Put simply, “closed-loop” is when you are able to respond directly to customer feedback.
While an unhappy customer might start to ring alarm bells, the most successful companies see it as an opportunity to resolve the complaint and keep the customer loyal. In fact, 70% of consumers said they would be more likely to do business with an organisation again if their complaint was handled well the first time.
So it’s an opportunity to demonstrate to your customer in a much more direct and personal way that their feedback is important and you care about the outcome.
But it’s not just about preventing unhappy customers from becoming detractors – it’s equally useful to follow up with neutral customers and turn them into promoters.
Some use closed-loop to follow up with promoters too, motivating happy customers and inviting them to share the product or service with a friend or join a customer advocacy program.
How to Build a Closed-Loop System
A closed-loop system requires two main components:
- Ticketing – This is the alert system that raises a request in your system that you have an unhappy customer. You should be able to set up the thresholds, such as a negative or neutral NPS score, so you control what types of comments are fed into your closed-loop system.
- Case management system – this allows you to track the ticket all the way through to resolution and should allow you to assign tickets to the right team members and to monitor progress of each one. The best systems also allow you set and track targets – for example, you may set a target requiring 85% of all complaints to be resolved within 24 hours – so you always know how your customer service team is performing.
Integrating Your Closed-Loop Process in Your CX Program
In order to run closed-loop effectively, it needs to be fully integrated with the rest of your program – where it’s either run on the same software as your feedback and analysis or it easily transfers data back and forth between the two.
This allows you to set up automated alerts. So when a customer gives a negative score for something – say, for example, they rated you ‘6’ on your NPS survey – it automatically creates a ticket requesting follow up.
It also allows you to delve deeper into a customer’s problem and perform root cause analysis or spot trends in your customer feedback.
For example, you might see that a particular demographic is consistently triggering a ticket. You can then dive into your data to find out why, helping to solve the problem and reduce the load on your customer service team.
Going Beyond Your CX Program
If your organisation is using a CRM system, it’s a good idea to link it to your case management system too. This can usually be done through an API to pass data back and forth between platforms.
By integrating with your CRM, you have all the relevant information at hand. So when you’re resolving a complaint, customer service agents have all the background information on the customer. And when a member of your team next contacts that customer, they can access information about the previous complaint too.
Start Closing the Loop with Qualtrics
Follow up on feedback and turn detractors into promoters with automated ticketing, tracking and case management with Qualtrics Customer Experience. Built on the same powerful collection and analysis platform, it allows you to address issues quickly to improve the experience for your customers. With integrations into Salesforce, Marketo, Tableau, and many more, it gives you a single view of your customers to make case management simple and effective.
See How You Can Close The Loop with Qualtrics