Information Flow | Customers, Etc.
Highlighting the positive reinforcing feedback loops of customer experience teams.
This is the 9th post in a series on support systems (though it’s evolved to be more about business systems), which began with Your First Support Model. The most recent post in this series was about Process Analysis.
One of my favorite accomplishments from my time managing the customer support team at FullStory was implementing the #cx-wins Slack channel. There’s a super simple automation that takes positive customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey responses and pipes them into Slack. Here are a few recent highlights1:
[Agent] is awesome! Super responsive, and I feel he definitely gave attention to my problems and feedback. A huge part of very positive interactions with FullStory.
She quickly answered my question and showed me exactly how to accomplish what I wanted with the tool.
I honestly half expected my first email to be ignored. Instead I got a prompt response with follow up questions and promise to forward my request to the product team. Thanks [agent]!
One of original reasons we set up this system was to draw attention to positive customer interactions, which are useful in establishing practice levels and maintaining high performance standards. Another reason the #cx-wins channel is valuable—and one which I didn’t fully appreciate at the time we created this system—is that it draws attention to the value of support beyond simply “responding to tickets”. Put another way, it helps to avoid only looking at support as part of a balancing feedback loop.
Balancing feedback loops and minimization
Customer support, when seen as purely a function of retention, is part of balancing feedback loop. Balancing feedback loops are all about maintaining a particular level, e.g. retaining a specified number of customers, or responding to tickets within a target time frame, or ensuring the bug backlog doesn’t get too long, etc. When it comes to balancing feedback loops, you want to spend as little as possible to maintain the balancing feedback loop—why pay extra to maintain the same desired level of whatever it is you’re trying to maintain? As we discussed in the post on reinforcing feedback loops:
Retention, as part of a balancing feedback loop, is mostly a cost center. You want to spend as little money as possible to maintain the stock of customers that you’ve created. Let’s say your goal is to retain 97% of customers. If you can retain 99% of customers with a team of 5 and a 97% of customers with a team of 3, you’ll settle for a team of 3. You want to maintain the desired level of customers for as little cost as possible.
This is where process analysis comes in, which we touched on a couple weeks ago:
[P]rocess analysis is focused heavily on the balancing feedback loops of the system, that is, the areas of the system that are focused on minimizing. Minimizing is all about reducing costs and making operations more efficient.
If we get hyperfocused on process analysis and reducing the costs to support customers, we’re thinking in terms of balancing feedback loops, i.e. “what is the minimum we can spend to support our customers and still maintain an acceptable level of service?”
(Hidden) reinforcing feedback loops
One of the traps we can get into when we focus heavily on process analysis and minimizing costs is that we can become blind to positive reinforcing feedback loops that may not be modeled clearly in our processes. For example, one of the positive reinforcing feedback loops associated with customer support is that in delivering a remarkable customer experience, customers can become so enamored with the service they receive that they’ll go out of their way to tell their friends, creating an additional pipeline of new customers, who then can potentially receive remarkable service, tell their friends, etc., etc., etc.
One of the ways we fail to account for positive reinforcing feedback loops is we simply don’t have information about their existence. As CX leaders, it’s our job to make sure others within the organization understand the reinforcing feedback loops of which we’re a critical part.
Information flow can draw attention to reinforcing feedback loops
In Thinking in Systems, there’s a chapter on leverage points, places to intervene in a system. Number six on the list is information flows, understanding the structure of who does and does not have access to information. The author shares:
“Missing information flows is one of the most common causes of system malfunction. Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructure.”
Customer support is principally part of a balancing feedback loop. In order to draw attention to the reinforcing feedback loops in which it is also a function, you have to share that information somewhere. That’s where the Slack channel for #cx-wins comes in. By drawing attention to the times that support is providing remarkable support using the customer’s own words, it becomes impossible to ignore that customer support is about more than just solving tickets.
We sometimes look past information flow as a way to intervene in a system because it seems almost too good to be true. “You mean all I have to do is change who has access to this information and that will change how the system behaves?” Yes, exactly that. If your goal is to have support viewed as “more than just responding to tickets”, you have to increase the flow of information about how the team participates in reinforcing feedback loops.
Bonus: Implementing a #cx-wins channel
FullStory uses Stella Connect to send CSAT surveys to customers. I shared a bit about what I like about them in my post on hopeful customer service late last year, but the TL;DR on why I chose them is this: their surveys don’t suck and they put the focus on the people, not the score. You can probably implement a #cx-wins channel with any CSAT tool, but I think Stella is set up to do an especially good job at getting positive comments from customers about agent interactions.
As for wiring it up, we used Stella’s Zapier integration so we had a bit more control about what gets posted to Slack. If I recall correctly, we set it up so that any survey with a score of 4 or 5 that had a comment would post to #cx-wins.
Any survey of 3 or less with or without a comment would get posted to #cx-grumpies. Unlike #cx-wins, which is internally public to the entire company, #cx-grumpies is private—only CX leadership are members. The primary purpose of #cx-grumpies is to try to “save” the support interaction by providing an additional way to reach out to the customer to make them happy2. Secondarily, it can also serve as an opportunity for coaching agents who may have received negative feedback from a customer. That’s also why you want negative feedback to show up in a private channel—it helps maintain psychological safety on the team.
We’ve had a couple different iterations of the way we do the survey. We recently added a second question that’s focused on the value customers are getting from the product. We’ve also started using CSAT surveys as a follow-up to customer success trainings and webinars.
I also implemented a similar system during my time at Trello. My colleague Emily Chapman wrote about it in a post called Forget Big Data: How Tiny Data Drives Customer Happiness.
Once you have a CSAT system in place, setting up a #cx-wins channel is relatively straightforward and creates a huge payoff because it draws attention to one of the positive reinforcing feedback loops in which the CX team participates.
This is not an ad for FullStory, but still, I’m so dang proud of the support team.
For whatever reason, customers who have a negative interaction in a support ticket aren’t always going to say they’re having a poor interaction to the agent providing them support. A survey that’s not part of the original email thread gives the customer another way to reach out and say they need help.