going back to the same hotel twice.

It’s a long story, including a service recovery that made me fall in love with this resort. 

Happy to share a review + the story in an upcoming newsletter if there’s interest!

Tulum aside, let’s talk about this week’s topic. This week, I want to address the misconception that CX is a cost center.

Let’s talk about how CX can drive growth, shall we?

This week’s newsie is brought to you by Syncly - the brain behind a game-changing CX Feedback Analyst juiced up with AI, transforming how every CX Team connects with customer pain points and takes action upon valuable insights.

Syncly is not just for the CX team. Now upgraded with AI Search and Dashboards for easy data sharing, it enables all teams to harness the power of customer insight.

While they empower users with real-time customer visibility, their real knack lies in arming businesses with fully customizable, top-of-the-line AI models.

Let's shine a spotlight on some standout features that truly grab attention:

• All customer feedback in one place: Syncly integrates seamlessly with your CX tools, including Gorgias, Zendesk, Intercom, Front, and aggregates reviews on Google, Reddit, Facebook, and more. This allows users to holistically understand the real issues hidden behind the mountain of feedback across chat, emails, and calls.

• New AI Search for data accessibility: Ask Syncly AI to answer critical business questions and get a concise overview of customer feedback from everyday queries. Every team member can instantly get granular level of actionable insights by brand, SKU, channel, and many more.

• Negative Sentiment Alert: Detecting negative vibes early on is a game-changer for customer retention. Forget reacting to low NPS/CSAT scores; Syncly's proactive tracking of customer sentiment triggers timely alerts, ready for swift action.

• VoC Report auto-completion: Say goodbye to manual tagging and Excel marathons. With AI taking the lead, kiss goodbye to 80% of your VoC Report hustle, allowing laser focus on streamlining the customer experience.

Syncly is offering an extended free trial discount for my readers if you schedule a 30-minute demo call with the founders!

The Power of New Insights

Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room: the idea that CX is just a cost center. 

I get it. On the surface, it seems CX is about spending money to solve problems. So why not look for the cheapest way to solve those problems? (Oh god, I cringed writing this pitch.)

But let’s peel this onion back a few layers.

First, let’s talk about why people might think this way. Folks outside the CX team often believe they already know the problems and that there's no need for "something new" insights.

Call me crazy, but that’s where part of the CX magic really shines. You have a team of folks constantly engaging with your best (and most annoying) customers.

Imagine taking that for granted and giving that to the lowest bidder… 

New insights are constantly emerging, from planned factors like new product launches or sales or external factors like logistics issues or natural disasters.

Say you launch a new product. You might think you know how it will land, but CX teams are hearing directly from the customers. They’re getting real-time feedback on what people love, what they hate, and everything in between.

This feedback drives growth by helping you quickly adapt and refine your approach.

During a product launch at OLIPOP, we didn’t just sit back and hope for the best. We actively collected feedback from multiple channels—emails, chats, social media, reviews, you name it. 

• How’s the feedback on the flavor?

• Was the description we used close enough?

• How’s the carbonation? 

This allowed us to spot trends and issues early, making real-time product and marketing strategy adjustments. 

The result?

Smoother future launches and happier customers.

So, what’s the takeaway here? CX isn’t just about solving problems—it’s about driving growth by providing those “something new” insights that can make a real difference. It’s about being proactive, not just reactive. 

That’s how we start changing the narrative around CX.

Providing "Something New" Insights

Initiative #1: Provide Product Insights:

In the last few months, I have spoken with fashion, food, beauty, and furniture brands. The one thing I heard from them is how vital feedback post-launch is.

One massive fashion brand even CX data and triangulates it with Yotpo reviews insights and Loop Returns analytics to build a universe of insights that blew my mind. 

This feedback reveals what people like and dislike, who’s talking about it, and the intensity of their feelings. 

Before we harness these data points and feedback effectively, I’d be remiss not to mention some challenges:

1. Data Fragmentation: Customer feedback is scattered across various platforms—public reviews, private chats, calls, and more.

2. Data Overload: The sheer volume of data can be overwhelming, making it hard to quickly digest and draw actionable insights.

However, you can certainly centralize your feedback system. Gather data from all customer interaction channels into one unified platform. This creates a comprehensive view of customer sentiment and makes it easier to identify trends and issues.

Solutions like Syncly can help by integrating seamlessly with customer interaction channels (Zendesk, Intercom, Front, and more) and importing data from public sources (including App Store, Discord, X). 

During and after product launches, you collect real-time feedback from all the channels. This will allow you and your team to spot common themes and issues early on. 

You could then adjust product and marketing strategies pretty quickly, ensuring a smoother launch and happier customers. It’ll help you knock the campaign out of the park, aside from giving you intel for future launches. 

Initiative #2: Keep Your Team Informed on Important Events

Aligning the team on critical issues in real time is essential. With access to real-time data, CX professionals can significantly impact growth by keeping everyone on the same page. 

In my last few CX roles, I had two ways of sharing important CX events.

1. A weekly CX report. I’d refresh this report every Sunday with the news from the previous week. Here’s a version of mine that you can replicate. Keep it at a high level if you’d like. 

2. The chaotic clusterf*cks would be reported in real-time via Slack or email only to those needing to be in on it and help resolve it. There is no need for everyone in the company to hear all the noise that is not helpful or relevant to them. 

But if you want to get ahead of lots of the manual work I did, you can implement a real-time issue-tracking system. This allows the CX team to report critical issues promptly and ensures that everyone can access the most urgent matters easily. 

Syncly's Trending Issues Tab displays "New" and "Hot" issues in real-time, allowing the CX team to report critical problems promptly and ensure the entire team has easy access to the most urgent matters.

In chatting with the folks there, they shared this story of a leading furniture company in EMEA that faced alignment issues that led to missed revenue opportunities across the board. It is worth sharing with you all. 

The marketing team missed a significant revenue opportunity due to a small error in a discount code. 

The operations team had a delivery issue that went unnoticed for a long time, causing substantial growth loss. 

By adopting a real-time tracking system like Syncly, they were able to quickly address and resolve these issues, preventing future losses and driving growth.

Additional Strategies to Promote Growth

Make CX Data Accessible:

1. Unified Insights: Ensure all teams use the same customer insights with easy access.

2. Dashboards: Create and share dashboards across the team.

3. Proactive Sharing: Proactively share data before it's requested.

Leverage Technology:

1. NLP and Analytics: Utilize NLP to process large volumes of text data and advanced analytics tools to gain deeper insights into customer behavior.

2. Automation: Use automation to streamline support processes and improve response times.

Measure, Measure, Measure:

1. Cross-Reference Metrics: Cross-reference traditional KPIs (like NPS or CSAT) with new insights to understand what drives customer experience.

2. Actionable Insights: Combine NPS and CSAT scores with feedback from reviews, chats, and calls to pinpoint real issues.

3. Post-Action Impact: Measure the impact of actions taken based on new insights, such as decreases in ticket volume or increases in retention and decreases in churn.

By cross-referencing NPS scores with detailed feedback from various channels (we used Retently), Jones Road was able to pinpoint specific issues driving negative experiences and address them effectively. 

For example, we learned early on that folks hated the shipping experience we offered and the couriers we used in specific locations. Making shipping changes drove an additional six figures of profit to our bottom line (shoutout PDQ).

With actionable insights, there’s no limit to the strength of your lean (or heavy) CX team. 

Go forth and prosper, but please, for the love of everything holy, glean some actionable insights while you’re at it. 

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you'd like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers, 

Eli 💛

P.S. Looking for inspo on your next email/sms campaign?

I know you will love this.