The 7 Habits of Customer-Obsessed Businesses is a foundational bedrock of AskNicely's feedback philosophy. You can download a copy of the Coaching Playbook here.
Below is a summary of the 7 Habits, and how AskNicely can support each step.
1. Set the Service Standard
What kind of experience can you promise your customers? What kind of experience do you want to promise your customers? When standing up a Customer Experience Program, it's crucial to take a moment to take the 10,000 foot view and carefully consider what you wish your Customer Experience could be, and what gaps need to be filled in order to provide that Customer Experience.
- For example, at AskNicely, we have four pillars to our service approach: "Simple, Personal, Responsive, Curious."
- We avoid jargon and unnecessary complexity, we care about the people we are trying to serve, we prioritize Closing the Loop over perfection, and we stay curious about our customers - their needs, their wants, and how we can best serve them.
- These pillars serve as a guiding light for how we interact with and respond to our own customers.
Once you have had a chance to nut out your high-level objectives with your team, you are ready to configure AskNicely to meet those objectives.
2. Do One Thing Better
Now that you've got the dream dialed in, it's time to make it reality. AskNicely works best with a dedicated team that is hooked on feedback - once you have added your users, invite them to the AskNicely mobile app. Show them they can manage their notifications in the Settings page. Test out some Internal Notes, and explore our #hashtags functionality.
In short, play around! Get your team excited about this tool - you're opening up a whole new world of feedback and giving voice to your customers. This is a chance for your team to take more ownership over the customer experience, and to validate or challenge everything that they've come to believe about what makes your organization tick. It's an exciting time.
3. Get Feedback to the Frontline
As you use AskNicely to reply back to your customers, the flexibility of AskNicely really will start to shine. We recommend starting really simple with our default Reply Templates and a handful of Workflows to drive reviews and respond to blank comments - from there, let your customers lead the way. Often, just simple acknowledgement goes a long way. Flag successful interactions with #hashtags, and share learnings with Internal Notes.
4. Recognize Achievements
Arguably the greatest value AskNicely provides is our Leaderboards. This function provides breakdowns of your NPS/CSAT/5 Star scores by the fields you import into AskNicely. If, for example, every contact that is imported into AskNicely has a designated Customer Success Manager, we can then get a breakdown of which Customer Success Manager has the happiest customer. Being able to shoutout a member of your organization with data to back it is a powerful tool!
Our Frontline module takes this to the next level, tying overall feedback to individual contributions. Check it out here.
5. Coach for Small Improvements
One of the most powerful ways you can improve customer experiences while helping your organization see the pain-points of their customers for themselves is to have members of your organization reach out directly the dissatisfied customers. Why not schedule a call? Talking to real-live customers is the best way to let your team coach themselves and learn the behaviors that will drive real change.
6. Connect the Frontline to the Bottom Line
In our experience, people that have excellent interactions with your organization will want to share the good word.
The key thing to do before you fire up the AskNicely referral machine is to take stock of where things are when you started: how many Google Reviews? How many referrals are you averaging? How many customer success stories do you have in your bank? Count those first so that your can measure the impact AskNicely has 3-6 months down the line.
After an AskNicely experience, set up Get More Reviews Workflows to kick your review and referral gathering into overdrive.
7. Unmute the Frontline
For this last one, the power is in your hands. We give you tools to manage your Responses (Case Management), Dashboard displays for your Response data (AskNicely TV, Dashboard Apps, the General Download Report), and myriad ways to get your organization's eyes on the prize of being truly customer-centric. From here, you need to gather these learnings and make choices.
So what's next for your organization? Are you going to put together an outreach squad to reach out to your Detractors and convert your Passives? Are you going to implement a process improvement that you unearthed the need for by using our Theme Buckets or #hashtags? Are you going to pass the feedback you gathered to your Product team to improve your offerings, or use your Leaderboard data to Praise the Best and Coach the Rest?
The Power is in your Hands!