Sometimes, a handful of customer complaints is the key to growth.
That’s why customer success teams spend ample time gathering customer feedback, which offers crucial insight into their services. By being open to both positive and negative input, CS teams can pinpoint their weaknesses — and reverse them.
Considering customer feedback can be the catalyst for positive change, it’s important for CS teams to efficiently measure and implement this information. According to Chelsea Darby, customer success manager at SevenRooms, it’s a task that involves many moving parts.
“Measuring customer satisfaction isn’t a one-stop shop,” she said, explaining that information gathering is only the first step in the process. Darby said a focus on relationships, value and engagement are also crucial to helping teams understand clients’ feedback.
In order to forge those strong bonds with customers, brands must maintain consistent engagement, a best practice the team at Rhino knows well. Partner Success Team Lead Chelsea Strickland recalled how the company received important feedback that altered its product roadmap.
Strickland explained that the team discovered clients’ desire for cash deposit management, which led to the development of a new product. Without strong engagement, the team wouldn’t have developed this product, which has proven an effective solution for clients.
“Partner success is a powerful force for continued product improvement and business growth,” Strickland said.
For Darby and Strickland, customer feedback is the key to building strong client relationships and driving companywide progress. Built In NYC caught up with both professionals to discuss how their teams efficiently measure and implement this critical information.
SevenRooms’ guest experience and retention platform enables hospitality brands to gain repeat business and garner insights from their customers’ experiences.
How do you measure customer satisfaction?
Tools, such as NPS, CSAT and surveys help collect and measure data, but they’re only a small piece of the puzzle. In order to effectively measure customer satisfaction, you need to focus on three main things: relationships, value and engagement.
Customers want consistency while businesses want predictability. Finding the points that overlap is key to success. Customers care about how you make them feel and the outcomes they experience. If you can understand a client’s goals, you can build a valuable relationship.
When you receive customer feedback, how do you implement that into impactful change?
Customer feedback helps drive our business strategy. Whenever a customer success manager receives feedback from an operator, we share that information with our CS and product teams. This allows everyone to keep a constant pulse on how our product is doing and find out if there’s anything we can improve on.
Giving customers a forum where they can share their thoughts is one of the most powerful ways to show them that you care. Actively listening to our operators and implementing their feedback helps us build loyalty in an authentic and meaningful way.
Giving customers a forum where they can share their thoughts is one of the most powerful ways to show them that you care.”
To ensure this feedback is being heard and embraced, we engage in a cross-departmental meeting at the start of each month to analyze feedback trends and advocate for product improvements on behalf of our customers.
What tips would you offer to a customer success manager or leader for strengthening client relationships with open communication?
At the end of the day, customers just want to be heard. Lend them an ear and take the time to listen to what they have to say. By having a conversation with them, you’re opening the door to a world of opportunities, including creating authentic relationships.
These authentic relationships are built on the foundation of trust, and a great way to build trust is through empathy. While your relationship with your client is rooted in business, you have to ensure you see them as a person rather than a number. Everyone is busy, yet making time to strengthen relationships must be a priority.
Rhino’s renters insurance removes the burden of cash security deposits, instead offering access to a low monthly policy.
How do you measure customer satisfaction?
Partner, or customer, success is the heart and driver of our revenue. We serve as the voice of both Rhino and our customers, measuring satisfaction through our conversations and feedback gathered from various surveys. Ultimately, we measure customer satisfaction by gauging retention and expansion, which is a direct result of our engagement with our partners.
When you receive customer feedback, how do you implement that into impactful change?
Partner success is a powerful force for continued product improvement and business growth. We’re constantly talking to our partners and taking time to understand what they love about Rhino and where they see room for improvement.
Partner success is a powerful force for continued product improvement and business growth.
We proactively seek out challenges and collaborate with teams cross-functionally to cultivate creative solutions in order to drive real impact for our partners and their renters as well as our company. For example, many of our partners were requesting cash deposit management. Because of this feedback, we developed a new product, Rhino+, which is an end-to-end deposit-management system designed to better serve our customers’ leasing needs.
What tips would you offer to a customer success manager or leader for strengthening client relationships with open communication?
The biggest and most important aspect of strengthening partner relationships is ensuring we’re talking to them, whether that’s through quarterly business reviews, weekly check-ins, proactively sharing performance findings, or simply being available to assist when needed. We truly know our customers best, and it’s our job to be their advocates and ensure they’re getting the most out of their partnership with Rhino. The most effective way to accomplish this is through proactive, consistent contact.
