4 solutions every customer experience + employee experience program needs

While most brands understand the importance of customer + employee feedback and have some sort of experience management (XM) solution in place, many lack the actionable insights necessary to create meaningful, systemwide change.

For large organizations, this is often due to an XM provider underdelivering on technical + professional support while also falling short on the services needed to run a successful program. Capabilities like video feedback, online reputation management, and text analytics can make a big difference.

To determine if your XM platform is delivering the end-to-end impact that drives improvements across your enterprise, ensure it includes these 4 capabilities:

1. Video feedback | Add emotional context to your experience management data

Experience management (XM) leaders often struggle to engage stakeholders and drive action. Presented with a never-ending stream of data, it can be hard to see feedback as the output of real, human interactions. But when you can incorporate rich, contextual video into existing feedback channels, you’re able to humanize the experience and build the kind of stakeholder empathy that results in real change. 

In Humanize Feedback To Drive VoC Engagement and Action, Forrester author Faith Adams emphasizes the importance of motivating employees to connect with customers, stating, “Forty-five percent of CX pros cited a lack of cooperation across the organization as a challenge, up 9% since 2017… Humanizing feedback means making it more real, understandable, and relatable for stakeholders. This requires moving beyond traditional surveys and reports—and tapping into emotionally engaging forms of feedback like social media, speech, images, and video.”

DICK’S Sporting Goods understood this need to bring life to customer feedback. By implementing video feedback, the specialty retailer was able to build stakeholder empathy by putting a face and voice to the customer experience and uncovering relatable insights that empowered employees to drive real change.

By providing customers with a video feedback channel, DICK’S Sporting Goods not only got more feedback but richer insights—driving operational efficiencies + score improvements across the board. In just three months, the brand saw a 3-ppt increase in responses and 3-ppt increases in Overall Satisfaction and Likelihood to Recommend.

2. Digital DIY | Control the creation + deployment of your experience feedback

In 2020 Online Retail Forecast, North America (COVID-19 Update), Forrester predicts over a quarter of all retail sales will take place online by 2024. But attempting to oversee digital CX with a single-channel solution adds yet another silo to your data and another program to manage.

The right self-serve capabilities, technology, and support give organizations more control over how they engage with consumers—creating smarter touchpoints, more relevant interactions, and richer insights.

With intuitive DIY survey design capabilities, you can:

• Edit questions on-the-fly or choose from a pre-approved question bank
• Hyper-target your invitation criteria—triggering invites based on time on site, # of visits, # of clicks, pages visited, or a combination
• Build logic paths to prompt drill-down questions based on prior responses
• Take an iterative approach to testing + assessing conversion strategy tactics

3. Business intelligence | Pair datasets for deeper insights + synchronized strategies

The proliferation of feedback channels and consumer datasets has made it clear: the line between fully informed and completely overwhelmed depends mostly on resources. And while it’s important to distill all that data into tangible action items for the field, power users and department heads have different tasks to tackle.

With the right business intelligence (BI) solution, you can marry your experience management (XM) data with other third-party datasets to provide a more unified view of your purchasers + non-purchasers throughout their cross-channel journeys. To do this, your BI tool should provide:

• Flexible integrations for streamlined analysis
• Easy-to-read visualizations for more holistic views
• Clearly defined paths to better business outcomes

4. Voice of Employee | Provide always-on feedback for real-time insights

Companies that are serious about engaging employees know success takes more than an annual survey. If you’re not measuring every aspect of the employee experience—from the first interview to the last day—you’re missing out on key improvement opportunities.

Employees often identify problems before they become systemic. By providing them with an always-on Voice of Employee (VoE) option, employees can leave timely, unsolicited feedback so you don’t have to wait until the next annual survey to uncover looming issues. It also will help you embed continuous dialogue into your company culture—driving employee trust, loyalty, and retention.

Maximize your experience management program with SMG

SMG’s product vision is to enable brands to efficiently evolve and grow their business through meaningful insights that anticipate the changing needs of consumers and employees—pushing beyond traditional XM philosophies and organizing the whole business around the delivery of exceptional experiences. We remain focused on listening, interpreting, analyzing, + maximizing XM feedback for clients to help them generate new revenue, grow existing revenue, reduce churn + detractors, and drive operational efficiencies.

Through this commitment to continuous innovation, we’ve released several tech enhancements in 2021, helping keep our clients ahead of the measurement curve. Here are a few highlights:

Online reputation management: Ratings + reviews hierarchy automation | SMG’s ratings + reviews solution simplifies online reputation management by scanning the most important ratings + reviews sites for location-level information and putting it in one place—providing an aggregated view of CX data and a more effective close-the loop process with in-platform response.

Our latest enhancement makes it easier than ever for each user to see aggregated scores across locations and glean insights at every level of the business.

Data integration: SafetyCulture partnership | Many SMG clients leverage our open API architecture to share all types of data with us—from CRM case data to operational audit data to scheduling app data. That way clients can see all related data in one spot and get the full benefit of all they’re collecting.

As brands continue to prioritize the well-being of customers + employees in the wake of COVID-19, our latest update enables clients to pair SafetyCulture operational data with employee and customer feedback to enhance the visibility of health + safety standards on the customer experience.

Text analytics: Product impact report | Analysis of open-ended feedback is critical in surfacing what customers are saying and why they are saying it. And an efficient text analytics solution is a crucial component to gleaning those insights you need to take informed action on customer feedback.

SMG’s newest text analytics report pairs product mentions with key metrics, helping users quickly identify products that have a negative impact on the customer experience—enabling them to make informed, swift changes and drive satisfaction.

Actionable Insights: Multi-source mid manager reporting | Without a clear way to spot trends, compare scores, and read comments, it can feel impossible to take action. That’s why we designed the role-based smg360® platform for customizable data views, powerful analysis, and actionable information. With intuitive navigation and easy-to-read data visualizations across solicited and unsolicited touchpoints, smg360 keeps the focus where it belongs—on what matters most to your customers.

With our newly expanded dashboard view, mid manager users get a holistic, multi-source overview of metrics and comparisons across datasets, delivering insight on how key metrics change over time or compare to overall company performance. Complete with significance testing against benchmarks or date-range comparisons, users can view measures in aggregate or side-by-side—eliminating the need to toggle between pages.

What’s next?

We’ve already made great progress in 2021 and we’re excited to deliver even more meaningful enhancements this year. To get a preview of what’s to come, check out the video of our 2021 platform roadmap.

If you have any questions about any of these platform updates—or are seeking additional support in serving your customers and employees—please reach out.

Marty Williams | Chief Information Officer