Just about every business we talk to is interested in doing more with less. GatherUp was never designed to do only one thing. We set out to architect a core of features that work together to optimally engage your customer. Not just encourage online reviews, not just monitor reviews, not just capture Net Promoter Score… we wanted to create a system that is accessible to the consumer, productive in customer experience management, and actionable for your business.
This view has been top of mind for us since GatherUp was created and especially now as we continue to grow, evolve, and bring more features to life. We help you do all the things with one solution.
It’s not easy in our world of tactic fads to create a bigger space and share a bigger vision. In all honesty, we have even struggled a few times ourselves in the rabid state of “get more reviews at all costs” to keep our focus on what we know matters both short and long term for a successful business. I won’t dive deep on the current review ecosystem, but it’s a full on mess of buying reviews, selling reviews, trading reviews, faking reviews, incentivizing reviews, review gating, and forcing reviews.
We believe you should be thinking bigger than reviews. You should be thinking about your customer’s experience and how to make it the backbone of your business. GatherUp helps you do this because we are a customer experience hub, not just a review tool.
Unifying Up To 5 Tools Or More In One
A common occurrence when we talk to a business is finding out they are using separate systems or software to facilitate what we offer in one. They’ve had a survey tool in place for many years, then someone added a customer feedback form on the website. Another department started monitoring reviews and yet another department created a process to capture Net Promote Score.
With a software solution for everything, a business is not in need of more software, they are in need of the right software. GatherUp can unify these tools and not only provide efficiency for all sides, but a significant cost savings as well.
Common Hurdles To Implementing A Customer Experience Hub
Change is rarely without a few challenges and I wanted to share some of the ones we most often run across.
1- Different departments own different tools
This is a very common one as social media or the SEO team might own reviews while operations or communications might own customer feedback. Getting another department to shift tools when it wasn’t their idea can be tricky. If you can find a couple of department heads to work together it can produce a big win for multiple teams.
2- Changing how feedback is gathered
Moving to real-time customer feedback from a static or periodic survey can be frightening. Companies can be satisfied with having enough data and worried about what it will take to manage more. It’s important to show how requesting feedback in real-time will not only drive quantity, but the quality of data received.
3- Revisiting the desired outcomes
Many companies have been conducting 20, 30, or even 40+ question customer surveys for years. Getting them to reduce to a quick survey of 5 questions or less is hard. They must move past the fear of losing the depth of data to understand the wins of high-volume, quality data in real-time and a positive brand touch for the customer.
4- Planning how to take action
It’s not hard to imagine how GatherUp will change the intake of customer experience data, but next comes what to do with it. Who will own it, who will respond and how. Planning the actions the team will take to customer experience data coming in can be one of the hardest parts, but it’s a success problem, and those are the best kind of problems to have.
The Wins In Implementing A Customer Experience Hub
To battle the challenges you need some unifying wins that all departments and the company can get behind. The good news here is there are many and you can champion the ones that really matter to your organization.
1- You make your customers happy
Instead of fragments of a customer experience hub or even missing pieces, you make talking to you easy. That will win over your customers every time. You are proactively asking them on channels like email and SMS, you have easy access to feedback channels online, you respond. Most of all, a good customer experience hub doesn’t force (or even trick) actions, it allows the customer choice in their participation level and time.
2- You take less of their time
This is a big one and where many companies fail. When you have to answer 30 questions in a survey as a consumer you don’t finish with a smile on your face. Time is as precious as their money, make sure you respect them equally.
3- A single customer experience data source
One place that has your Net Promoter Score, survey scores, review ratings, and more. No more chasing around to get data from somewhere else and figure out where to marry it together. All of your data in reports you can use and share.
4- Save money
It’s not hard to imagine that the cost savings can be massive. If you’re dedicating budget to 3, 4, or 6 tools to provide all of what GatherUp can give you, you are overpaying by hundreds and maybe even thousands of dollars every month. Since many times these tools are spread in different departments and budgets, it’s money leaking without knowledge that it can be put to better use.
5- You learn a lot
When you have a hub with proactive entry, passive entry and endless ways “in” for the consumer you get participation numbers like never before. Giving your customers more of a voice empowers you to listen and take action in better ways. Actions like responding to customer feedback, saving disappointed customers, replying to reviews and posting reviews to your website all have huge impact.
Continuing To Grow
With all of this outlined, it’s clear to us that continuing to expand our customer experience hub is going to be challenging and awesome. The same holds true for your company. It’s time to take stock of the many tools you are employing to connect with your customers post experience and unify into the right offering to do more with less. GatherUp is the right solution to make this happen.
