Data isn’t always cut-and-dry, structured, and organized.
Your organization may have customer data scattered across departments, including unstructured data from sales calls and more.
In this clip from her session at B2B Forum 2023, Dina Otero (VP of Demand Gen at Mission Cloud) uncovers the different places your data may be hiding, and how to put it to use to improve your customer’s experience with your brand.
Watch this video from Embracing Customer Centricity: The New Rules of Marketing, or read the transcript below.
And for more data about improved marketing through customer insights, join us in Boston this November. Click here for details about the world’s most actionable B2B marketing conference: B2B Forum.
Transcript:
Quality of your data.
Data is such a complicated subject. And it’s often underused and used incorrectly, unless there is a tangible asset that someone can go look at, or read, or understand with takeaways.
So instead of just having all these disparate sources…
I mean…
Marketing is collecting their data through the website and all of their channels.
Customer success probably has their own.
The service team definitely has their own to track support cases, and progress, and responses from people, and how that’s going.
And they’re all over the place. And they’re not talking to each other.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve worked [with] or spoken to companies where their sales team has no idea—and even their own customer success team has no idea—that their customer has an ongoing case ticket open with customer support that could have been going on for weeks or months.
And then they have to start talking about renewals, and they’re like, “why do I want to renew with you? I’ve had this problem for weeks and you never… I haven’t been able to fix it.”
That openness, that connection, needs to continue. And make it consistent so everyone in the organization can see it.
Going back to culture, transparency.
Bad feedback is not something to hide. We actually learn more from negative information than positive information.
Those are the customers who are going to help you improve.
And you need to use that technology to connect with customers. Knowledge basis. Customer portals. Give them a bird’s eye view of everything that you have for them, access to resources, product information.
If you really value their vision, [give customers a] sneak peek into product roadmaps and let them provide their input.
And quite frankly, if they provide input and it’s something that you implement, chances are they’re going to be more invested in that feature because it came from them.
Oh, sorry. One more thing on improving your data. I talked about unstructured information.
So tools like Gong and Chorus—and quite frankly, a lot of these call recording services—a lot of them also transcribe the calls. Every time, they’re recorded, and it happens automatically. It doesn’t require any human time.
A lot of them now are adding or have added an AI element, too, where it will track emotional sentiment based on the way that an individual’s voice raises, or lowers, or… I don’t know the science behind it. But basically the tool is able to pick up the emotions that somebody is feeling during a conversation.
So if you’re having a demo or a call with a client about a renewal or a contract or something, these AI features are allowed to give you now access to information that’s saying, “hey, this part of the call really resonated well. Their sentiment was green or happy or whatever, or excited. But in this part of the call, their sentiment really dropped and it became quite negative.”
And then, if you collect enough of that information and start looking for trends, you now have different information that you can use to be like, “okay, well, we haven’t been talking about this topic, but it’s really resonating. So how do we build on that?” Or, “you guys, we’re doing this renewal, we’re not positioning it right. We need to think of another way to bring up this challenge and concern.”
It’s that information that helps improve the customer experience overall. And this kind of ties back into customer feedback as well, formal and informal.
So yes, relationship surveys, NPS surveys. For anyone who’s unfamiliar, NPS score is usually, it’s like those survey emails that you get. It’s like a one-question, “how likely are you to recommend this company or this tool?” And it’s from zero to 10. Zero, unlikely. Ten, very likely. NPS score is the percentage of detractors. So anyone who scores you zero to six, minus the percentage of promoters, people who mark you as nine or 10.
Seven and eight are neutral. And so they are out of the calculation. They don’t hate you, but they’re not going to go out of their way to advocate on your behalf.
So [NPS is] taking that information and tracking your progress.
And there’s different kinds of NPS, by the way.
There’s overall NPS sentiment, like, “how likely are you to recommend?”
There’s product NPS. “Is your user interface easy to use? Do you have to go through too many clicks, not too many clicks? Are you making improvements?” Things like that.
And then taking that feedback, like I said, the incoming feedback formally, informally, if you’re on a call and someone just says something in passing. Have some sort of system or a place or notes or somewhere to just throw it in so it’s collected. And then it can be used and then tied back or handed over to the team or the group.
That comment really applies to then creating a customer advisory board. I love customer advisory boards when they work well and when they’re implemented correctly.
Here’s the thing with customer advisory boards. If you’re going to create one, you really have to listen.
And hearing and listening are not the same thing. I know that. I have a toddler, so he hears me all the time, but he doesn’t listen.
With the customer advisory board, if you are going to have somebody commit their time to spend time with you and give any sort of feedback on product or service—anything of any kind—and you are just doing nothing with it? You are hurting yourself more than helping yourself. Then just don’t do it. Honestly. Just don’t do the customer advisory board.
It has to be a constant feedback loop and the product team, R&D, have to be fully bought-in on this to work. Because nine times out of 10, it’s going to affect them the most.
Published April 10, 2024
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