Annual Admin Checklist for Optimizing Your LoyaltyLoop Account

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As the year winds down, it’s the perfect time to conduct a comprehensive annual maintenance check of your LoyaltyLoop account. Like your annual doctor's appointment, this proactive approach will ensure optimal performance and help you start the new year strong.

By following this checklist, you can ensure that your LoyaltyLoop account is primed for success in the coming year. If you have any questions or need assistance, don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team at (888) 552-5667 or support@loyaltyloop.com.

Your End-of-Year LoyaltyLoop Maintenance Checklist:

• User Management


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• User Audit: Review the list of users with access to your LoyaltyLoop account.
• Permissions: Ensure that each user has the appropriate permissions.
• User Additions/Removals: Add new users or remove inactive ones.
• Training: Schedule training calls for new users with our support team.
• Alerts: Make sure your team is receiving the appropriate LoyaltyLoop notifications
• Location Details:
• Address: Has your business moved? If yes, please contact support@loyaltyloop.com
• Add a New Location: Has your business expanded? Add an additional location to capture feedback specific to a new customer or drive feedback results to a new physical location.
• Customer-Facing Materials:
• Email Signatures: Check that email signatures are up-to-date and consistent with your branding.
• Survey Invitations: Review the wording and tone of your survey invitations.
• Survey Reminder: Ensure that the reminder is clear and effective.
• Survey Resend: This year LoyaltyLoop introduced the Resend Survey Link feature. Review and, if necessary, update the wording.
• Review Reminder (not applicable for Basic plan): Encourage your customers to share their experience.
• Reminder: If SMS is enabled in your account, review email and SMS versions of the customer facing materials. Multi-location and multi-survey accounts should audit customer-facing materials for each location/survey.
• Survey Review:
• Branding: Verify that your logo and color scheme are accurate.
• Questions: Ensure that survey questions are clear and concise.
• Survey Scales: Check that your choice of the survey scales are appropriate for your needs. Is it time to change your survey scales to freshen it up?
• Cross-Selling and Referrals (not applicable for Basic plan): Confirm that the wording and the products and services offered are accurate and aligned with your business goals.
• Reminder: To update your survey, please contact support@loyaltyloop.com
• Email Address:
• New email domain? If you changed your email domain, make sure to connect with our Support Team so we can give you the proper domain settings (SPF, DKIM) that will ensure high email deliverability.
• Testimonial Widget (not applicable for Basic plan):
• Widgets are live: Verify your widgets are on your website.
• Configuration: Ensure your widgets are configured to your needs.
• Published: Check that testimonials are published to your widget.
• Tip: Your account can support multiple widgets. Consider a horizontal widget or badge for your home page and a vertical widget for a testimonial page.
• Integrations:
• Review: LoyaltyLoop Integrations and Automations are available to streamline your process of engaging customers for feedback and reviews.

Negative is Positive! Wait, what?

Sometimes in life we find ourselves in situations where up is down, left is right, in is out, and black is gold and blue is white. In the world of customer feedback, the world gets even stranger. It is a world where negative is positive.

When we start working with a new client, it is fairly common to hear that they fear receiving negative feedback. This is particularly true if the client has never employed a regular process of gathering real customer feedback. This reaction is rational and natural. After all, no one really wants to hear bad news, or negative things about what we do and how we do them. It stings. In business, not only does it sting, but has the potential to de-motivate everyone in the company, unless properly managed.

That being said, negative feedback is supposed to sting, but it does not need to be a de-motivator. Quite the contrary, when managed correctly. Just like touching your hand to a flame, that stinging sensation tells you that you’re doing something that isn’t right, and if continued, will hurt. In business, that stinging feeling from negative customer feedback is telling you the same thing…your business, product, services or processes, is doing something that may not be right, and if ignored, may severely hurt your business. This is the entire point of gathering feedback.

Think about the customer who chooses to give you negative feedback. They are stopping what they’re doing, and taking time to tell you why they’re unhappy with your business. In some cases, it may be that they’ve been unhappy for a long time and finally hit their breaking point. More commonly, they are taking the time to tell you they want you to be better. When customers give negative feedback, they are telling you, and in some cases begging you, to do better for them. They are telling you they want to continue working with your business, if they can feel better about their experiences. This is how loyalty is formed. A customer giving negative feedback is almost asking if you want them to be loyal customers. If they didn’t feel that way, most unhappy customers would not waste their time giving feedback in the first place. They would simply move on to a competitor, leaving you to wonder why sales have declined.

Now that we feel a little better about hearing this negative feedback, let’s go to work for those customers, and welcome their loyalty. Filing that negative feedback on a computer someplace does nothing to improve. You must employ a repeatable process that gathers feedback, organizes it, understands it, shares it, and converts it into actions. A phrase to remember regarding feedback is “Celebrate the positives - Analyze the negatives”. Ensure employees who can affect change for the issues identified are engaged and empowered to make changes. Make corrective actions plans, test the plans, verify they address the issues, and then implement.

A key part of turning feedback into actions, is having the proper company culture. You must make it a safe environment to receive negative feedback, even if the negative feedback is about a person. Your feedback loop does not supersede your HR policies, but you can engineer an open culture where employees are incented to embrace negative feedback in order to make positive change.

Another phrase we like to use when talking about building the right company culture for embracing customer feedback, is “Use more carrot than stick”. Build a culture where employees and teams can openly discuss negative feedback without the threat of punishment or ridicule. Teams will be empowered to listen, learn and improve. Using too much stick will encourage the opposite behavior - teams will try to hide feedback, or conceal what actually happened, or game the system, which only serves to hurt the customer, the company and all employees.

Once this is understood, we can more easily see how negative is positive in the world of customer feedback. It is through this negative feedback that we learn the most. Within your company, it is probably commonly understood that if the business can improve, it could mean higher growth, higher sales, more job opportunities, faster career advancements, and so on. It is from this orientation that you need to continually educate teams and employees not to fear negative customer feedback, but to welcome it. Once they understand the relationship between acting on negative feedback to create positive outcomes (success) for the business, you will find it to be transformative.

In fact, it is not uncommon for us to feel like therapists with new clients who fear negative feedback. We help them to understand the forces at play outlined in this post, and help them implement internal procedures that foster the correct attitudes and attention to customer feedback. For us, the best reward is when these clients experience the transformational change that a well-turned customer feedback loop brings to their company, employees, brand, and bottom line.

"Feedback First" vs "Reviews First" Configuration

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If your goal is to primarily generate more Google Reviews, you might want to consider a “Reviews First” configuration in your LoyaltyLoop account. This is an advance configuration, and has some pros and cons, depending on your perspective.

Like any online marketing, it helps to reduce the number of steps or clicks when engaging someone to do something. In other words, creating a low-friction marketing approach can increase the number of people who respond to your online marketing.

Feedback First

When it comes to soliciting feedback and reviews, there is always a balancing act between creating low-friction, and gathering the correct insights for you and your business. LoyaltyLoop has tuned our “balance” over the years, which produces great results in all aspects of our customer experience service. The default LoyaltyLoop configuration is a “Feedback First” approach, followed by a “Review Ask”.

This “Feedback First” approach allows you to gather customer input privately, so you can build continuous improvement “loops” and processes in private. The feedback is provided for your eyes only - the good, the bad and the ugly - so you are in position to understand your customers, and take the appropriate action to improve. Negative feedback is in intercepted, and placed directly in your hands for action. The nature of the private feedback loop affords you the opportunity to make improvements at your pace and in private.

The goal is always to make improvements that can increase all of your customer’s experiences, improving your brand, reputation and profits. The Feedback First approach also allows you to capture other key insights in a deliberate way, such as capturing customer testimonials (with images and videos) which are similar but different from reviews, and identify other services of interest from your customer (aka Leads) and solicit referrals to new prospects, helping you drive more business.

Reviews First

But let’s suppose you want an imbalance, skewed toward attempting to get higher numbers of Google Reviews. What does a “Reviews First” configuration look like, and how would it behave?

A “Reviews First” approach solicits all customers to post a review on a site like Google, Facebook, Yelp, and others. There are 2 key differences between the “Feedback First” approach and a “Reviews First” approach:

1. All customers are requested to post a review, regardless of their disposition.
2. All reviews, and the feedback extracted from those reviews, are public.

In a “Reviews First” configuration, you need to manage negative online reviews. This is perfectly normal, as most businesses will get negative reviews from time to time. But if you delegate the process of replying to your online reviews, it will be extremely important that those individuals are trained in the methods of managing negative reviews in the eyes of the public, as anyone can see how your company responds to an unhappy customer situation. The flip side of this is actually powerful. If you can effectively manage negative online reviews, anyone reading your replies will see that your company addressed the bad situation responsibly and professionally. Ignoring negative online reviews, or worse, arguing with unhappy customers in public, will send the wrong message to prospects and others reading your reviews.

Reviews First Configuration

So how do you configure LoyaltyLoop in a “Reviews First” mode? The best way is to engage our support team to do this for you, but here’s the basic configuration. With each wave of contacts you upload or LoyaltyLoop receives, your Survey Invitation email starts the process. Instead of requesting feedback and presenting your survey link, the Survey Invitation email would be rewritten to simply ask the customer to post a review, presenting your Google Profile link. All customers would simply have the option to click the link, and be directed to your Profile to post a review. Back to the concept of ‘friction’, this is a low-friction approach to requesting reviews.

Next, the Survey Reminder email, which is sent 7 days after the Survey Invitation, will be worded to request the customer’s feedback and present your survey. The Survey Reminder would look just like your Survey Invitation in the default “Feedback First” configuration. The Survey Reminder would start your survey process after the review request has been made. The customer would exit the survey to the appropriate ‘Thank You’ page, simply thanking the customer, or thanking them and requesting they post a review if they haven’t already. Lastly, you would likely want to disable the Review Reminder email, which is sent automatically 48 hours after a survey respondent lands on your Reviews Thank You page. Since all customers in this survey launch were asked to post their review first, sending the Review Reminder email might feel redundant to your customer.

If a Reviews First approach is something you’d like to consider, please reach out to our support team to discuss.

What is Customer Effort Score (CES) and how does it compare to other CX metrics?

What is Customer Effort Score (CES?

Customer Effort Score, or CES, measures the customer’s level of effort (aka “work”) to complete an interaction with your company. Interactions might include completing a purchase, getting a quote issued, getting help or answers to a question, completing a return/refund, and many other key interactions.

Why CES is important?

Customer Effort is a key measure of loyalty. In fact, it has been shown that as customer effort increases, so does the potential for customers to turn disloyal. Intuitively, that should make sense. If it is difficult for a customer to get something done with your business, the likelihood they look elsewhere for your products or services goes up.

Ensuring that you actively reduce friction in your business, thereby allowing customers to have easier interactions, will help you increase customer loyalty, reduce churn, and strengthen your brand.

According to Gartner's research, improving your CES can create the following benefits:

• Increased NPS
• Lower costs
• Higher repeat purchases
• Higher employee retention

How to measure CES?

Every business is different, and it is important to identify the key points of interaction between your business and your customers. Identify the journeys your customers follow through your business, from first contact to ongoing relations, and consider measuring CES at key interaction points.

Typically, measured using a 5 or 7 point scale, CES asks a question about the specific interaction, such as “How easy was it for you to complete your online purchase? (0=extremely difficult, 6=very easy)”. Paired with an open-ended question to qualify the respondents answer, more details can be captured regarding why the customer answered as they did. This insight can be valuable in building continuous improvement plans.

CES and NPS

Net Promoter Score^SM, NPS® is the leading indicator of customer loyalty. Measured over time, it gives you great insight regarding how your customers feel about your business, when considering all of their integrations and experiences.

CES, on the other hand, measures a how the customer feels about a specific, but critical, business process or interaction. Each place where a customer can interact with your business is a potential point of friction and frustration for a customer. Regularly measuring CES over time can give you an early-warning system to identify specific areas that need improving. Pairing CES surveys with your NPS surveys gives you a more complete picture of your business.

Automating CES

Like any CX process, the more automated the better. Using triggers and automations to generate lists or flows of the customers exiting your key processes (e.g. purchase, ticket, quote, shipment) will allow you to more easily engage them for CES feedback. Using a CXM (Customer Experience Management) platform, like LoyaltyLoop, will ensure the right customers are engaged at the right time.

Calculating CES

Just like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Product Quality (PQUAL), CES is measured on a scale of 0 to 100, and is calculated by dividing the number of respondents who found the interaction easy in any way (e.g. 4: “somewhat easy”, 5: “easy”, 6: “very easy”) by the total number of respondents. If 70 out of 100 respondents found the process easy, you have a 70% CES for that process.

Start measuring, then build continuous improvement plans that reduces friction (i.e. effort) in the process. Set goals to increase your CES over time. Like all CX metrics, do not fixate on attaining a perfect score. Execute plans that allow you to improve CES, and maintain high levels.