November 2020

TIP: The Power of Feedback by Filter

If you’re reading this, chances are you too are focused on customer satisfaction and ensuring your company is creating more and more loyal customers. While you use LoyaltyLoop’s main dashboard to track your satisfaction, did you know LoyaltyLoop gives you the ability to slice customer satisfaction in different ways that can be very illuminating and give you even greater insights as to how you can improve?

Feedback by Filter is a feature found in your Feedback section. This powerful feature allows you to create reports to view customer satisfaction in ways you might not normally consider. However, these reports can be quite helpful in driving overall customer satisfaction improvements.

These reports are based on the additional data you send into LoyaltyLoop along with your customer contact details. You might include data such as the sale region for the customer, the product line purchased by the customer, or the sales rep who manages the customer. Using Feedback by Filter, you can run reports that show you how customers rated your company relative to one of those additional data fields.

For a concrete example, let’s assume you include in your data feed to LoyaltyLoop the Sales Rep who manages the customer’s account. In the example below, we show a report of customers who answered your Net Promoter Score^SM question, and the resulting NPS® rating for that group of customers, where the results are grouped by the Sales Rep who manages the customer. At a minimum, the results are thought-provoking.

Notice that 11 of Emily’s customers responded to your NPS question, and that group of customers rate your company with a low NPS of 9. However, Burt had 8 customers respond to the NPS question yet those customers rated your company with a solid NPS of 50. Your company offers the same services so why would one group of customers rate you so differently than another? Maybe you assigned Emily all the most difficult customers? Maybe Burt has an approach to customer relations that is more beneficial to you and your customers? By slicing satisfaction data in different ways like this, it can help you discover hidden areas that could be ripe for improvement that can help you make large strides to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

You can use this same approach with any field you send in to LoyaltyLoop. If you need help including more fields when sending contact info to LoyaltyLoop, please give our Support Team a call at 401-560-0311 option 3, or via email at support@loyaltyloop.com.

TIP: Are you using the right Testimonial Publisher Widget?

One of the great features of LoyaltyLoop is the ability for you to publish your customer testimonials to your website in seconds. There’s no better way to market your business than in the words of your existing happy customers.

You should double-check your website to see if you’re using the new LoyaltyLoop widget and not the legacy widget. The legacy widget will be deprecated in late 2021 so you want to make certain you’ve updated your website to the new widget.

To identify if you’re using the old legacy widget or the new one, view your testimonials page on your website, and compare it to the images below. You can confirm which widget is used by inspecting source code of your testimonial web page. For example, if you’re using Chrome navigate to your published testimonials website page and right-click, then click “View Page Source”. In the HTML, search for the phrase “LoudSpeaker”. If you find HTML that looks like the legacy code below, you’re using our old widget and should update it with your new LoyaltyLoop widget.

Keep ‘Em Coming Back

A boomerang that doesn’t come back, is just a stick. Keep your loyal customers coming back with a few helpful tips.

Even though loyal customers will come back when they need their next purchase, they can also be engaged via newsletters or in person and be made to feel as if they’re included in the “next great thing”. It could be new products or a new packaging method of existing products. Or even new products based on the feedback you’ve received from your promoters.

In your outreach, via sales or other means, let your loyal customers know there are new or updated versions of products available in which they might be interested. Consider it a more personal approach to Amazon’s “Other products you might be interested in”. This way, it isn’t up to your customers to discover what’s new, and they get to feel like insiders when they’re personally notified of the exciting new products you offer.

Your survey invitation email promises you will use your customers’ feedback to improve your products and services. In your communications, explicitly state how the feedback has done exactly that and outline how it helped shape your improvements. For example, “We read your feedback and we’re proud to introduce our new Widget Package for 2021!” Or “Your suggestions have allowed us to pinpoint 5 distinct methods of improving efficiency for the Widget purchasing process! And it’s all thanks to you! Give it a try today!”

This last one is a secret. We wouldn’t want this tip to go public, but did you know there are two kinds of loyal customers in LoyaltyLoop? It’s true. Two! There are those who indicate they are very likely to recommend you, your NPS Promoters, and there are also those who take your survey every time they get an invite. They may not say they’re very likely to recommend you every time they take your survey, but they keep coming back to share their opinion with you every chance they get. If you have a default email invite filter of 90 days, then someone who takes your survey 5 times has made regular purchases for at least 1.25 years, and someone who takes it 10 times has been coming to you regularly for 2.5 years. When you have one of these loyal customers, consider giving them praise or a reward for their feedback. They are familiar with the way you normally operate and they are most likely to be an early indicator to help you avoid a process breakdown costing you time or money!

Keep your LoyaltyLoop going by maintaining communications with your customers through your survey and other means so all of your boomerangs come back!

Everyone’s New Customers – Are You Ready for Gen Z?

No one can be pigeonholed perfectly into a group, but generations do have common experiences that shape how they see the world. The oldest members of Gen Z are 20-25 years old this year and are entering the workforce. They are primed to begin making purchasing decisions. But what traits do they share that are relevant to ensuring you meet their needs and turn them into loyal customers?

If you think of Gen Z, you think of the mobile phone, or as they call it, “the phone”. It is their way to stay informed about the world, stay socially connected with friends, and consume entertainment. They may never plan to buy a landline. Now that 5G is rolling out in major cities and will soon expand to cover rural areas, we can expect that more commerce will take place on mobile devices. Make sure your online presence is up-to-date to ensure you don’t look too Web 1.0. You should expect that most of your communication with Gen Z customers will be via mobile devices. And while you’re at it, make sure your LoyaltyLoop survey is updated to the modern mobile theme since Gen Z customers will likely give feedback via their mobile phone.

Gen Z is a populous generation. They are estimated to make up one third of Americans this year, and understanding how they communicate will help you work with them to meet their needs. They have only known their country to be at war, and they have been through a recession and a pandemic. Because of this, they are very socially conscious and aware of the role they play as a group. Does your company address its impact on the environment? Do you make donations to charity? Do you locally source what you can? Your future Gen Z customers may care about these issues more than past generations, and the answers to these questions may inform their decisions as to whom they do business.

They have connected to their community, both nationally and globally. They connect digitally in place of the way previous generations did, such as church, community events, or 4-H. They are highly educated, and smart as a whip. And with that they are also very passionate about what they like and like to feel a bond in their relationships with others. They often approach others with an unspoken subtext that “A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet.” They have a very keen sense of when someone is being insincere or is misleading. Showing warmth and sincerity go far with Gen Z.

You and your products can be the focus of the Gen Z-er's passion and with a little extra attention to their needs, they can also become your most loyal customers. Listen and understand and you’ll become a friend they can count on.