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Month: May 2020

When All Else Fails….Turn to Social Selling

During the COVID:19 Pandemic, business owners have had to be very creative in order to survive. In an instant, an owner may be left with no customers. What is next? Creative thinking to the rescue! Interestingly enough, many find new ways of selling their goods and services. Social selling is one option.

A great example of this is how a Minnesota Farmer got quite creative when faced with meat processing plants closing suddenly. One farmer had 1200 pigs that were ready for slaughter, with nowhere to go. “We went from having planned all of this 10 months out, having a market for these pigs – that flipped on a switch,” Kluver said. Brad Kluver is a third generation pig farmer, who has never seen something like this happen. He goes on to say that they were stuck, with no alternatives and the pigs were getting fatter every day.

Social Media To the Rescue!

So the family decided to try selling their pigs in social media. They turned to their community for help through their social media accounts.

“In just 48 hours, we had over 400 families reach out to us wanting to purchase pork and help support us through this,” Brad said. “We were left high and dry with nowhere to go and nowhere to turn and that’s where our community stepped up.”

The family was also able to get connected with other, smaller pork producers who were able to take some of their pigs and get them ready to be sold to consumers. 

Time to Try Social Selling?

Social selling is really nothing new, however, it is new to some industries. The impact of COVID-19 has made everyone more aware of social selling and it will be interesting to watch and see if this trend continues. When you think of social selling, LinkedIn comes to mind. LinkedIn has been the best place to date to build relationships and acquire more customers. This is especially true for B2B companies.

However, now is a great time to start building your social media community. It doesn’t matter if it is in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram. The Pig Farm story is a good example of social media ROI. I bet the farmer never would have thought this online community would be of benefit to him at any time now or in the future. But it was. It may also make him think of his business differently post COVID.

Consumer Reports recently reported on the increased importance of social media customer service which goes hand in hand with social selling. Once you commit to being there, you must maintain it and monitor it. Customers are eager to reach out to you there. To get that personalized service that everyone wants these days.

Maintenance goes a long way in social as well as your website. As more and more people turn to online shopping for essentials, be sure:

  • Outbound links in social media are all in working order.
  • Contact information correct.

Take time now to be sure everything is up to speed. Are there ways to increase your followers? How well are you engaging? You never know when it will all come in handy in ways you never would have thought!

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Evaluating the B2B Customer Experience Effectively: Program Design is Key to Success

B2B companies have a unique challenge in evaluating customer experience. Many times the sales and business cycle is long and consists of several steps to complete the entire experience. This may be in the form of initial order placement/purchase, delivery or products and services, and final billing. Depending on the industry, there may be steps in between that don’t necessarily apply to all customers – perhaps a company that offers rentals and some customers may require service calls – so how is it possible to fully evaluate the customer experience with so many moving parts?

A well formulated and thought out feedback process will serve to be an effective tool. Thinking outside of a traditional “how did we do?” type format is the best way to approach this.

Why?

Since the B2B processes are much longer than a typical retail experience, for example, it’s best to get feedback while the experience is fresh in the minds of customers. So the logical thought may be surveying customers at each step of the process. However, that could lead to response burnout as customers may be inclined the respond to one or two requests for feedback, but will soon tire of completing feedback surveys each time they have an experience with a company.

So what’s the answer? There are three guidelines to consider to create an efficient program:

Take time to lay the foundation

Initial planning will help with this. The first thing to think about is the customer experience, from start to finish. What basic steps are involved for a customer to do business with you? If you sell products or services, that may be initial purchase order, receipt of products/services, billing processes, and resolution of any issues if they arise.

If the company rents products, that journey may look a bit different. It may start with the initial order, then to delivery of items, any service or maintenance calls if they are necessary, return of the products, final billing, and overall experience.

Survey design

Once you determine the steps of the journey, it’s easy to create separate feedback surveys to capture journey specific information. This will be effective in reviewing customer satisfaction at each step of the process – you may find that when people are dissatisfied with an overall experience, it could be due to one specific part of the journey. If you don’t know what step that is until the experience is over, it’s too late to work to improve it. However, if feedback is captured along each step of the way, it’s easier to pinpoint the weaker areas of the process and fix them quickly.

Keep the surveys as short as possible. Multiple surveys allows for fewer questions and journey specific questions to be asked. Carefully consider what information is needed to get the appropriate feedback – nothing more, nothing less – and build a short survey for each step of the journey.

Develop contact rules

What about response exhaustion? A well designed system can alleviate response rate reduction that comes with surveying the same customers at each step of the journey.

Consider setting up some initial guidelines for the feedback process. One example may look like this:

  1. Create call list segmentation for each step of the process. A list of customers who recently placed orders is compiled and used to request feedback on this step of the process. A second list is created for those who received a delivery of products/services within the last 3 weeks, and so forth.

Each contact list will reflect a different list of customers. However, depending on the business model, some companies may find themselves on one or more contact lists at one time. To alleviate this, additional parameters are needed.

  • From each list, cross reference to remove companies that fall on one or more list. From there, determine which companies have been contacted in the last six to 12 months. This takes away the chance to contact a customer too often.
  • Create a feedback cadence to request feedback at key times – not too soon after an experience but not too far out either. Some of this will depend on the size of the customer base, the length of the customer cycle, and other key factors. Ideally, customers should be contacted within one to two weeks of experience an interaction with a company.
  • Decide on a request format. Will telephone or email (or a mix of both) get the best results? Initially, test email and telephone based survey requests. Many customers are busy and do not answer calls from unknown phone numbers, but this is not always the case. Some companies find that telephone requests have a better response rate over email requests. Furthermore, they find that customers who are contacted via telephone tend to share more narrative detail regarding their experience. This unstructured commentary can yield information that would never be uncovered with a more traditional survey set up.

With so many moving pieces to the customer cycle, it can seem like an overwhelming process at first. However, once it is set up and a cadence is determined, the process can run smoothly and provide deeper insight about the entire customer experience, quickly finding strengths and areas for improvement.

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Customer feedback across the journey – tips for a successful program

For traditional restaurant and retail companies, feedback programs can be pretty straightforward. However, for others, such as ecommerce, the process can be a bit more complicated. There are many parts of the journey, from the buying experience to the purchase experience, all the way through complaint resolution to overall product satisfaction.

How is it possible to get feedback at each step of the process in a way that doesn’t inundate customers to the point of survey exhaustion and make sure the experience is recent enough to get accurate feedback about the experience?

Below are some tips to creating an optimal, efficient feedback program for businesses with many steps in the customer journey:

Remember, there is no “one size fits all” feedback survey. Try to avoid sending one feedback survey request at the end of the customer experience. That’s too general and won’t give you the best insight possible. Companies also run the risk of customers not recalling earlier aspects of the experience, so the data may not be as accurate. Multiple feedback surveys are the best bet when the overall experience is a series of steps taken by a customer.

But…don’t feel like you have to get feedback from a customer at each step of the process. While businesses think that the only way to get the best feedback about the entire process is to ask for feedback from Mr. Jones each time he has an interaction with the company, this isn’t necessary. You can get feedback from a variety of customers at different touchpoints to gain overall satisfaction data without risking your customers tuning out.

Keep it simple. Feedback surveys should be short; the shorter, the better. If multiple surveys are used for each step of the process, this can easily be done while getting the best information possible. Want to add more bang to your buck? Offer an open ended narrative option simply asking, “What would you like to tell us? What can we do better? What would you like to see? The sky’s the limit, so share your thoughts.” You may be surprised at the ideas and suggestions your customers have.

Look beyond your most loyal customers. Just like not inundating customers with multiple surveys over time, focusing solely on customers who subscribe to a loyalty program isn’t the answer either. Their time and loyalty needs to be respected; it may be easy to use this group for feedback needs, but it’s important to respect their loyalty and not rely on this group too much. This group may also have different behaviors/opinions/experiences than non-loyalty based customers, so it’s good practice anyway to capture feedback from a broader customer base.

Social Media Monitoring

Take advantage of social conversations. Combine traditional feedback with unstructured feedback on social sites. Taking the last step a bit further, go outside social media audiences and look for feedback from customers that are not tied to a company’s social sites but are talking about your brand, products, or services socially. This is achieved through social media listening – there are many tools to listen to customers talking about a certain topic and compiling that data to tie into feedback results. Unstructured data is a technological goldmine and brands should be aware of how to use this data for greater insight.

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