When it comes to helping teams build customer-centric products, a big part of that is figuring out how you can help communicate more effectively and efficiently insights about customers.
Exposing CX insights, so you have the visibility and attention of the entire company could help generate change and a deeper empathy with the customer. It could be the difference between being seen as having an impact across the organisation or the hard work you do each day going unnoticed.
If you’re an Insight Analyst, UX Researcher, Product Manager or CX Professional who works on customer-centric initiatives read on as you may find some tips that help you get that promotion and elevate your standing in the organisation.
Slack Integrations
If your team is anything like ours, you're in Slack a lot. At Chattermill, almost all of our internal communication happens in Slack, and it's even one of our preferred methods to speak to customers.
Which is why when thinking about how to help teams share and discuss insights from their customer experience data, Slack is one of the first places that comes to mind. Lots of you have likely taken screenshots and pasted them into Slack channels to spark further discussion with your teammates - not exactly an ideal workflow.
Firstly, screenshots will see your desktop turn into a monstrosity, the digital equivalent of locating a needle in a haystack. A far cry from the visual serenity Steve Jobs and Apple intended the desktop to be. Secondly, the workflow is reactive rather than proactive. You have to dig into the data to pull insights. You only have a limited amount of time each day to surface insights on different projects and segments of the business.
A change in your dataset might go unnoticed, and a critical insight could go unseen for a few days. By then it's too late, and you're playing catchup to keep up with customer sentiment and demands. It's better to structure your workflow to be proactive where you have alerts and insights posted into Slack so team members can be agile and make decisions quickly based on data.
You should make sure the platform you use to monitor CX data has taken advantage of Slack's APIs to help make some beneficial alerts and notifications for you and your colleagues.
Using Chattermill when a pattern emerges in your data and meets specific criteria, you will receive a notification via Slack automatically. For example, this could be when a customer has asked for further contact or has given you a particularly low NPS score. Or when NPS has reached a particular milestone that should be celebrated.
Host Internal Events
At times in your work life, you may have been frustrated that people don’t quite understand the work you do or the impact and benefits it has for your teammates.
At Chattermill every week we have a breakfast and learn session where employees from different teams present and educate the broader company on their area of expertise. Topics could range from the Product team discussing agile methodology, the Deep Learning team discussing the latest developments in AI or Marketing sharing tips and strategies on how they plan to grow the customer base.
Why not organise one for CX and Data? It’s an excellent opportunity to educate the broader organisation on the work you do, the challenges you face, the problems you solve and plans for the future to get everyone pumped and excited about the impact you have at the company.
You may find yourself with new fans and fewer blockers in the organisation to help get projects over the line. More engaging conversations during breaks and new ideas to help turn your insights into action.
Email Digest
People still have time for high-quality content in their inbox. Everyone in an organization checks their inbox regularly at all levels from the intern to the CEO.
We live in a world of information overload and shortening attention spans, and you might be surprised at the positive response you receive by sharing easy to digest insights. A successful digest email can have impressive results on engagement. Good digest emails (a) summarize important information in a way that makes it very easy for a reader to get value, and (b) delivers it right to…their inbox (where they are already spending most of their time).
For instance, take LinkedIn Daily Update Digest - one of the most successful digest emails ever — it has been essential for driving LinkedIn’s engagement and growth. If there were an engagement email Hall-of-Fame, this would be the first inductee!
It’s safe to say that LinkedIn wouldn’t have driven nearly the participation and engagement it has without this email. Maybe you can take inspiration and set up your own weekly internal CX insight digest email? Treat it as an experiment if it doesn’t quite work out then move on and try something else.
Integrate Data Sources
As your team and company scales, you'll generally have a light stack of a few analytics, support and CX tools.
It might be easy for different members of your organisation to log in to a particular tool and pull insights that they need without any hassle. As the company scales more sophisticated, more complex and powerful tools are introduced to your workflow. The number of touchpoints with the customer increases, and you'll be collecting feedback and CX data from different mediums and channels.
It can soon become difficult for other people in your company to understand what customers think and feel about your brand and grasp the key drivers behind the customer experience. Quite quickly, your insights can become lost in a sea of software.
Modern workflows and CX analytics platforms are designed to integrate with the tools you use daily via APIs. They are helping you transform the time-intensive process of importing CSV files into excel spreadsheets and manually checking feedback into a smooth operation. Connecting the dots between different tools to create a centralised hub of CX information and analytics dashboards for team members to access.
The integration of data sources leads to better and faster business decisions. Without the right analytics platform, how can your company know or understand the customer's needs and be empathetic to their demands? It can become a complex challenge to take action on data when it's dispersed across different tools.
Customers who use Chattermill have enhanced their customer understanding and can deliver great insights at speed to wider organisation. We've been pleased to see CX insight teams status within the organisation skyrocket as a side product of making their organisation more customer-centric and data-informed.
Display Your Dashboard on a Large Screen
A highly effective way to achieve sharing your insights to your teammates is to use TV dashboard software to display a selection of key data on a TV screen or monitor in a prominent area in your workplace.
The benefits of using TV dashboards can be profound. Aside from being able to monitor abnormal events and trends, a simple dashboard with some carefully selected metrics can impact an organisation’s culture, inspiring customer data-centric conversations (and more importantly, action) like nothing else.
To get it up and running would be quite simple, other than ensuring you have a screen that is HD (i.e can display 1080p) and that has the necessary ports to display the output from the device you select.
Tip: If you’re looking for help with mounting your screen, consider hiring someone for a few hours through TaskRabbit.
Speak the Language of Your Audience
Not everyone is accustomed to CX metrics or is a data expert, so you may need to adjust the messaging and adjust how you present your insights.
In other words, it means presenting data in a way that makes sense to different people within your organization, allowing them to take action by tailoring analytics to their needs.
Start by gathering feedback from internal stakeholders and gain a deeper understanding of the metrics that matter to them. Remember, their goals and their interests will be heavily aligned and bespoke to their function. If you can create dashboards excluding data that isn’t pertinent to their day to day objectives, you can capture the attention of your co-workers.
Make a point of scheduling standing meetings to discuss results. This kind of ongoing communication is pivotal when it comes to driving action; it turns your CX strategy into a responsive, ongoing conversation, not a twice-yearly, “Hey, we really should measure NPS.”
