Quarterly Business Reviews with Delighted CX

In this article:

Suggested next article: Reporting and Analytics Overview

Review program goals and measure success

A Quarterly Business Review, or QBR, is key to any Voice of Customer program. These reviews help any team update goals, measure progress, and identify opportunities to increase the value of their Delighted CX program.

Delighted's Customer Concierge team has run hundreds of Quarterly Business Reviews to date. We focus on five key areas to help brands like Affirm, Glassdoor, and ClassPass keep their Voice of Customer programs top of mind as their businesses have grown. This guide was developed to share these key topics and strategies with all programs running on Delighted CX.

Review program goals

Whether it's your first quarter using Delighted CX or your fiftieth, it's always important to reflect on one question:  What are the main reasons that you're running a program with Delighted? Here are a few we hear most often:

  • Product: We're launching new product and want to send live feedback to our product managers
  • Support: Our team wants to metric performance and identify improvement areas
  • Marketing: We'd like to up-sell promoters and empower them to evangelize the brand
  • Retention: We want to qualify customer health and prevent churn

Keep in mind that you may be addressing multiple goals, using different CX projects to manage each. Whatever the approach, make sure you're clear about the goals of your program!

Measuring success

Regardless of where your program is in its maturity cycle, there are two methods for measuring performance that work best when done together. These include:

Benchmarking your scores

When reviewing a program from a high level, benchmarking is often times the easiest place to start. Think of benchmarking as addressing the question, "How are we doing in comparison to other companies in our industry?"

With curated benchmarks, provided by our partners at the Qualtrics XM Institute, you can easily review your company's NPS score alongside others in your industry. Keep in mind that this data is simply a starting point for further exploration—all programs measure NPS at different stages of the customer funnel and target different customer subsets, which can lead to variability in scores. For example, customers who have been with any company for a year or more will typically have a higher NPS than those who're new.

External vs Internal Benchmarks

Comparing your scores to other companies can be useful, but Voice of Customer programs also help build internal benchmarks and expose patterns in customer sentiment. While it's natural to want to compare ourselves to others, the most important and actionable benchmarks are those that are internal to your business. When optimizing product, support, marketing and retention efforts, you have acute visibility into and control over over what impacts your score (like customer subsets being surveyed, recent product changes, and more).

Sentiment across your customer segments

Ever wondered what the key drivers are that impact your score? With Trends and Reporting in CX, you can narrow in on customer segments and patterns that are driving changes in your score.

Think of Trends like saved searches, comprised of keywords and properties that you select. Once created, both existing and new responses that meet the Trend criteria are automatically added to the Trend. You can use Trends to trigger Alerts to specific departments, to create robust searches for sentiment analysis, and to produce refined reports.

In a QBR setting, Trends can be used as internal benchmarks. Each Trend can represent a key customer cohort or a category of feedback (such as responses mentioning customer support or product quality) that you're keen to segment your feedback by and report to the rest of the business on.

Customer example: Bed linens brand corrects flaw in product market fit

A consumer linens brand sends NPS surveys to customers one month after delivery and every quarter there after. Using Trends, they break out customers based on which product line they've purchased and how long they've had that product. For this high-growth brand, emphasis in their program is put on new customers—to continue to grow, aligning how the product is marketed with the large cohorts' first impressions is marquee for an unforgettable customer experience.

When quarter-to-quarter NPS dipped 10 points after a rebrand, the team knew something was up. Properly designed trends exposed the problem: while existing customers saw marginal deltas in NPS, new customers were disappointed with how the product was portrayed and what was delivered. That effect was quantified with Trends and realignment on marketing message was pushed as a result.

If you're not using Trends yet, let's change that. There are too many examples where quantifiable insights are slipping through the cracks. Check out our Trends guide for an introduction to their key functionality, methods of reporting with them, and more!

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Improve your program engagement

When customers are engaged in your feedback program, they're more likely to respond to your surveys and give high value feedback. The goal of this section is to help increase the quantity and quality of actionable feedback that is captured.

Using the Metrics page, you can track the key statistics (like open rate and response rate) that measure engagement. With CX programs, we typically see between 10 and 15% response rates, with open rates around two times that value. These metrics are overwhelmingly dictated by three key components of program design:

  1. Timing of your survey sends
  2. The survey platform you’ve chosen (email, web, sms)
  3. Your brand messaging

We urge everyone to focus in on the first point above. The closer to a critical moment in the customer journey that you send a survey, the riper a customer's impression and the more likely they are to engage. Our B2B customers with the highest response rates trigger surveys right after product onboarding. Our B2C customers with the highest response rates trigger surveys right after delivery.

While the macros outlined above require more buy-in to change and implement your program around, there are a few quick win updates that we harp on during QBRs that are worth exploring for an immediate boost in engagement:

Bump response rates with Reminders

The CX reminders feature will automatically resurvey customers that haven't engaged with your initial email, 7 days after delivery. When enabled, response rates can bump up between 3-5%. Reminders target folks who overlooked the initial survey email and didn't open it—we avoid over-surveying recipients who have more explicitly opted out of responding by opening but not responding to the survey email.

Read more about reminders in our article about the Email platform.

Personalize your email subject with Special Properties

As you can tell by the name, Special Properties function similarly to standard Properties, allowing you to pass unique information about a particular person with every survey. What sets Special Properties apart is their ability to dynamically update aspects of the survey content on a per-survey basis, including the subject line.

Imagine you run a subscription pet supply business, and are sending out a CX survey to your subscribers once every three months. To improve response rates, try personalizing the subject line of the survey email with the customer’s pet’s name. Using the Special Property “Delighted Email Subject,” you can send eye-catching emails with subjects like, “How is Fido enjoying their treats?” These types of updates will quickly grab a customer's eye and drive up open rates.

Head to our Special Properties guide to learn about what Special Properties are available, how to pass Special Properties, and about specific properties such as the Delighted email subject.

Consider new survey channels and touchpoints

Delighted CX allows you to send surveys via five different platforms, and thoughtfully combining these to target different subsets of your customer base can enrich and increase the feedback that you receive.

Imagine you own a software company that sends an NPS survey to decision makers every 6 months. You might be hitting a customer segment that responds well to emails, but what about your end users who spend time in the product? Consider adding web surveys to capture their feedback and drive up engagement.

Check out section 3. Distribution Platforms & Sending to learn all about our different survey platforms.

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Improve your survey experience

The next aspect of your feedback program to review during your QBR is your survey experience. Personalizing outreach and infusing your voice into every aspect of the feedback process creates a stronger brand.

This kind of branding is simple with CX's customizable surveys. Below, we’ll outline three features to take advantage of when refining the survey experience:

Customize your survey by setting an Intro Message

The Intro Message is what appears before your survey question when sending surveys through Email, Link, and Kiosk platforms. This message can be customized statically from within your Delighted account, or dynamically using the Delighted intro message Special Property. The intro message is the first thing a respondent will see, so use it to set the tone for the survey, to prime the customer for what type of feedback they should give, or just say a casual "Hey!"

Check out section 4. Survey Customization to learn more about customizing your intro message, or jump into your account and set up the message from the email customization page under Advanced customization!

Contextualize your feedback with Additional Questions

The Delighted CX Additional Questions feature allows you to include up to 10 more questions in a single survey flow, allowing you to ask follow-up questions to expand on your respondent's earlier feedback. With large datasets, quantifying feedback can be tricky. Additional questions let you ask probing, specific, and canned questions to bucket feedback. When running your QBR next quarter, an Additional Questions data set will help you easily quantify key drivers that are shaping negative experience for your detractors, and positive ones for you promoters—they're the perfect way to say "let's do more of x and less of y."

In addition, consider combining other surveys, run by other internal teams, into your CX touchpoint. Leveraging Delighted CX's best in class response rates, you'll collect more data for these teams and reduce your customer's overall exposure to surveys.

Head to the Help Center to learn more about Additional Questions, including how to set up Additional Questions, how to add conditions to these questions, and how to view the responses to these Additional Questions.

Drive customers to action with the Thank you page

Once a respondent submits their score and their comment, they are directed to a Thank you page. You can customize your thank you pages to display specific text and links, choosing content based on the score your respondents gave. The Thank you page is the final portion of the survey experience and presents a phenomenal opportunity to urge those who were happy with their experience to promote your brand—this can be through redirects to public review sites, to your referral platform or to your social media pages. At the same time, it gives you a final chance to level-set with those who were underwhelmed with the experience.

Check out our Thank you page guide for tips on maximizing your promoter feedback, preventing fallout from passives and detractors, and answers to frequently asked questions about thank you pages!

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Increase the value of your feedback

The final aspect of your program to consider during your QBR is how you action your feedback. Your customer experience program will get buy-in across departments when feedback is shared and actioned, allowing you to infuse the voice of the customer into your everyday operations.

In this section, we’ll walk through two strategies for increasing the value of the feedback you receive:

Share feedback where your team works using Integrations

No matter where your team works, Delighted CX's out-of-the-box integrations can send your feedback there. Check out our Integrations page for the full list. If your team checks Slack frequently, sending response notifications to a team channel can engage them in your program. If your team always respond to email, then Alerts would be a fantastic way to notify them of relevant feedback.

Check out our Integrations section for more information about Slack, Alerts, and more!

Follow-up with your respondents and close the loop

Our integrations simply pipe feedback to those who can action it. Closing the loop with customers after they give feedback is the strategic processes your team follows to let your survey respondents know that you've heard them and that you're acting. The goal of closing the loop is two-fold: (1) you want to take immediate action to resolve customer concerns and to share feedback with the wider team, and (2) you want to measure patterns in feedback for systemic improvements to the overall customer experience moving forward.

Closing the loop is different for every brand. It requires cross department buy-in and carries strategic weight. It's a process that demands deliberate thought and execution but can reap massive rewards. Head to our Closing the loop guide for more information, including the micro and the macro of this process.

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Considering ways to expand your XM program

As a concluding note, we want to zoom out on Voice of Customer programs as a whole. The Customer Experience (CX) is the sum total of each and every step in a customer's journey. Consistently monitoring, improving, and evolving each step in that journey is imperative for building a competitive program and brand.

If you're monitoring a single metric, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) after purchase, you're already headed in the right direction! But, is that view too myopic? As owner of this CX program, are there other moments in the customer journey that are in your blind spot? We started this read with questions that have brought to life CX programs—as food for thought, we want to leave you with them once again:

  • What's the quality of customer support being delivered? 
  • Do customers find the in-app features helpful? 
  • Are quarterly business reviews yielding actionable insights?

Think of "CX" as a control panel with a series of controls and sliders. Each customer touchpoint, ranging from a first experience all the way to churn, has its own independent drivers. While at the helm of that control panel, you dictate what key customer touch points you are you tracking, monitoring and listening to on a regular basis. The goal of every Delighted CX program should include:

  1. Identify, track and prioritize each customer touchpoint
  2. Maximize sentiment at each and every customer touchpoint

Just as your company and CX program is constantly improving, so is the Delighted platform! Check out our Release Notes to stay on top of all of the new functionality, integrations, and products that we’re releasing so you never miss an update.

How can we help?

With a toolbox of Delighted features at your fingertips, there are plenty of ways to go about expanding your program. But identifying the next best touchpoint to add to your control panel (and how to go about rolling that touchpoint live to customers), can be daunting.

Our Customer Concierge team is you strategic partner for any customer journey mapping, project management, and implementations. If you're keen, let's set up a call! Fire us a note and we can schedule up a call!

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