SightMill
June 2019
Are you considering customer feedback software? You know it’ll provide great, actionable feedback to improve your customer experience or help improve employee retention, but perhaps you are unsure how to justify the cost or how to determine if it’s a worthwhile investment.
We’re often asked about to help with internal business cases, so thought it useful to set out a quick, concise guide for those of you looking into the financial side of a customer feedback software purchase. We’ll take you through a couple of the strategic ways your investment can pay off, and then address a couple of objections that you’re very likely to come up against before you get the go-ahead.
Why use Net Promoter Score?
The NPS framework is very simple for customers and employees to understand, has great response rates (unlike long questionnaires) and is widely used in hundreds of thousands of companies around the world. It provides tangible and actionable feedback that you can work on to improve your customer experience. And as well as these, there are three internal points to:
- It helps orientate your business to be customer-focussed.
- It delivers a single number that can be tracked, so it’s easy for teams and departments to see how their efforts improve this score.
- And it provides senior management a great metric to understand the view from the customer.
Will it make our business more profitable?
There’s plenty of research to say yes it will ! Obviously, not on its own, but customer-focused businesses are normally more successful, have better customer retention rate, higher customer advocacy and are more successful in their sector.
Implementing customer feedback software is not particularly expensive; getting buy-in across the business takes time but normally any tool or metric that helps teams focus more on their customers and ensuring there’s ever-improving customer satisfaction can only be for the good.
By focusing on the customer, you will focus more on ‘good’ profits that are driven by customers rather than ‘bad’ profits that are normally short-term and almost always at the expense of customer satisfaction.
Customer feedback software can help you retain customers
Customer retention, as any sales director will tell you, is incredibly valuable and just as important (often more so) than bringing in new business.
Your NPS score is a great way to monitor this, but if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it...and customer feedback software makes it super easy to:
- Measure your NPS score, so you know where you’re starting from
- Collate comments from your customer surveys so you know what you need to improve
- Improve your NPS score, and by extension increase customer loyalty
On a basic level, more customer loyalty equals a bigger potential for profit - there’s your first pay off. A high customer rating is also an attractive selling point for potential new customers, which leads us to the next point…
Customer feedback software provides marketable statistics
Companies which have good NPS scores - and know they have good NPS scores - make this a central pillar of their brand.
They display it proudly on their website and make it a central point in their marketing campaigns because they understand the value of online reviews and ratings as social proof. Customer feedback isn’t just a way of analysing your company’s performance. Used correctly, it’s a valuable marketing tool both externally to new prospects to reinforce the company’s focus on great customer satisfaction, but also as an internally as a great message to teams and employees – and to help attract new talent when recruiting.
...But couldn’t we do this manually?
Absolutely - if you have the in-house expertise to do so.
You could add this to your software product – divert your developers to code this and manage the data security, privacy and all the analysis tools. Or you could do it using simple emails, exporting results, then managing the analysis and trend analysis in spreadsheets.
So if you do have that expertise, you’ll need to be happy for your team to spend their time building email and SMS surveys from scratch, sending them out, then manually tracking, collating and analyzing the results. That’s a lot of man-hours over a few different departments - you’re looking at developer resource, as well as marketing and potentially customer admin, depending on the structure of your company. It might be doable, but it’s certainly not an effective use of anyone’s time.
Customer feedback software automates this entire process. You can send and analyse customer feedback surveys in a fraction of the time it would take you to do it manually, so your team’s time is freed up for other tasks too.
But what about an add-on to your existing software?
If you’re using a CRM or marketing automation platform already, you might know that some vendors offer an optional customer feedback module you can add to your main system.
There are certainly advantages to this - it can be quicker and cheaper to set up, and you’ll need to spend less time adjusting your team to it as the interface will already be familiar.
Equally, add-ons to more general sales and marketing software tend not to have the functionality that specialist customer survey software offers. They generally focus on one channel (normally email) and generally have limited analysis tools.
If you want to reach your customers across a range of channels – including your website, via email, SMS or at events, then you’ll find it simpler, easier and better use of time to work with a specialist provider that offers good value for money.
Using your CRM’s NPS module might offer a short-term cost saving. If you’re serious about tracking, improving and, eventually, monetizing your NPS score, however, specialist software pays off in the long term.
Conclusions
So there you have the six main questions we’re asked about on a regular basis – with our thoughts on proving how adopting NPS customer feedback software in your business can deliver great benefits at a low cost. At SightMill, it’s exactly this equation that drives us to continue to deliver you with the most powerful and flexible NPS software in great value plans.
If you’re interested in more information, get started with a free trial or get in touch: we’re always available to discuss how we can help you listen to your customers and so improve your business.