Measuring the success of customer service isn’t as simple as just looking at reviews, sales figures or the amount of potential customers your store receives.
There are a wealth of statistics and metrics to monitor to understand customer experience. As well as the minefield of potential bad reviews to navigate. The best solutions intercept unhappy clients and ask for feedback that comes directly back to you, preventing third party criticism. They also let you shout about your great reviews through social integration.
Tapping into customer insight is fundamentally about ease of use. Simple and timely campaigns yield results. There’s a host of software out there to meet the needs of businesses. I’ve collated the four best simple, effective and affordable online solutions to help you track your metrics.
AskNicely provides customer feedback analytics software based on the Net Promoter Score (NPS) analytic framework. It incentivises customer feedback through simple ‘one tap’ feedback. Widely regarded as the most functional feedback management platform, its simplicity is not only intuitive for you but great for customers too, resulting in a high rate of feedback.
Features:
- Outstanding four-step setup for easy onboarding and migration:
- AskNicely asks you to test their software first before anything else. This familiarises you with the look and feel of the emails you’ll be sending out.
- Upload a list of customers. Either import or manually add them or set it up to send ‘triggered’ emails after a customer
- Configure your email schedule.
- Plan when you want to receive feedback alerts.
- Attractive, contemporary user interface focusing on functionality.
- Easy scheduling system, Business Agility Consulting and email blasts.
- No contract.
- Customer segmentation.
- Feedback management page that allows you to email the customer requesting permissions to publish the comment on your site and the ability to request permissions to publish comments to social media in attractive ‘social cards’. If they respond positively, AskNicely automatically publishes it in the design you preapprove.
- Keen customer support team, open during business hours.
- Text analysis compiles a list of the keywords that happy and unhappy customers use.
- Allows customer support teams to leave notes on feedback status.
- Integration with a wide range of apps such as Slack, Mailchimp and Intercom.
- Embeddable widgets for your website and social.
- Downloadable reports.
- Dashboard analytics features:
- Net promoter score.
- Survey stats and response rate: e.g. sent, delivered, opened, responded.
- Monthly trend analysis.
- Segmented leaderboards that show response rate and NPS.
AskNicely has four packages: Free, Startup, Business and Salesforce. Startup prices come in at highly affordable $39 (annual) or $49 (monthly) plans allowing 1,000 surveys per month and multiple methods of integration.
Hively is big on team motivation. At the cheaper end of the scale, it has its pros and cons, and it is better for support teams rather than small brick and mortar businesses. Team members earn points for their ratings and these result in an overall and individual customer happiness score. Whether this competitive element is right for you depends on your company culture. In a supportive environment, Hively encourages and rewards employees, and real-time feedback directly to support teams allows staff to act on customer information and address any negative responses.
Features:
- Three minute setup time.
- Customizable customer landing page.
- Customers can provide further feedback with optional comments.
- One-click feedback.
- Ability to set up email alerts.
- Feedback is personal.
- Segment the type of data from happy, satisfied, unhappy as well as filtering those with or without comments.
- Downloadable data in excel format.
- Integration with any email client, customer relationship system or ticket tracking system.
- Rewards feature Buzz, which they describe as a ‘pat on the back’ between employees.
Hively comes in at $15 a month, or free if you have three team members or less, making it the most affordable online customer feedback management system. With annual subscriptions, you can get a 10% discount on this price.
Grade.us is a simple, affordable review management process. Fantastic for small businesses, Grade.us places an emphasis on prompting customers to review through timely three step prompts. I like Grade.us because the customer support is incredible and the platform prioritises intuitive technology for customers and businesses. What’s more, it offers a free 30-day trial so you can decide if it’s for you.
Features:
- Excellent customer support during business hours.
- Custom URL.
- Integration with other review sites and social media.
- Comprehensive video demo.
- Fully customizable feedback landing page.
- Invitation to review through email, SMS, and print.
- Invites happy customers to review on third party sites i.e. Facebook, Google, TripAdvisor,
- Provides customer feedback form for unhappy customers to prevent badmouthing on third party sites.
- Customizable feedback form.
- Embeddable website and email widgets.
- Embeddable ‘review us’ button.
- Customizable email, SMS and print campaign.
- Exportable campaign data.
- Collates database of all historical online
- Real time review alerts.
- Data provided in reviewing panel:
- Overall average review rating.
- Review volume and distribution by website.
- Social “likes” and “check-ins.”
- Total number of visits, clicks, and conversions.
- Total review volume.
- Links to all reviews made in period.
Grade.us packages start at $25/month for a small business package and $70 a month for their ‘marketer’ package with discounts for annual subscriptions. The $25 a month package comes with a $99 setup fee.
Freshdesk’s vision is to optimise communication and efficiency for customer support teams. Its strength resides in aiding organization and team cohesion. Every element of the support process is available within one easy to navigate system. Better yet, freshdesk aims to anticipate customer needs through keyword analysis helping your support team keep satisfaction levels high.
Features:
- Ticketing facilities allow teams to work together, write notes and set deadlines for tasks.
- Excellent organisational features for ticketing including priority markers and status.
- Shared inbox for team collaboration.
- Text analysis of ticket queries to find keywords that need addressing quickly.
- Define your support hours so customers are aware of support periods.
- Analyses ticket volume trends.
- ‘Gamification’ facility to boost the productivity of support teams through motivation and awards.
- Create a customizable ‘knowledge base’. This is essentially a FAQ section, to help customers resolve queries through self-service.
- Create community forums so customers can communicate with each other and ask questions.
- ‘Day Pass’ facility allows you to add additional agents one day or a weekend to help during peak periods.
- Helpdesk reports show:
- Created tickets.
- Resolved tickets.
- Reopened tickets.
- Average response time.
- Average resolution time.
- Average first assign time.
- First contact resolution.
- Resolution and first response SLA.
- Integration with social media.
- Integrates with popular software like Google Drive.
- Built in email customer satisfaction surveys.
- Powerful inbuilt spam filter.
- Plugin facility to integrate software not yet available.
Freshdesk starts at $16 or free for up to three agents. It has five packages to choose from, ranging from $0 to $70.
There are a wealth of statistics and metrics to monitor to understand customer experience. As well as the minefield of potential bad reviews to navigate. The best solutions intercept unhappy clients and ask for feedback that comes directly back to you, preventing third party criticism.
Picking the right solution should be measured against its ability to enable you to tap into the key customer experience metrics you need in order to continually improve your customer service delivery.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.