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Welcome back!

We hope everyone had a great weekend— and for our U.S. readers, happy Memorial Day! Since we’re closing our theme of customer relationship management with this week’s edition, feel free to share suggestions for future themes in the quick form here.

This month, we’ve mostly been discussing how to get customers hooked on your brand from the product side. Today, we’re fully spotlighting your customers to help you make your life easier by letting them do the talking.

Customer feedback isn’t just about treating your customers right after something goes wrong, but proactively implementing their thoughts into your growth strategy and long-term product development. We’ll see what we can learn from Tesla, Uber, and Netflix about making customers feel heard.

Let’s dive in! 🏎️

News

Tools + Productivity

Strategy

Elon Musk often highlights the importance of feedback loops for both personal development and business growth. Naturally, implementing customer feedback and closing the loop has been critical to Tesla’s exceptionally high customer satisfaction rates and NPS score.

Although he’s been criticized for certain branding decisions (read: X), Musk knows a thing or two about feedback-fueled growth. He makes a point to insert himself in the loop by soliciting customer input and using it to constantly improve Tesla’s vehicles.

Like Musk often does on X/Twitter, you can close the loop by informing customers when you use their input to make changes.

This doesn’t just make customers feel heard but also taps into their sense of importance and autonomy, making them feel like they have a role in the product’s future.

“How would you rate your experience:”
To close the loop successfully, you have to start with a strong foundation— which you build by gathering all the data you can from your product’s users.

You probably don’t fill out every customer feedback survey in your inbox after buying a product. To avoid annoying customers and only extract what you need, keep surveys short and sweet by defining a clear goal before sending them out.

To this day, companies use in-person interviews and focus groups to gather thoughts from customers. Incentivizing people to do so is an added cost, but can still be valuable to get intel on specific questions.

However, thanks to social media, you can now easily eavesdrop on honest opinions of your brand, competitors, and industry for free! And don’t forget about third-party review sites or community forums like Reddit.

Tools like Google Alerts or Mention can help you identify mentions of your brand on these relevant websites.

The Big 3
Of course, analyzing qualitative brand sentiments online can be harder to measure and track over time compared to more quantitative survey results.

Here’s a quick overview of the three main surveys used to quantify feedback:

Net Promoter Score (NPS): Percentage of ‘promoters’ minus percentage of ‘detractors’. Uses a single-question survey asking how likely you are to recommend the product on a scale of 1-10.

Usually, scores are broken down like so: 0-6 = detractor, 7-8 = passive, and 9-10 = promoter

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Percentage of “satisfied” or “very satisfied” customers. Think, when you’re asked to choose between a range of five emojis ranging from☹️ to 😃.

Customer Effort Score (CES): Measures how easy it is for a customer to have their problems solved. Usually % of positive results by asking an “agree”/”disagree” question.

For example: “The company made it easy for me to handle my issue.”

Decisions, Decisions.
Once you know what customers are thinking, you can use that to guide strategies, processes, and goals across all aspects of your company— from product features to customer service.

Making decisions about pricing, promotion, and products can be one of the trickiest things to navigate as a business owner. So why not let your customers help make those decisions for you?

Uber maintains the quality of its’ drivers by collecting ratings from all customers and asking below-average drivers to improve their service. They also keep it fair by allowing drivers to rate customers for other drivers to see.

This two-way feedback system benefits both sides of the satisfaction equation for Uber, allowing them to quickly identify and address bad apples on the platform.

Let customers lead the way
Lasso, an AI service that delivers B2B contacts on demand, maintains a publicly available product roadmap where users can request new features.

Allowing users to boost other ideas automatically prioritizes which features are most in demand, making it easy for Lasso to decide which ones to implement next.

As a plus, this helps customers feel more connected to the brand because they can clearly see how their input is being used to guide the product’s development.

If you’re a company that offers a wide range of content (like Netflix), customer feedback is crucial for identifying areas of improvement.

You’re probably familiar with the streaming service’s various options, which range from Netflix originals to blockbuster hits to locally produced movies and shows.

By asking customers to rate their satisfaction with selections across these different categories, Netflix knows where it should focus on improving or expanding its’ content to make subscribers happy.

Netflix also allows users to request shows or movies, helping them identify the most in-demand titles to make better licensing decisions.

Did you catch the form in the intro of this article? At Beyond9to5, we practice what we preach— which is why we asked for your input to guide our future content.

Looking Ahead
Even if you’ve got your feedback collection processes down pat, you’re not growing until you use it to make changes to existing products and systems while reprioritizing new features and improvements.

To tie the knot on the feedback loop, don’t forget to follow up with customers who do provide feedback to show your appreciation and reinforce a positive brand relationship.

The way you respond to feedback reflects how you’re engaging with your customers— and customer engagement, along with personalization, is the thread you should be weaving throughout the entire customer journey.

Clearly, the components of this month’s theme are all tied up, and improving any one of them helps reinforce the others. CRM boils down to understanding the human side that influences customer behavior— and leveraging that to create long-term connections with your brand.

Stay tuned for next week’s edition, where we’ll introduce a new marketing strategy theme!

Customer Relationship Management
Week 1: Personalization
Week 2: Customer Journey
Week 3: Engagement
Week 4: Feedback (This week)

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