The Sentiments Blog team recently had the opportunity to chat with Chris Rogers, VOC Analytics Project Manager at Constant Contact. Chris shared his experiences with listening to and acting on the Voice of the Customer (VOC) in order to make meaningful change across the company. Here’s what he had to share:
Sentiments: Chris, can you give us a quick introduction to Constant Contact please?
Rogers: Sure. Constant Contact offers email marketing software that helps our customers to create effective email marketing and other online marketing campaigns to meet their business goals. Simply put, we empower small businesses and non-profits to grow customer relationships and succeed.
Sentiments: How do you currently use Clarabridge to listen to the voice of your customers?
Rogers: We are currently analyzing customer feedback – both text-based comments and customer ratings – from multiple customer surveys. Before Clarabridge, we used to manually read through and code all of the customer survey responses. This was a huge, time-consuming undertaking. With Clarabridge, we’ve seen a massive increase in the amount of data we are able to analyze. This means we spend less time reading and more time acting – which is where we make the most impact to the company.
Sentiments: What kind of business impact have you seen by using Clarabridge?
Rogers: With Clarabridge, we’ve been able to make product improvements and process enhancements. In many cases, there may be an issue our teams are aware of but our customer feedback analysis will reinforce the severity of the issue, prompting re-prioritization to address it.
For example, our team started seeing a huge drop in satisfaction scores and increased comments around the Editor loading process. After analyzing the data further, we realized that Chrome had recently made an update to their browser, which meant that some Constant Contact pages took longer to load. We took our findings to the Product team. As it turned out, the Product team had been aware of the updated Chrome browser, but did not realize how much of an impact it would have on the performance of our software. With hard data and quantifiable proof of customer discontent, we were able to have the performance issue reprioritized internally, and as a result, customer satisfaction scores improved back to their normal levels.
Sentiments: How is your VOC team organized within the company?
Rogers: We are a central team that governs and oversees all of the customer feedback data management and analysis. We work with other departments across the company, sharing customer insights and acting on the feedback together. The VOC team sits under the VP of Customer Success, who reports into our CEO.
Sentiments: What advice do you have for other VOC teams trying to get executive buy-in for their customer experience program?
Rogers: Getting executive buy-in is critical in order to make meaningful change. After all, there’s no point in getting all this great insight and customer feedback if you can’t use it to improve and innovate your products and services. At Constant Contact, showing results has been key in gaining executive backing. If we make a change to the product and the VOC Analytics team is able to track how customers are responding to the change, then it gives executives tangible data to act on. Show executives that the issue is really meaningful to customers.
Sentiments: What would be your number one tip to other VOC teams working to improve the customer experience they deliver?
Rogers: Thank your customers for sharing their thoughts with you. A feedback loop is essential. When a customer responds to a survey, saying that you appreciate their feedback can go a long way. At Constant Contact, we do this over a phone call and ask them if there’s anything else we can do to help improve their experience with our software. But even just a Thank You note can go a really long way too.
To learn more about how Constant Contact uses survey feedback to improve product offerings, read the full Constant Contact case study here.
About Chris Rogers
Chris Rogers has been working at Constant Contact since 2008. He began in technical support and in 2014 moved into customer experience as the VOC Analytics Project Manager. Chris has a passion for diving deep into customer pain points and working cross-functionally to address those issues. Outside of work, Chris is a big advocate for the Big Brothers Big Sisters of America program. In his free time, he enjoys watching baseball and attending as many Red Sox games each year as he can.
Serina Aswani is Manager of Content Marketing and EMEA Marketing at Clarabridge. As part of her responsibilities, Serina serves as the voice of Clarabridge’s customers, highlighting customer stories and sharing proven best practices for implementing successful Customer Experience Management programs. Serina also oversees content marketing strategy and PR for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region. She is responsible for establishing Clarabridge’s position as an industry thought leader across EMEA. Serina holds a M.S. in Commerce, specializing in Marketing and Management, as well as a B.A in French and Studio Arts, from the University of Virginia. Read more from Serina on Twitter at @SerinaAswani.
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