Your customer success team holds the keys to unlocking customer relationships. But how do you make sure the entire organization has access? We sat down with Marco Yim, Director of Customer Success at Inkbox, to understand how his team collects, shares, and takes action on feedback to elevate the customer experience.
Unlocking the value of your customer success team
Your CS team interacts with your customers on a daily basis. This means they’re sitting on a treasure trove of information.
Unfortunately, at most companies, this valuable data stays within the CS team. But this is a huge missed opportunity. Imagine what would happen if you could turn your own CS team into a source of market intelligence.
Your marketing team could use this information to strengthen your FAQs, returns page, and any other content to improve the customer’s understanding of your brand.
Your operations team could leverage the data to identify problem areas with shipping logistics so people get their orders faster.
Your web development team could follow customer feedback to update kinks with the checkout process and create a more seamless experience.
Does this sound like a dream come true? Well, this is exactly what the team at Inkbox does. And Yim was generous enough to share exactly how he and his team accomplish this.
How Inkbox turns its customer success team into an information hub
Inkbox creates semi-permanent tattoos that last one to two weeks and allow customers to express themselves to the fullest. Since this is a novel product, the Inkbox team has invested a lot of resources into understanding how they can best educate, serve, and communicate with their customers.
Yim, recognizing the value of this information, decided to create a system at Inkbox that allows the customer support team to share this information with the rest of the organization.
“We’re a hub of information for customers when they have questions, concerns, or feedback. Internally, we’re the hub of information for all of our customer’s data to be able to share across different departments,” explains Yim.
But how exactly did he build this process? If you want to hear our full conversation with Yim, you can listen to our podcast episode. But for the high-level takeaways, check out our overview below.
1. Create a feedback loop across the organization
Inkbox tracks customer data across different channels at a very granular level. To make sure everyone at the organization has access to this information, Yim put a few tools and processes into place that allows them to create an internal feedback loop. Specifically:
- Customers insights are shared with department leaders daily
- Every team has a customized dashboard to help them optimize their work
- Inkbox also has a program that utilizes customer feedback to make business decisions
Yim shared an example of what this feedback loop looks like in action. After identifying an opportunity to improve the way Inkbox runs sales promotions on its website, Yim’s team decided to collect qualitative and quantitative feedback from customers. After sharing their findings with various teams and running multiple tests, Inkbox ended up having one of the best-performing sales promotions in the company’s history.
“By understanding what the customer was looking for and their expectations, we were able to create hypotheses and do more in-depth A/B testing to get to where we wanted to go,” says Yim.
2. Structure the customer support team strategically
As every organization knows, knowledge sharing is easier said than done. With the amount of customer data Inkbox is collecting, how do they efficiently organize and distribute this information? Yim’s secret is to strategically break down his CS team into three subgroups:
- Customer experience. This sub-team is responsible for what we traditionally think of as support, such as answering emails across channels, proactively reaching out to customers, and implementing retention practices.
- Custom team. This sub-team is focused on Inkbox’s custom platform, which enables customers to design and purchase tattoos that aren’t part of the standard catalog. They spend the majority of their time on operations and informing customers on how to use their custom platform.
- Customer success team. Finally, the CS sub-team is solely responsible for collecting customer insights, aggregating the feedback, and sharing everything out to the appropriate teams.
According to Yim, having a team dedicated to project managing the customer feedback and liaising with different departments accomplishes several things. First, it creates clear ownership. It also ensures that the CS team is the first point-of-contact when other teams are looking for answers to a customer-related problem.
“We use that team to strategically boost our visibility and provide valuable insights to the rest of the company,” says Yim.
3. Focus on the right KPIs
Of course, it’s important to make sure the information hub is having a tangible impact on the organization. To do this, Yim and his team take a holistic approach to KPIs. While most CS teams just focus on tactical metrics, the Inkbox team take it a step further by focusing on three types of feedback.
- Tactical. Yim doesn’t deny the importance of measuring the tactical, day-to-day impact of their work. This type of data is one of the most tangible ways to see if their actions in response to customer feedback are having the desired impact. This includes looking at metrics like the rate of application errors and shipping delays.
- Holistic. Yim also likes to look at more holistic metrics like NPS, CSAT, and public reviews. He even includes qualitative feedback in this category. The purpose of these metrics is to provide a big picture of how customers are feeling about Inkbox as a brand.
- Influenced impact. There are also times when CS doesn’t directly own a sale but was heavily involved in enabling the success of the teams that do. Yim calls this influenced impact. For instance, maybe the CS team provided valuable insight into how to rebuild certain parts of the website, which has led to an increase in conversion rates.
Focusing on these KPIs – which go beyond just tactical efficiency – allows Inkbox to close the feedback loop and ensure that their information hub is providing value to the rest of the organization.
We love Inkbox’s unique approach to collecting, sharing, and acting on customer feedback. Hopefully, the strategies that Yim shared inspire you to find new ways to unlock the value of your CS team. Get in touch with our team to learn how Loop can provide your team with even better customer feedback.