When I go to the grocery store, I‘m a bit of an in-and-out type of customer. I’m usually running in after a workout, grabbing exactly what’s on my list aisle by aisle (with the occasional sweet treat), and typically opt for self-checkout over a traditional cashier to speed up the process.

I never paid any mind to my checkout experience until this recent blurb on TikTok started popping up on my FYP last week: “Do cashiers not talk anymore?”

While controversial takes and debates are not new to the app, I found it interesting that something as simple as the customer’s frequency of chatting was next on the algorithm.

Luckily, I‘m feeling pretty chatty myself today, and in this article, I’ll discuss the evolving expectations placed on cashiers for social interaction. I’ll explore both sides of the argument regarding their obligations, limitations, and what businesses should prioritize for an ideal and realistic customer experience.

Table of Contents

• What is the role of a cashier?
• Expectations of Cashiers to Engage in Conversation
• Challenges Faced by Cashiers
• The Solution: Mutual Respect and Understanding

The Problem: Customers are complaining about cashiers not speaking enough.

It’s understandable that customers desire more personable interaction while shopping, but often they feel disappointed by the limited conversation from service workers.

To grasp why customers might feel this way, let‘s start by defining what a cashier’s role entails.

Historically, the role of a cashier has always been the same, to handle transactions and keep up with accounting. But there has always been an unspoken rule (which was always inferred through various service onboarding role-play videos) that it should all be done with a smile and casual conversation.

But over the years, I‘d argue that cashiers have faced increasing pressure to perform in more ways than before. Not only do they have their company’s eyes on them via security, but the rising trend to single out and film cashiers over product costs, item shortages, attitudes, or misunderstandings that add another layer of stress to an essential worker’s plate.

And this isn’t even counting if a customer is hangry.

Image Source

Expectations of Cashiers to Engage in Conversation

There are many different reasons why customers would want — or even look forward to — conversation while they’re out running errands.

1. Feelings that conversational interactions can enhance the shopping experience.

Marketing thought leader and best-selling author Paul Greenberg once said, “If a customer likes you — and continues to like you — they will continue to do business with you. If they don’t, they won’t.”

80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services. So perhaps the power of friendly greetings and small talk is a necessary part of good customer service.

2. Cashiers have an opportunity to make a memorable interaction.

One of the most timeless forms of positive company marketing is real-life, organic stories from customers who appreciated engaging with personable cashiers. The opportunity to interview and share customer testimonials of how their expectations were exceeded is music to a business’s ears.

These stories go beyond just attracting new customers, too. 88% of customers say good customer service makes them more likely to purchase again, emphasizing the impact of these interactions on brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.

Challenges Faced by Cashiers

1. Overwork based on foot traffic and staff headcount.

During college, I worked at a local pharmacy between classes. I was actually a pharmacy technician, but because of rush hour and being short-staffed, I’d have to help check out at the front desk and still manage to tend to the drive-thru.

Situations like this impact a cashier’s ability to engage in extra social interactions. It can go beyond small businesses to grocery stores, restaurants, and more, as any business can get congested and leave employees in a tizzy.

2. Invisible disabilities or personal limitations can hinder communication.

Respecting cashiers’ diverse capabilities, including their physical, emotional, and psychological constraints, is key to running a successful business.

While staff may be aware of invisible disabilities or other considerations among their colleagues, they often face angry customers when “excellent” customer service expectations aren’t met.

Not everyone excels at on-the-fly communication or is always in the best mood, but these factors do not undermine their ability to perform their job well.

The Solution: Mutual Respect and Understanding

The desire for a pleasant shopping experience is the result of both employees and customers. And while there may not be a one-size-fits-all approach, there are some good takeaways to share for more friendly interactions.

The Customer’s Role: Lead with politeness, but temper expectations.

Customers can contribute to a positive interaction by being polite and considerate. Yes, it’s not their job to do so, but entering the checkout with a smile increases the chances of a more positive interaction.

Expectations should be tempered with an understanding of the cashier‘s situation. Most of us have worked a service role at some point in our careers, meaning we all know what it’s like to come to work and give what you can, instead of giving “your all.”

The Company’s Role: Support your cashier’s work environment.

Creating a positive work environment lays a foundation for energetic, enthusiastic employees.

Take actions to support employees, such as guaranteeing fair pay and reasonable workloads. If your team is supported and able to, they can provide good service from more than just the checkout.

And lastly, encouraging a culture where cashiers feel empowered to be pleasant without feeling pressured.

In conclusion, yes. Cashiers still talk.

You might catch a super extroverted Kyle who‘s just as stoked as you are to speak, but if you instead get Carrie, who’s about to clock out and worked a double shift, then I think a quieter checkout process is just fine if you ask me.

While conversational cashiers add value, it’s crucial to recognize the limitations and challenges they face. Instead of demanding more than the job entails, advocate for balanced expectations and greater empathy from customers, and encourage your business or others to create supportive environments for their cashiers to enable them to go above and beyond.

In 2023, it’s clear that AI and other technologies are transforming the way we work, search, and learn about new things. But, in a shocking turn of events, humans — real, live humans — are being called upon to satisfy consumers.

And, if consumers don’t get what they want, they’ll use their free will, sentience, and emotions to go straight to a review page and give you a rating that they see fit.

Think your 3.5-star review doesn’t truly matter because it “can’t possibly tell the whole story?”

Oh, it matters.

Image Source

Through digging into the customer experience industry, I recently learned that trust drops an astonishing 67% when reviews drop from four stars to three.;

Conversely, trust spikes up to 95% at the five-star level.

These are some pretty good reasons to keep your customers happy.

Still not convinced customer service is a worthy investment? New research shows that when customer experience is part of your overall brand strategy:

• Revenue increases by 2%-7%
• Profitability expands 1%-2%
• Satisfaction and engagement blast up 20%-30%

Despite all the technological growth out there, my team at Trends is betting that there’s money in human-centric customer experience solutions.

Boosting Five-Star Ratings

Leveraging Tech to Empower Humans

For the tech-savvy Trendster or customer service innovator, there’s an opportunity to develop or invest in affordable, automated, AI-powered software to support the humans tasked with making consumers happy.

For example, you could develop, test, or invest in tools that streamlines you or your service team tasks, enabling a friendly, engaging, but simplified intake process. You can also explore features that humanize the service team with realistic photos and video chat options.

Or, leverage platforms that aggregate and analyze interactions with customer service teams, and pairs it with AI to suggest streamlined service processes for businesses in real-time.

In the name of excellent CX, you should also go above and beyond by making an inclusive interface so that all customers feel comfortable accessing support.

Learning from Lucrative Customer-First Brands

While getting reviews up definitely won’t hurt, providing a great customer experience also results in returning customers, upgrades, or retained customers in tougher times because they’ve developed trust for your brand.

And, on the Trends team, we’ve covered countless examples of how brands have driven financial growth by prioritizing their customer — beyond the ratings.

From 2021 to 2023, HubSpot’s Trends team has done deep dives into the lucrative business opportunities in customer reviews. As the workplace landscape shifted, customer interactions didn’t lose importance. In fact, many affordable customer experience startups, like Freshworks, reported a 20% revenue increase in Q1.

This demonstrated that even though businesses are cutting costs, they’re not willing to skimp on CX.

Need more examples?

• Baby monitor brand Nanit made national news after they 10x’d conversions when they prioritized CX by adding human customer-service reps to calm the fears of new parents.
• Meanwhile, bigger brands like Apple have begun to offer video chats with live product specialists to enhance the online shopping experience.

Not Avoiding Negatives

Negative reviews can actually build trust by showing consumers that the brand values transparency and honest feedback.

Use in-app tools to handle negative comments: For example, respond to an Instagram Reel with another Reel,politelysetting the customer straight and offering solutions or new knowledge.

Added bonus: It’s just more positive brand content working to combat the unavoidable, occasional negative comment.

Google is the best place for tackling small to medium local business reviews. But, these businesses can be especially vulnerable to negative reviews because they are so niche. Still, you shouldn’t avoid or ignore them as they come in.

Sure, Google’s less glossy than Instagram and TikTok — but there is money to be made by mastering Google Business Profile.

Rather than just thinking about these reviews as feedback and customer service, think of them as free promotional content where you have a great chance to present the transparent, thoughtful humans behind your business. Reply to every comment and review to keep the human connection alive and engaged.

Taking Your Customer Experience Beyond Five Stars

While these are all just a few examples of how to maintain or innovate a great customer experience — as well as a great customer rating, you shouldn’t stop there. To learn more about the latest consumer preferences or customer experience trends, check out this post.

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published in our Trends Newsletter and later edited and adapted to publish on the HubSpot Blog.

Henry Ford once said, “If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.” 

Ford was a revolutionary in many ways, but his empathetic leadership style was undoubtedly before its time. He was a “people person,” well-known for the loyalty he inspired in his workforce and the high productivity that came as a result.

While Ford’s approach may have been a rarity in the early 1900s, today’s visionaries are making empathy the cornerstone of their leadership models. Take Jacinda Ardern, for example, the prime minister of New Zealand whose party won re-election in a rare landslide victory last autumn. For Ardern, empathy is a key aspect of leadership that in no way reduces her efficacy.

“One of the criticisms I’ve faced over the years is that I’m not aggressive enough or assertive enough, or maybe somehow, because I’m empathetic, it means I’m weak,” Ardern told the New York Times. “I totally rebel against that. I refuse to believe that you can not be both compassionate and strong.”

Although some professionals continue to see empathy as more of a “soft skill,” many are learning it’s crucial to building an aligned, inspired team. In this post, we’ll explain how treating employees with compassion fosters a stronger bond with your workforce and increases productivity on your marketing, sales, and customer service teams.

Why Empathy Is the Key to Strong Leadership

It’s easy to get confused about what empathetic leadership is and what it is not. Empathy is the ability to understand and share another person’s feelings and perspective, and in no way should it be confined to our personal lives.

Empathy motivates employees by making them feel valued.

It’s a common misconception that if you show empathy in a leadership role, your team will lose focus and stray away from short- and long-term goals. In reality, empathy is an acquired skill that you should flex in moments of need to help you reach your organization’s objectives. It doesn’t decrease your drive to achieve, nor does it put yourself in a position of weakness. Rather, it shows employees that you recognize their value and you want them to perform to the best of their abilities.

A recent survey found that 80% of CEOs believe empathy is a key driver of success. Why? Empathetic leadership increases trust in management, prevents toxic work culture, and helps companies retain their best employees. People need to feel valued if you want them to be engaged in the workplace and aligned with your organization’s mission. Strong business leaders know that when employees are happy and motivated, their teams are much more likely to succeed.

Maureen Zimmerman, CEO of The Edge Ideas, learned this lesson while managing her company.

Empathy generates goodwill with your business partners.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented incredible challenges for countries all over the world. Some places have been more successful at combating the virus, while others continue to face uncertainty until a vaccine is widely available.

In April 2020, Taiwan had the lowest incident rate per capita out of the 100 countries affected by COVID-19. Tsai Ing-Wen, the country’s first female president, demonstrated a remarkable amount of empathy when she launched the “Taiwan Can Help” campaign as a way to assist countries that were severely impacted by the pandemic. As part of this effort, Taiwan would donate 10 million masks to places like Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and other countries that were the most-affected by COVID-19.

President Tsai said in a press conference, “Over the past months, we have seen countless acts of bravery and sacrifice from medical workers around the world. It’s our duty as global citizens to give them our full support.”

This act of empathy didn’t go unnoticed by other countries. Shortly after President Tsai’s announcement, world leaders like Ursula von der Leyen took to Twitter to voice their appreciation.

So, what does this mean if you’re a business owner?

This teaches us that empathy creates value both inside and outside your organization. When you ingrain empathy into everything that you do, you can help a lot more people than you may think. And, when you do, this generates good karma for your business. More partners will want to work with you, customers will take notice of your good deeds, and a positive reputation will follow your brand.

Empathy aids career advancement.

No matter what department you’re working in, you’ll need to embrace empathy if you want to take on a leadership role.

For sales teams, there’s a clear benefit to understanding empathy because if you can recognize customer needs, it’s much easier to sell to them.

For marketing professionals, the value of developing an “empathetic muscle” is more subtle. But, if you can uncover what people want and need from your brand, you can create content and campaigns that are much more eye-catching and effective.;

Lastly, the benefit of empathy is quite clear for customer service teams. If you don’t understand why customers are upset, you’ll never fully solve their problems. As a result, people will be quick to turn to your competitors when they realize your agents can’t meet their needs.

Even if you’re in a leadership position, without empathy you won’t know whether your management style is effective until it’s too late. Because empathy puts yourself in another person’s shoes, it gives you real-time insight into whether your approach is being received positively. This kind of awareness is paramount for managers, whose job is to align their team around a central vision, inspire others, and build employee loyalty.

Empathy fosters a productive work culture.

A positive work culture leads to higher productivity because it gives team members a safe space to express their concerns, removes barriers for growth, and makes your employees more agile and resilient.

One way you can build this type of culture is to create a forum that encourages open conversations and active listening. Active listening not only increases emotional intelligence but also encourages others to train their own empathetic muscle. This includes withholding judgment, which isn’t always easy for some people. You need to consciously initiate conversations with people who have different backgrounds, talent sets, and experiences to elicit their unique perspectives. Then, you have to compare their views against your own before you react.

This takes more than practice; it also requires patience, self-management, and self-awareness—all of which takes time and reflection to develop. Having an open forum where employees can practice these skills helps you develop a positive and productive work culture.

For more leadership tips, check out this guide to customer service and support management.

Sometimes, customers leave. But this doesn’t mean they’re gone forever — with the right approach, it’s possible to win them back and get them spending again.

Done well, customer win-back campaigns can be very effective. In fact, 45% of recipients who received a re-engagement email read subsequent emails.

In this piece, we’ll break down the basics of customer win-back campaigns, the steps for creating a great campaign, explore the emails associated with customer win back, and offer tips to help your teams bring customers back into the fold.

Table of Contents

• What is a customer win-back campaign?
• 6 Steps for Creating a Win-back Campaign
• Common Emails in Win-back Campaigns
• 10 Tips for Winning Back Customers

What is a customer win-back campaign?

A customer win-back campaign is what happens after customer retention efforts aren’t successful. The goal of these campaigns is to re-engage previously loyal customers and bring them back into the fold. This is often accomplished by offering them rewards, incentives, or special offers that help encourage them to come back, make additional purchases, and ideally stick around.

Customer win-back strategies are typically more expensive than retention efforts but less costly than acquiring new customers. If successful, these re-engagement campaigns can help improve both current revenues and boost overall customer lifetime value (CLV).

Consider data from the Harvard Business Review — won-back customers had an average CLV of $1,410, compared to $1,262 after their first conversion and purchase.

1. Plan a personalized customer winback email campaign.

Your customer win-back program starts and ends with a personalized customer win-back email campaign.

This campaign will include a series of emails meant to re-engage customers who’ve started to disengage. This could mean they’ve stopped reading your emails, haven’t purchased from you in a while, or haven’t renewed a contract.

To be successful, this email campaign needs to be personalized. For instance, you can use the recipient’s name in the email, provide product recommendations, or customize the incentive offer based on their level of disengagement.

Given that 80% of customers are more likely to buy from companies that provide a personalized experience, this is a critical component of winback campaigns.

2. Make a realistic offer.

In a customer winback email campaign, you’ll typically include some type of incentive or offer in one of the emails.

Your offer needs to be realistic, while also making it easy for the customer to come back. In other words, your offer should be hard to refuse. Additionally, keep in mind that the offer doesn’t need to be a discount.

This could be a coupon, product upgrade, or even free shipping. Whichever you choose, make sure that the offer solves a potential problem that could have potentially caused your customer to disengage.

It’s important that your winback program communicates that you understand your customer and are aware of the potential roadblocks in the customer journey.

3. Be strategic.

When you create your customer win-back email campaign, you need to be strategic.

For instance, your emails should contain a sense of urgency so people want to re-engage while also communicating empathy for their problems.

Another strategy would be to create FOMO (fear of missing out). If something sounds exclusive or like it’s the last chance to participate, people are more likely to respond.

Additionally, you should give your customers options. For example, you can let them change the frequency of receiving emails before unsubscribing. Once unsubscribed, you can also allow them to resubscribe.

4. Ask for feedback.

During your email campaign, you’ll want to ask for feedback. This shows your customers that you take feedback seriously.

For example, you can send an NPS survey or some type of questionnaire. You could ask for feedback on specific products or overall customer satisfaction.

Additionally, asking for feedback can help you come up with incentives that entice customers to return. If you know why customers are churning, you can start to avoid recurring issues.

5. Segment your audience.

An email win-back campaign should be segmented. For example, you can segment your list based on how long it’s been since a customer’s last purchase, their average order value, or by customers who’ve had negative feedback or experiences.

By segmenting your list, you can personalize your copy and maybe even the incentive that you offer.

The more personalized your emails are, the more likely you will be to win back customers.

6. Test and measure success.

Just like any campaign, to truly see success in your customer winback program, you’ll need to test your emails and use analytics to determine what works for your company.

This means you’ll want to A/B test emails to see what subject lines work best, which offers resonate with your customers, and what design engages customers. These details may vary between your list segments, too.

To create your customer winback program, you’ll want to use an email marketing software. For example, you can use HubSpot’s free email marketing software to create these winback emails. HubSpot’s software uses smart rules so you can tailor each email to each subscriber.

Common Emails in Win-Back Campaigns

Usually, these campaigns contain five emails. However, you’ll want to segment your lists so you can personalize the content.

Email 1: We miss you!

The first email you send will be a simple hello. This is just to get people interacting again as sometimes a quick notification like this is enough for customers to remember your brand and re-engage.

This email should be easy to skim through but also remind customers of your value. You could talk about changes you‘ve made or just remind customers that you’re there if they need something.

Email 2: Discount or Offer

In the second email, you‘ll want to offer some incentive or discount to get customers interested. This shouldn’t be in your first email, because sometimes people don’t need an offer to re-engage.

Like we mentioned above, this incentive could be a discount, exclusive offer, free shipping, or reward points. Keep in mind that you can personalize each offer by including a recommended products section or adding a reminder of products that a customer has purchased before.

Whatever you offer, this email should create a sense of urgency and play on your customers’ fear of missing out.

Email 3: Customer Survey

Once you‘ve made an offer, it’s time for you to ask for feedback. This could be in the form of a customer satisfaction survey.

People like to talk about their opinions, so even customers who aren’t planning on re-engaging might answer this email.

Again, this will help you figure out why customers are churning so you can fix recurring issues.

Email 4: Last Chance

Your fourth email will be the last chance email. This will tell customers that you‘re planning to unsubscribe them from your list if they don’t take action.

Additionally, this email can give them the option to change the frequency that they receive your emails and adjust their preferences without unsubscribing.

This is an important step because you need to clean up your email lists so engagement and deliverability aren’t impacted

Email 5: Unsubscribe

The last email in your customer win-back email campaign will let customers know that you’ve unsubscribed them from your list. This should also include copy that lets them know you’d love for them to come back. This means you should include a link to resubscribe.

10 Tips for Winning Back Customers

Not every win-back strategy will work for every customer. Depending on what caused customers to leave, what your win-back strategy needs to offer will change. Here are 10 tips to help you create winning win-back campaigns.

1. Learn why they left.

Before you can craft a winning winback campaign, you need to know why customers chose to leave. You’ve got several options when it comes to learning this information. First, reach out and ask them where things went wrong.

Be prepared for honest feedback — if your customer service couldn’t cut it or your products weren’t up to par, you may get an earful and need to resist the urge to push back.

It’s also worth examining any first-party data you’ve collected, such as demographic and transaction information about previous customers. So long as you have their permission to use this data or the information is anonymized, analysis of this data is a great way to uncover trends that may have led to customers leaving.

For example, you might see buyers getting hung up on specific product pages or checkout steps, which may indicate a problem with your website.

2. Target the right audience.

Not all previous customers offer the same value. In some cases, customers leave because your product or service simply wasn’t the right fit for them — even if you do manage to get them back, they’re unlikely to stay long.

Instead, make sure you’re targeting the right audience. This starts with transaction analysis: Which previous customers spend the most in a single transaction? Over time? Are there similarities between these high-spending customers that suggest a pattern? Targeting the right audience can help you make the most of customer winback campaigns.

3. Make them an offer they can’t refuse.

One of the simplest ways to bring customers back into the fold is by offering something they want. This could be a steep discount on products they’ve bought before or free gifts that align with their purchase history. Here, the goal is to give them something they specifically want, not a generic benefit.

4. Create personalized ads.

Retargeted ads on your social media page or website can also help bring customers back. These ads are personalized for the individual. You might create an ad that features a product they had in their cart before they left, or you might advertise the newest version of that same item to pique their interest.

5. Leverage your loyalty program.

If you have a loyalty program, use it to capture customer interest. Consider a company with a points-earned-per-dollar-spent program that lets customers collect and then spend points on items they want to lower the total cost. By offering high-value lost customers a significant amount of points to return, it may be possible to bring them back.

6. Keep them in the loop.

If customers are still signed up for your email and news communications, reach out and tell them about new products in the pipeline. Make sure to mention this news is exclusive, and consider giving them early access to pre-order or purchase these items.

7. Ask what they want.

Despite the focus on customer satisfaction, companies often overlook a crucial step: asking customers what they want. While it’s easy to assume that they stopped making purchases because of price or product quality, the reason may actually be something much different. For example, if customers felt bombarded by company emails or felt like they were “just a number” to marketing and sales staff, their choice to change brands may stem from specific treatment rather than subpar products.

8. Acknowledge your mistakes.

If customers say you’ve made a mistake, take ownership and apologize. Consider a customer who says that their interaction with customer service was frustrating and that they didn’t feel heard. If you’ve spent time and money building a great customer service department, hearing this may sting and may prompt the immediate reaction to downplay the concern and defend your investment.

Don’t. Instead, take the concern at face value and see what you can learn. If getting customers back is the priority, changes may need to happen.

9. Stay in touch.

Just because customers leave, it doesn’t mean they’re never coming back. If they’ve left the door open, make sure to regularly stay in touch with newsletters and promotions — you never know what might capture their interest.

10. Consider an image rebrand.

In some cases, an image rebrand may be in order. This could be the case if you’ve seen significant customer attrition over a short period. If these customers are telling you a similar story about your service, support, and products, you may need to start from the ground up to rehab your image.

Getting Back to Business

Acquiring new customers is costly — while they may spend significant amounts once you’ve captured their interest, they require time, effort, and money to bring on board. Retained customers, meanwhile, provide a steady stream of revenue so long as you keep them happy.

Customer winback efforts offer a middle ground. These previously loyal buyers aren’t as costly to convert as new customers and come with the potential revenue of customer retention.

The result? If growth efforts have stalled out, it’s worth getting back to business with a targeted, tailored customer win-back campaign that helps drive customer return, retention, and revenue.

What motivates a customer to take an advocacy action? This question grows more and more important as the buying process grows more customer-centric.

But the truth is that there are so many advocacy actions customers can take, and in so many different contexts they can take them, that an equally important question to consider is this: what will customer advocacy look like in three years?

So, that’s the question I’m going to tackle today using three primary sources of information: external reports and research I have consumed, two advocacy surveys I conducted, and my own experiences working on the customer marketing team here at HubSpot.

The Most Successful Customer Advocacy Programs are Entirely Customer Focused

A customer advocacy program is a marketing tactic to drive customers to be your spokespeople.

It seems rather obvious that a customer advocacy program should be customer focused (I mean it’s literally in the title), but a surprising amount of companies get this wrong.

Rather than working on cultivating interactions that drive value for their advocates, most advocacy programs try to harvest customer generosity, with little success.

The way you think about why a customer would participate in an advocacy program should align with the way you think about why a prospect would buy your product/service: they would never buy it if they didn’t believe they were going to get more out of it than they put in.

It’s the exact same for a customer advocacy program: customers should feel they are getting much more out of the advocacy program than they are putting in.

But how can you actually do this? How can you drive value for your advocates? The key is not looking at success within the product, or even success based on how many advocacy actions they have taken, but instead by looking at success as determined by the customer based on their own intrinsic motivations. And the key to tapping into these intrinsic motivations lies in personalization.

Now personalization can be a touchy subject – it’s tough to do well, challenging to accomplish with limited data, and can be tricky to scale.

Well, I am here to tell you that when it comes to advocacy, personalization can in fact be done well, with limited data, and at scale through the use of the four advocate personalities.

The Four Advocate Personalities

When I say that advocates come in four basic personalities, what I mean is that if a customer of yours raises their hand saying that they want to be an advocate for your brand, their motivations for doing so are likely to land them in one of four groups, which was developed by Forrester analyst Laura Ramos:

Image Source

But why are advocate personalities so important in creating a truly customer-focused advocacy program? There are two big reasons:

1. Advocate personalities help you know which content and opportunities are appropriate to give to each advocate.
2. Advocate personalities help you know which advocacy requests are appropriate to make of which customers.

So, in theory, advocate personalities can be a helpful tool for creating an epic advocacy program, but they aren’t worth anything if they are difficult to determine or if they can’t actually be leveraged to predict behaviors. As such, I decided to put them to the test.

Putting the Personalities to the Test

I wanted to find out how easy it might be to determine what personality a given advocate falls into. Could it be done, say, with just five short questions?

So that’s what I did: I conducted a survey with 731 participants and asked the respondents to imagine themselves partaking in a fictional advocacy community. Each of the questions had one answer that correlated with a given advocacy personality.

I was then able to assign four scores of 0-5 to every participant – one for each personality type.

I then plotted the responses for all the participants on the graphic shown below; the sizes of the circles indicate how many users had a given set of scores, and the colors do not mean anything.

As you can see, the majority of the respondents fell within the Educator and Validator quarters of the plot, with a great deal falling right along the line between the two personalities.

So, we are able to fairly accurately determine someone’s personality type (or types) based on these five simple questions – if the scoring system had not worked, we would expect all the respondents to be in the center of the plot or to see little variation.

Can Personalities Predict Behavior?

Knowing a given advocate’s personality is great, but being able to use that information to predict behavior would be even better. What if I could use a given advocate’s personality type to accurately predict what form of recognition they would value most? That would be pretty great right?

So, that’s exactly what I tested, I posed the following question to all of the survey respondents:

If a brand were to express their gratitude for your participation in their advocacy community, which of the following would you appreciate most?

a. A heartfelt, personal thank you letter

b. A small cash or gift incentive

c. More helpful content for your career or personal goals

d. Exclusive access to new products

The answers weren’t intended to correlate with a given personality type as the previous questions had, rather, I simply wanted to see if any trends presented themselves.

When we look at all respondents, we see that the majority of respondents would value a small cash or gift or incentive as their reward. This isn’t too surprising; cash tends to be a big motivator for most people.

But, where it gets really interesting is when we parse out the desired gifts by personality type.

Now would you look at that? Actionable personalization can not only be performed with a small amount of data and at scale, but it can enable you to serve your customers better.

With just five short questions, we can predict with a high degree of accuracy what kind of gift a given advocate would most value receiving.

And the greatest part? This is just one example of how this information can be leveraged. Imagine all the ways this additional information could be used to better and more efficiently serve advocates.

But how does this all fit into the broader vision? How does this help answer the question “What Will Customer Advocacy Look Like in 3 Years?”

In three years, customer advocacy will be an active community of customers who are driven by their own intrinsic motivations to take actions that help themselves grow better while simultaneously helping the business they advocate for grow better.

1. Lean away from monetary rewards as the primary motivator.

While monetary rewards can be a motivator to get people in the door, they should not be the point of being an advocate. What this does is create compliant behavior when your community should really be based upon self-directed behavior – when this occurs an advocacy community truly starts to drive value.

In addition, most advocacy communities, on average, have very low redemption rates (9-24%), and less success is typically seen in point-based advocacy communities.

For example, if you want customers to participate in a customer advocacy program you can use motivators such as access to new products or content.

2. Lean into a lightweight, hyper-personalized experience for your advocates.

A shift in focus away from monetary rewards as the primary motivator is likely to cause a great deal of advocates, who may only be there to get points and redeem gifts, to leave. However, losing these ‘advocates’ is absolutely okay: if these customers are only participating because they want gift cards, do you really want them in your community?

But, if you’re going to move away from gift cards and swag, how are you going to keep advocates engaged? Try heavily embracing personalization to create unique experiences for each and every advocate.

I see a future where new advocates take a short welcome survey when they join the program, and their responses on that survey guide how they progress through the program.

With a smaller community and more data on the advocates within that community, a greater opportunity to run more small scale experiments with your advocates presents itself. You can then discover the best ways to engage your participants based on their different personalities.

3. Bring process and structure to your advocacy program.

Most advocacy programs are run ad hoc with minimal resources. They also often end up disappointing the marketing/salespeople they’re designed to assist as well as the advocates within the program. Studies have shown that it actually costs a company more to generate social proof, like references in an ad hoc fashion, rather than having a single team run them centrally.

Advocacy programs are often under-resourced because they’re tough to track and difficult to evaluate. This tends to be the case because advocacy efforts happen around the entire flywheel and because much of advocacy takes place by word of mouth in ways that aren’t easily measured (emails, conversations, meetings, slacks, phone calls, etc).

So, how can you take action to make sure that your advocacy program is truly driving success? The key is establishing clear goals – which come in two forms:

1. Business Goals: Of course, it’s important to set goals for what your organization is hoping to get out of your advocacy program: referrals, references, reviews, whatever it is.
2. Advocacy Goals: The success your advocates see within the program. Is being a member of your community driving significant value to your advocates?

Now here is the point of note: the advocacy goals should be your primary goals. Every report on B2B advocacy communities out there will tell you the same thing: the minute you start prioritizing your company goals over your advocates’ goals you have already lost – you’ve ruined your chances at hitting both.

This doesn’t mean that you should just throw all your company goals for advocacy out the window, but it’s important to track them in the context of how your customers are finding success in the program. If your advocates start to find value, trust that the references and referrals will come.

4. Centralize and standardize your advocacy efforts.

Often times advocacy activities and behaviors are not considered such. I think that this can actually do both advocates and businesses a huge disservice.

For example, you may have people referring leads through an additional affiliate or referral program that falls under acquisition, rather than directly into your advocacy efforts. Or maybe you have an excess of promoters on social media, but their voices also aren’t being included in the advocacy program.

Whatever it is, acts of advocacy are often spread between multiple teams within the same business, and having these separate often leads to duplicative work and prevents advocates from reaching their full potential.

This is truly a situation of 1 + 1 = 3, by bringing these efforts together they become more than they can be on their own. This can prevent over-communication with your advocates, better measure their advocacy actions, and better demonstrate the effectiveness of the program.

5. Layer on technology to better scale.

The important note here is that you want to avoid molding your advocacy efforts to match whatever software is being used. Instead, finding a platform that allows for your advocacy program to scale your current efforts with flexibility.

Getting forced into performing advocacy as prescribed by another organization, rather than how you prefer, should be avoided.

What Customer Advocacy Is Not

Understanding what advocacy is can be helpful, but I think it’s equally as important to highlight what advocacy is not:

1. A group of people engaging in transactional behavior.

Rather than mindless drones looking for Amazon gift cards, you want people that are engaged because they want to grow themselves, their company, or their career.

2. A community of engagements that primarily benefit your business.

It’s important to actively put value out if you expect to receive value in return.

3. “Nice to have.”

If treated well, advocates represent tremendous value for your brand and they deserve to be treated as such — advocates should be viewed as no less than a corporate asset

4. Restricted by software.

Avoid rushing into the purchase of a software that forces you to perform advocacy as the software sees it

Customer advocacy is going to play an increasingly important role in how B2B companies do business in the future.

So, if I can leave you with one last thought when it comes to advocacy, it’s that advocacy programs should be incredible customer-focused. The truth is that it’s the easiest thing to dismiss but also the most important. So, in conclusion, don’t forget the customer.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in December 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

With all the focus on customer acquisition these days, it’s easy to overlook one of the biggest potential sources of new revenue out there: your existing customer base.

The existing customers you’ve retained may be the key to your company’s massive growth, and customer surveys are one of the best tools for driving these future wins.

Data gathered by Invesp’s Khalid Saleh suggests that it’s five times more expensive to attract a new customer than to sell again to an existing one. But despite this, he claims, “44% of companies have a greater focus on customer acquisition vs. 18% that focus on retention.”

But if you’ve never sent a survey before, how do you know what to send? What types of surveys will be most effective, and when should they be sent?

In this post we’ll cover:

• What is a customer survey?
• Goals of Using a Customer Survey
• Customer Survey Questions
• 3 Customer Survey Examples to Drive Growth and Measure Loyalty
• Customer Survey Templates
• How to Design Your Customer Surveys

The Goals of Using a Customer Survey

The development of digital survey technology has made it easier than ever before to poll your customers. But with this great power comes great responsibility.

Send too few surveys, and you’ll miss valuable feedback. Send too often, and you risk alienating the customers you’re counting on for future growth. Developing a survey strategy that’s informative, but not intrusive, requires an understanding of what you’re hoping to achieve with your customer surveys.

A few possible survey types to consider include:

• Post-purchase surveys to measure satisfaction with the product or service purchased, the delivery, or the onboarding experience.
• Net Promoter Score® (NPS) surveys to determine customers’ likelihood of recommending your brand to others.
• Product or service development surveys intended to capture customers’ desires for future launches (for example, asking for advance feedback on a possible line extension).

Customer Survey Questions

Asking the right questions in a customer survey is key to getting the information you need to make informed decisions. Here are some typical customer survey questions and what information their answers reveal.

1. On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend [PRODUCT/SERVICE] to your friends and colleagues?

This is an NPS survey question that measures customer loyalty. If the customer responds with a 9 or a 10, they’re loyal customers who may be willing to serve as your advocate.

But if their score is between 0 and 8, you need to do some more work to make them happier. Reach out to them proactively to ask for feedback.

2. How satisfied were you with your experience?

This is a customer satisfaction survey question that measures how happy, or unhappy, a customer is with your product or service, or a one-off customer service experience.

3. How easy was it to solve your problem with [PRODUCT/SERVICE]?

This is a customer effort score (CES) survey question that measures how easy or difficult it was for a customer to use your product or service.

4. How would you rate your experience with [PRODUCT/SERVICE]?

This is a semantic differential survey question used to measure customer sentiment about your product or service.

Each of these survey questions can be used in different ways to gather important customer feedback that will help you improve and fine-tune your customer experience.

3 Customer Survey Examples to Drive Growth and Measure Loyalty

1. Post-Purchase Surveys

Since a post-purchase survey is asking for feedback on a transaction that’s already occurred, it doesn’t necessarily drive growth by stimulating additional purchases (though offering a coupon or discount code for survey completion can have this effect).

Instead, post-purchase surveys allow you to do several things:

• Improve brand sentiment by positioning your company as one that cares about customers’ outcomes.
• Identify problems with the ordering process – or your products and services themselves – that can be corrected before they lead to bad reviews.
• Gather additional information about your customers in order to send more targeted promotions in the future.
• Deepen the relationship you have with new customers.

The specific questions you’ll ask on your post-purchase survey will depend on which of these goals you’re trying to achieve.

To get started, check out this sample from SurveyMonkey, or Square’s post-transaction feedback survey, shared by Joshua Porter on his Bokardo blog:

If you’re using a marketing automation tool, create a workflow or campaign so that this message is sent out automatically upon purchase. But you may want to incorporate a delay so that this survey request isn’t sent out immediately, but instead is delayed for a few days so that customers have a chance to get up and running with your product.

If it makes sense to do so, you can also include a request to take your post-purchase feedback survey in a more traditional welcome email.

Test different message contents and sequences to find the combination that spurs the most survey completions among your new customers.

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys

Adding a post-purchase survey to your checkout flow is a good way to capture valuable business-building feedback from new buyers. But what about customers that are already in your system? What if you want to turn them into advocates for your company?

Again, customer surveys can be your new best friend.

In this specific case, you’ll want to use what’s known as a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. The goal of an NPS survey is to determine which of your past customers like your brand enough to refer you to others.

This is done by asking them to rate the likelihood that they’d advocate for your company on a scale of 0 to 10. According to the official Net Promoter Score definition, those who score your company as a “9” or “10” are “promoters.”

Those who give you a “7” or an “8” can be considered “passive customers,” while those who rate you below a “6” may actively be detractors.

Most email marketing providers offer templates for these types of surveys (whether they call them NPS surveys or not).

So what do you do with this information?

Certainly, if you receive a “detractor” score from a customer, you’ll want to investigate further to determine what went wrong. Again, this can lead to the kind of information needed to grow sales by improving the satisfaction and experience of future customers.

“Passive” respondents can be followed up with in much the same way. Rather than ask what went wrong, ask what could have made their experience even better to capture process- or product-improvement information.

Finally, identifying the “promoters” among your customer ranks is the first step in implementing a formal referral-marketing program.

According to Extole, referral marketing is “a method of spontaneously promoting a business’s products and services to new customers by word of mouth. This can happen through a variety of channels such as email, mobile, and social media.”

Referral marketing programs can be formal or informal. An informal referral marketing program might involve asking customers who have identified themselves as “promoters” to suggest your brand to family members or friends.

A more formal program might involve the creation of a one-way or two-way incentive program through which customers earn cash or credit towards future purchases for successfully recruiting new customers.

There are plenty of reasons to implement a referral marketing program, according to Nielsen data gathered by AnnexCloud:

• 92% of consumers trust referrals from people they know
• People are 4 times more likely to buy when referred by a friend
• 77% of consumers are more likely to buy a new product when learning about it from friends or family

Effective referral marketing programs come in all shapes and sizes, but they all allow you to drive more sales from your existing customers.

Set yours up manually or using a marketing automation campaign so that customers who respond positively to your NPS survey are sent invitations to join your program, as well as instructions on how to participate.

I’ve personally found that the best time to send the NPS survey is after the customer has reached the “aha moment” where the value of your brand becomes clear to them.

For ecommerce companies, this can occur after the first purchase (assuming you’ve created a positive delivery experience).

For SaaS companies, or those with greater onboarding and activation requirements, this may be later in the game, after new customers have carried out their first major project or campaign using your tool.

For more on finding your own “aha moment,” check out the following resources:

• The Growth Marketer’s Guide to an Aha Moment
• This Is How You Find Your App’s Aha Moment
• How to Figure Out Your Aha! Moment

3. Product or Service Development Surveys

You can create surveys with HubSpot’s Customer Feedback Software

The potential of customer surveys to drive future sales is really limitless. But because covering all of them would take an entire book, one last survey type I want to cover is the product or service development survey.

Let’s say you’re thinking about adding a new product or service to your company’s existing offering. Who better to advise you on whether your new addition will be a home run or a strikeout than your current customers?

Surveying them in advance on what they’d like to see and how they’d respond to future offerings minimizes your risk of serving up duds.

In an article on For Entrepreneurs, Brent Chudoba, VP at SurveyMonkey and General Manager of the SurveyMonkey Audience business, shared the example of Modify Watches — a young start-up that was having trouble building an audience.

To determine how to allocate its limited resources, Chudoba helped Modify develop a survey intended to measure how future customers would respond to different price points or delivery models. For instance, one of the questions asked was whether or not respondents would be likely to purchase through a subscription model (roughly 60% of participants were at least slightly likely to do so).

Because this 60% was high compared to the 70% that indicated they’d be likely to purchase a Modify watch at all, the company could confidently make the decision to pursue subscriptions as a pricing model.

According to Chudoba, “If you want to talk to your own customers, and understand product satisfaction, feature requests or anything else, a survey can be a great tool. You most likely have email addresses for your customers, or can provide a feedback link on your site, or even embed a survey in-product.”

You can create surveys using HubSpot’s Customer Feedback Software and analyze the results.

Customer Survey Templates

Here are a few basic templates for common customer surveys you might implement in your own customer surveys:

1. NPS Survey

2. Customer Satisfaction Survey

3. Customer Effort Score

4. Semantic Differential

How to Design Your Customer Surveys

If putting all of these different surveys into place sounds overwhelming, don’t worry — you don’t have to do it all at once.

Instead, start with the survey type that makes the most sense, given the particulars of your business:

• If you’re a new company, start with post-purchase surveys so that you identify any problems with your processes early on.
• If you’ve built a customer base, but they’ve grown dormant, pair an NPS survey with a new referral marketing program to jumpstart sales.
• If you’re approaching a new product or service launch, focus first on a survey that’ll give you the information needed to maximize its financial impact.

Expand as you go, keeping your customers’ needs at the forefront.

With a little effort, these surveys will make it possible to drive massive growth based on the engagement of your existing customers alone.

Are you using customer surveys to drive growth? If so, share any other tips you’d add to this guide with me on Twitter.

Want more? Learn how to create a survey on Facebook, using Google Forms, or with Excel.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

You wouldn’t believe how many books I read last year — and it’s not because I became great at finding them myself. I’ve got the Kindle store to (blissfully) blame.

After I read a book that I really liked, I wanted to take a look at what else Amazon would suggest. Not only did I get recommendations for other highly-scored books from the same author, but also for others in the niche.

The thing about Amazon is that it’s as amazing at recommending good reads as it is at suggesting products in its ecommerce store. Nowadays, I don’t look for books anywhere else; I don’t need or want to, as the customer experience is just unbeatable.

I’m just one consumer, of course, but I’m no different in this regard from other online buyers. Customers expect brands to exceed their expectations — and that’s something where intelligent customer experience (ICX) can help.

Table of Contents

• What is intelligent customer experience?
• ICX vs. CX
• The Importance of Intelligent CX in 2024
• Key Components of an ICX Strategy
• How to Implement an Intelligent Customer Experience
• ICX as the Only Way to Meet Customer Expectations

What is intelligent customer experience?

Intelligent customer experience (ICX) is about making customer interactions more personal by using smart technology such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data analysis.

To better illustrate it, let’s imagine you run an online store. You could use AI to analyze your customer data, including past purchases and browsing data, and predict what products they might like. The next time they visit your store, they can see personalized product recommendations. If they have a question, an AI chatbot could provide answers instantly.

ICX vs. CX

Customer experience is a broad term – it refers to the overall ‘feel’ and impression a client has from all their interactions with your brand.

You can think of it as an informal scoring system, where points are either awarded or deducted every time your and your clients’ paths intersect. This covers situations like how they’ve engaged with your website, how they’ve used your product and services, and what their conversations with your support team were like.

So, what exactly do you score points for? Here are the factors:

• Ease of use, i.e., how simple and intuitive using your product or services is
• Consistent experience across all of your channels and touchpoints
• Personalization, i.e., adjusting your communication based on customer preferences and your mutual history
• Quick and high-quality support, if they ever need help or have a question for your support team.

Where and how does intelligent customer experience (ICX) fall into this?

The “intelligent” part means you’re using technologies to dynamically analyze and improve your CX strategy for each client individually. So, ICX is a means (i.e., use of technology) of offering great customer experiences — it’s not a strategy that contradicts traditional CX.

ICX uses artificial intelligence to help you analyze customer data, predict their behavior, and provide personalized recommendations. It lets you automate routine interactions through automated emails or chatbots, allowing your team to redirect their attention to more demanding tasks.

The Importance of Intelligent CX in 2024

Faster Improvement Opportunities

In the olden days, if you wanted to spot recurring customer behavior or sentiment, you’d have to spend hours watching website recordings or perusing your conversations. That’s what I did whenever I wanted to understand how customers interacted with an interface or a website I’ve written copy for.

Nowadays, ICX can give you a helping hand. You can spot issues before they grow into actual customer problems.

Courtney Zalesak, CEO at Home Service Amplifier, has seen first-hand how AI can analyze each user interaction to improve CX. She says that her company has used it to increase the customer lifetime value by over 50% for her agency’s clients in the last two years.

“For example, one HVAC company struggled with low retention and poor reviews. We implemented a ‘smart survey’ using predictive analytics to identify dissatisfied customers early,” Zalesak told me. “The company then reached out proactively, resolving issues before they escalated.”

From this action alone, the business saw a 28% decrease in cancellations and a 15-point increase in online ratings.

Offers Good Experiences at Scale

Intelligent CX lets you ‘supercharge’ your teams, without sacrificing that humane, brand feel that helps build relationships with clients.

“Traditionally, to do that, brands would have to scale by hiring more agents. Then they tried to use ineffective and frustrating chatbots,” says Larry Barker, Senior Customer Experience & Operations Manager at Teamshares.

Now that AI has become so prolific, companies can finally start seeing tangible results from automating parts of the customer’s experience. Barker says that companies that will use ICX methods while still leaning on human agents for complex issues, moments of frustration, and to create human connection are those who’ll come out ahead.

Josh Cremer, founder at Redfox Visual, agrees that the “scaling” factor is equally strong for both reactive and proactive measures.

“Customers expect highly personalized interactions and to feel understood and cared for. At Redfox Visual, we use marketing automation and predictive analytics to craft custom messages for each stage of the customer journey,” Cremer says.

He also mentions a potential blocker that unjustly keeps some businesses from using intelligent CX: a high perceived complexity and cost.

“Tools and skills to implement it are more accessible than ever, and the ROI is enormous — not just in revenue and loyalty, but also in operational efficiency,” he underlines. “The companies that recognize this earliest will have a key competitive advantage.”

Turns Data into Meaningful Interactions

Intelligent CX is the future of business because it allows you to turn data into personal, meaningful interactions. Scott Cohen, CEO at InboxArmy, says his team has harnessed AI to anticipate customer needs and tailor their communications in real time.

Such an approach allowed the brand to transform bland, generic emails into messages that feel personal and relevant, almost like a friend reaching out. When customers feel truly understood and valued, their loyalty grows, and it’s evident from the analysis InboxArmy constantly performs.

“I’ve watched our engagement rates soar because of this shift from reactive to proactive customer service. Intelligent CX is a revolution, not just an improvement. Our ability to engage with our audience is being enhanced by this combination of true empathy and smart data use, which is transforming ordinary interactions into unique ones,” adds Cohen.

Focuses on What Matters Most

AI allows companies to stay human. How so? By handling routine, time-consuming tasks and letting customer success teams focus on meaningful client interactions. David Sides, director of operations at FHV Legal, says, “We can focus on providing emotional support and truly listening to our clients’ stories.”

By using Intelligent CX, FHV can work more efficiently, potentially resolving cases faster and securing better compensation for those they represent.

“It‘s not just about technology — it’s about using these tools to provide more caring, responsive legal services. This approach helps us fight more effectively for our clients through the court system,” says Sides.

Key Components of an ICX Strategy

Data-Driven Insights

If I were to pick one element that is the backbone of every IXC strategy, it would be data. By collecting and analyzing information, businesses can understand customer preferences and behaviors.

Based on these insights, they can check what causes clients to churn, how they interact with the brand, what they like and dislike about the product or service, etc. Thanks to these findings, companies can better respond to customer needs and turn their experiences into more pleasant ones.

It’s worth mentioning that as businesses collect an increasing volume of data, they should make sure it stays safe.

Personalization

Personalization is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s a matter of survival.

McKinsey says that 71% of consumers want businesses to offer personalized experiences, and as many as 76% are upset if these expectations aren’t met. Only by diving into data can businesses provide a level of personalization that goes beyond including someone’s name in an email. By collecting information, companies can:

• Offer product recommendations.
• Organize targeted promotional campaigns.
• Adjust their communication channels.
• Provide customized content, including websites, newsletters, etc.

Personalization gives brands an opportunity to build long-lasting relationships with customers. It’s a way of showing their appreciation. According to HubSpot’s research, 66% of customer support specialists say that AI and automation tools help them offer more personalized customer experience.

Omnichannel Experiences

You need to let your customers interact with the brand however they want — some will prefer an email, or a chatbot, while others a good old phone. I personally hate phone calls and will always pick a live chat. But these days an omnichannel experience goes beyond offering multiple communication channels; it’s also about integration.

If a customer starts chatting with a support agent on social media, but then decides to switch to a phone, they should be able to do so without explaining their issues all over again. A true omnichannel experience allows for channel switching without losing context.

Seamless Integration

Intelligent CX is impossible if you can’t connect and exchange information across your tools.

Take a situation like a technical glitch in your customer checkout flow. If a client reaches out to report the problem via chat, your chatbot can provide a quick reply that you’ll look into the issue and get back to them ASAP. It could also:

• Decide, depending on its settings, whether to redirect the issue to a human agent
• Automatically create a ticket and assign it to the relevant team
• Respond to them in whichever channel they’re currently available
• Offer a discount code once the issue has been fixed for any inconvenience.

All this is possible with customer service software like Service Hub. And while the above was just a hypothetical scenario, the numbers you can get by using the right tools for ICX aren’t.

Service Hub lets your company reach up to 13x faster resolution times and, as a result, an 84% CSAT increase as compared to using siloed customer management tools.

How to Implement an Intelligent Customer Experience

Use data to know your customers.

Start off by gathering all the information you have about your customers. Take note of the features like how they use your website and what your product helps them achieve.

Your end goal here is to break your customer base into very specific segments. To do this, you’ll need to look into aspects like demographics (or firmographics if you’re in B2B), purchasing history, on-site behavior, customer survey scores, past conversations, etc.

For example, say you notice that a customer frequently visits a specific product category, like Japanese photography albums.

If your data tells you that they’ve responded to discount codes well in the past, you could email them a special code for items in the category. Or, if they aren’t a fan of promotions but like to shop for new releases, you could customize your newsletter to bring those forward in your emails.

As you can see from this example, you can be flexible with your tactics and customer behavior predictions.

Set up smart tools.

I’ve mentioned earlier that ICX is all about data, and you cannot collect it without the right tools (duh!). On top of deploying a chatbot on your website to answer customer/prospect’s queries, here are other tools you can consider:

• Website analytics: Google Analytics, Livesession, Mixpanel, etc.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): HubSpot, Pipedrive
• Feedback tools: survey platforms like Typeform, review sites like G2Crowd, and feedback forms like Google forms
• Social Media Analytics: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn – whichever you use
• Email Marketing Platforms: HubSpot, Mailchimp, SendGrid.

There are plenty of options to choose from. These are only a few examples. The most important thing is to pick software from each category to make sure you’ve got all the data you need.

Don’t know where to start? Give HubSpot’s Free customer experience tools a try.

Personalize the experience.

Part of effective ICX is personalization. And given how much data you can collect, personalizing the customer experience shouldn’t be that hard. You just have to segment your customers correctly.

Let’s imagine you run a SaaS company. If you collect data like usage patterns, subscription data, customer feedback, and engagement data, you could split your customers into the following segments:

• New users
• Power users
• Churn risk
• Engaged, but low usage.

Based on these segments, you could adjust your tactics to make their experience more personalized. For example, with new users, you could create a detailed onboarding email sequence. For power users, you can offer a loyalty program. For those at risk of churning, you can offer limited discounts. You get the point.

Monitor and improve.

You need to revisit and, if necessary, update your ICX tactics regularly. Look at how the user flows you’ve built are performing. For example, if you notice that certain topics that are now handled fully by AI don’t have a high success rate, then consider how you could improve it.

Sometimes, it’ll come down solely to giving your AI better data. Other times, you’ll see that the problem relates to something broader, like a problem with the website’s usability.

Remember that you’re building AI-powered solutions to serve your customers better. And no one will understand clients’ needs more accurately than humans, which is why your staff should always be kept in the loop.

ICX as the Only Way to Meet Customer Expectations

I know that everyone keeps talking about cut-throat competition, limited marketing budgets, and the constant pressure to innovate fast.

All of this makes acquiring new customers harder than ever before. But that’s why we all should put even more effort into making sure that our current clients are happy. And one of the ways to do so is by investing in intelligent customer experience solutions.

This not only allows you to put your data to good use by personalizing the client experience. It also lets your human CS agents focus on what matters the most: building meaningful relationships with clients.

I remember when project management tools first came out. I signed up for a free trial and was excited about the prospect of streamlining my team’s workflow. However, my enthusiasm quickly waned as I found myself lost in a maze of confusing menus. It felt like I needed years of experience just to create a simple task list. After several frustrating attempts, I canceled my subscription.

This experience highlights a critical flaw in the application’s onboarding process: It was too focused on showcasing features and not enough on guiding users toward achieving their goals. This is where product-led onboarding (also known as PLO) comes into play.

PLO flips the script on traditional onboarding by putting the user at the center of the experience. Instead of overwhelming users with information, PLO empowers them to discover the value of your product through self-guided exploration and contextual guidance. It’s about creating those “aha!” moments that turn curious users into loyal customers.

In this article, I’ll dive into the world of product-led onboarding. I’ll explore the different types, how they’re used, and some real-world examples. By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to create a PLO strategy that not only delights your users but also fuels your business growth.

Table of Contents

• What is product-led onboarding?
• Product-Led Onboarding vs. Product-Led Growth
• 8 Types of Product-Led Onboarding
• How to Implement Product-Led Onboarding
• Product-Led Onboarding Examples
• Using Your Product to Onboard Your Customer

A recent study by Userpilot found that businesses using product-led onboarding experienced a 30% increase in activation rates compared to those relying on traditional methods. The focus on delivering immediate value through the product itself became a key differentiator in the marketplace.

Image Source

Product-Led Onboarding vs. Product-Led Growth

While both product-led onboarding (PLO) and product-led growth (PLG) are user-centric approaches, they serve as distinct purposes within the customer journey.

PLO is a tactical method focused specifically on the initial user experience, aiming to accelerate time-to-value and drive early adoption. It includes strategies like interactive walkthroughs, contextual tooltips, and personalized checklists, all designed to familiarize users with the product’s core features and benefits quickly.

In my own experience working at a subscription clothing startup, I’ve seen firsthand the transformative power of well-executed product-led onboarding.

At first, we struggled with high churn. However, by implementing a series of personalized questions and customized style discovery, we were able to significantly reduce the time it took for users to experience their first “aha” moment. This resulted in a 25% increase in activations and a 30% decrease in churn.

PLG, on the other hand, is a broader strategic approach that leverages the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, activation, retention, and expansion. It involves a shift in mindset across the entire organization, aligning marketing, sales, and customer success efforts around the product experience.

According to the OpenView Partner’s 2023 Product Benchmarks Report, companies with a PLG model typically see a 2.8x faster growth rate compared to their peers.

This underscores the transformative potential of PLG for businesses seeking to accelerate growth and create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Image Source

8 Types of Product-Led Onboarding

There are several different types of product-led onboarding, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The best type of onboarding for your product will depend on your target audience, product complexity, and business goals. I’ll discuss each option below.

For HubSpot users, product-led onboarding is a strategic opportunity to deepen customer relationships and drive growth. By leveraging HubSpot’s robust toolkits, you can create tailored onboarding experiences that guide users toward success, turning them into loyal advocates who champion your product.

And if you want to learn more about implementing a CX strategy after the sale, check out our guide The Post-Sale Playbook.

1. In-App Guidance

This method uses interactive elements like tooltips, walkthroughs, and hotspots to guide users directly within the product’s interface, providing contextual support and highlighting key features. HubSpot does this as soon as you sign up, making getting started a breeze.

I’ve also experienced the benefits of this firsthand. As a growing professional with multiple income sources and investments, I found that tax preparation software like TurboTax was a great example of in-app guidance for complex situations.

Their software guided me through reporting my full-time W-2, freelance 1099 income, investment dividends, and capital gains and losses. When I was unsure about deducting home office expenses, the app provided clear, step-by-step guidance in the form of questionnaires that guided me toward the correct outcome.

Throughout the process, pop-up explanations clarified tax jargon, while interactive tools helped me understand the impact of different financial decisions on my tax liability.

The personalized, educational approach not only simplified a potentially overwhelming task but also improved my understanding of the principles and processes behind it, leaving me feeling more empowered as a user.

2. Interactive Tutorials

These step-by-step guides actively engage users, allowing them to learn by completing tasks and interacting with the product in a simulated or real environment.

As someone who has worked in Silicon Valley, I’ve seen my fair share of onboarding experiences. Now, as a budding consultant, Hubspot’s interactive onboarding for their CRM really stood out when I set it up for my side gig.

I loved how it felt like having a knowledgeable buddy guiding me through the process. The tool asked me about my business goals and then tailored the setup accordingly.

It didn’t just dump features on me, which can be overwhelming. Instead, it walked me through creating my first contact, setting up a deal pipeline, and even crafting an email template — all things I actually needed.

This approach not only got me up and running faster but also showed me the real value of the CRM for my specific needs. By the end, I felt like I had a solid grasp on how to use Hubspot to manage my clients and pipeline.

It’s this kind of personalized, interactive onboarding experience that leaves users feeling confident in their ability to navigate and use a product successfully.

3. Personalized Checklists

These dynamic lists adapt to each user’s progress, outlining specific actions they need to take to get the most out of the product, creating a sense of accomplishment and direction.

Image Source

Asana offers a great example of personalized checklists. Over the years, I have found their project setup particularly helpful for personalized onboarding. When starting a new project, I’m prompted with suggestions for templates tailored to my specific needs.

The checklists within these templates guide me through setting up the tasks, assigning team members, and creating deadlines — making the whole process more structured and manageable.

What I appreciate most is how these personalized checklists simplify the getting started process. They are usually relevant to my project type, which makes onboarding quicker and more intuitive.

4. Contextual Help

This approach offers support resources like tooltips or help articles precisely when and where users need them most, minimizing disruptions and maximizing relevance.

Image Source

When I think of a role model, I turn to Intercom, especially for customer support. In my previous experiences building out support operations, I found that Intercom’s in-app messages and tooltips were tailored to the exact steps I was taking.

The messages offered real-time guidance that kept me moving forward without needing to search for help elsewhere. What I found most helpful was how seamlessly the support was embedded within the product, as if I was being coached through the process that was in a way specific to my needs.

This kind of contextual assistance made onboarding smoother and helped me quickly understand and implement the tools I needed for my support ecosystem.

5. Self-Service Resources

This comprehensive library of FAQs, tutorials, and video guides empowers users to find solutions independently, reducing their reliance on customer support reps. The Zendesk 2023 CX Trends Report points out that “69% of customers want to resolve as many issues as possible on their own,” emphasizing the need for these resources in your PLO strategy.

My favorite self-service resource by far is conversational chatbots, especially those powered by agent-trained natural language models. There’s something fascinating about the way they interpret and respond to queries in a fluid, almost human way.

Unlike static FAQs or traditional help articles, conversational chatbots allow me to interact with them on my own terms — whether it’s asking specific questions, troubleshooting an issue, or even exploring a product’s services and features.

What makes them so effective is their ability to provide personalized responses that feel relevant to my needs at the moment. Plus, the immediacy of their answers helps me stay productive without having to leave the task at hand.

These chatbots are trained to understand user intent, context, and nuances like tone, making interactions feel more natural and less mechanical. This capability makes them a powerful self-service resource that creates an increasingly personalized and fluid user experience.

6. Gamification

By incorporating elements like badges, points, and challenges, this technique transforms onboarding into a fun and rewarding experience, boosting user engagement and motivation.

Image Source

From my personal experience with Duolingo, their gamified approach to onboarding has been exceptionally engaging and effective. What stood out to me was how the app transforms language into a series of interactive challenges and games that make the process feel both fun and rewarding.

The use of levels, streaks, and immediate feedback creates a sense of accomplishment with every completed task, which keeps me motivated to continue learning. This gamified structure not only breaks down the language learning process into manageable, bite-sized pieces but also makes the overall experience more enjoyable and less daunting.

Duolingo uses gamification throughout its platform. I would love to see more companies take a page out of the app’s books, adding these experiences to client onboarding.

The dynamic nature of their gamified approach ensures that learning feels like an engaging game rather than a repetitive task. This thoughtful design makes them a standout example of how integrating gamification into onboarding can lead to a more immersive and effective learning experience.

7. Email Triggers

These triggers help guide users through the onboarding process, ensuring they receive timely and relevant information to enhance their experience and increase engagement.

I really appreciate email triggers for onboarding because they provide timely, personalized guidance that helps users navigate their initial experience with a product. What makes a great onboarding email series, in my view, is its ability to deliver contextually relevant information at the right moments.

Effective email triggers are tailored to user actions and engagement, offering helpful tips, reminders, and encouragement as users progress through their onboarding. This approach also helps motivate users to explore and use key features.

Something that makes an onboarding email series genuinely helpful is its clarity and relevance. When emails are crafted to address specific user needs, they provide actionable insights and support without overwhelming the recipient.

At Skybound Entertainment, we use these emails to drive awareness and engagement for our Insider Loyalty Program. Members get to learn about updates happening in the Skybound Universe while also engaging with activities that further drive their loyalty program adoption and ultimately their fandom.

I find that a well-designed email series ensures users feel guided and supported throughout their journey, ultimately leading to a smoother onboarding and user experience.

8. Community Driven

This is typically a platform or hub that enables users to connect, ask questions, share tips, and learn from each other, fostering a sense of belonging and collective knowledge-sharing.

I find community-led onboarding appealing because it leverages the power of peer-to-peer support and shared experiences to enhance the onboarding process. Engaging with a community of fellow users and experts offers new users access to diverse perspectives, “real-world” advice, and practical solutions to common challenges.

This collaborative approach not only helps users learn more effectively but also fosters a sense of belonging and connections to the product. I’ve found that genuine support and shared knowledge within a community can make the onboarding experience feel more personalized and less isolated.

Now, this is not to say there aren’t areas where community-led onboarding fall short. Sometimes, it can lack structured guidance and immediate responses, which can be challenging for users who need direct or more timely assistance.

To address these gaps, it’s beneficial to pair community-led onboarding with other onboarding methods, such as tutorials or email triggers. Combining these approaches ensures that users receive both the structured, step-by-step guidance they need alongside the communal support that can offer deeper insights and encouragement.

Another popular method is to have human agents moderating the community to ensure timely support and accurate knowledge-sharing. These integrated approaches provide comprehensive onboarding experiences, recognizing the need for immediate support and community-driven learning.

How to Implement Product-Led Onboarding

Let‘s imagine a fictional company, “CloudCanvas,” a cloud-based graphic design platform aimed at small businesses and freelancers. As their onboarding consultant, my main goal is to improve their user experience and ignite growth. Here’s my playbook:

Step 1: Define your ideal user persona.

I start by diving into CloudCanvas’s customer data, and analyzing demographics, behavior patterns, and pain points. This helped me craft a detailed user persona, a fictional representation of their ideal customer. In this case, “Sarah,” a freelance graphic designer juggling multiple projects, seeking an intuitive and efficient design tool.

Step 2: Map the user journey.

Next, I put myself in Sarah’s shoes, signing up for a free trial and meticulously documenting every interaction. To map out Sarah’s user journey, I would take the following approach.

Sign-Up Experience

Start by going through the registration process as Sarah would. Document each step, noting any friction points or areas where additional guidance is needed. Pay attention to how easily Sarah can understand and complete the sign-up process.

Onboarding Guidance

After signing up, assess the onboarding experience. Examine how CloudCanvas introduces Sarah to its features — whether through in-app guidance, interactive tutorials, or welcome messages. Make sure to evaluate how effectively these methods highlight key functionalities and help Sarah get started quickly.

Initial Interactions

Use CloudCanvas as Sarah would, focusing on the first few tasks she might perform post-sign-up, such as creating a new project or using a design template. Then, track how intuitive and seamless these interactions are, and identify any areas where Sarah might get stuck or need extra help.

Engagement with Features

Explore the deeper features of CloudCanvas, such as advanced design tools or integrations. Document your experience with these features as if you were Sarah to ensure they are discoverable and add value.

Feedback and Support

Review the support options available, including help centers, chat support, and community forums. Make sure to assess how easily Sarah can access help and whether support is timely and relevant to her needs.

“Aha!” Moment

Identify the point at which you, as Sarah, fully appreciate the value of CloudCanvas, otherwise known as the “Aha!” moment. This could be upon the successful completion of a project, when using a unique feature, or when experiencing a moment of great efficiency. It’s important to ensure that this moment is clearly defined and facilitated by the onboarding process.

Post-Onboarding Experience

Finally, track your experience after the initial onboarding phase. Do you know how to engage with CloudCanvas and where to get help if you run into barriers?

Step 3: Identify friction points.

Throughout the user journey, I pinpointed several critical friction points that hindered a smooth onboarding experience. For instance, the sign-up process was cumbersome, creating unnecessary barriers for new users.

Additionally, the FAQ page appeared cluttered and disorganized, not to mention there were scattered resources about getting started instead of a centralized onboarding hub.

These observations highlighted key areas for improvement, where streamlining the sign-up process, organizing FAQs, and creating a unified onboarding center would significantly enhance the user experience and reduce onboarding friction.

Step 4: Craft the onboarding experience.

With Sarah’s needs and pain points in mind, I would design a comprehensive onboarding experience for CloudCanvas that integrates multiple elements to enhance usability and engagement.

Interactive Guidance

I would create a series of interactive tooltips and hotspots that guided Sarah through the core features. These elements not only introduced the functionality but also demonstrated their benefits in real-time, ensuring she understood how to them effectively. The walkthrough was designed to be non-intrusive, allowing Sarag to explore at her own pace while receiving valuable guidance.

Personalized Checklist

A dynamic, personalized checklist could be implemented on Sarah’s dashboard. The checklist would be tailored to her specific goals and project requirements, providing a clear, step-by-step plan for getting the most out of CloudCanvas.

Contextual Help

I could embed contextual help resources throughout the platform, including in-app articles and tutorials. These would be strategically placed to offer just-in-time support, addressing Sarah’s immediate questions or challenges as she navigated the platform. This approach ensures that help is available exactly when needed, reducing frustration and facilitating a smoother learning curve.

By integrating these elements, the onboarding experience could be improved to be engaging, supporting, and responsive to Sarah’s journey, ultimately leading to a more effective and satisfying introduction to CloudCanvas’ product.

Step 5: Test, iterate, and optimize.

After the new product-led onboarding is ready, it’s time to test. To do so, I would gather a group of freelance designers similar to Sarah, observe their interactions, and gather feedback. You’ll want to follow these steps.

Recruit participants.

Select a diverse group of freelance designers who match the profile of Sarah. Ensure participants are representative of your target user persona by screening for relevant experience levels, design needs, and familiarity with similar tools.

Design a testing framework.

Clearly outline what you want to test. This could be the usability of certain features, the effectiveness of onboarding tutorials, or the clarity of the user interface.

Then, create realistic scenarios or tasks that participants perform during the test. These should reflect common tasks Sarah would undertake, such as setting up a new project, using specific design tools, or integrating with other platforms.

Conduct usability testing.

Arrange individual or small-group sessions where participants can interact with CloudCanbas while being observed or recorded. Provide testing scenarios and ask them to think aloud as they navigate the platform.

Think of it as a focus group. After the testing sessions, conduct interviews to gather detailed feedback.

Analyze data.

Review the collected data to identify common issues or patterns in user behavior. Look for trends such as frequently encountered problems, areas where users hesitated, or features that were particularly well-received. Then, prioritize the issues based on their impact and focus on resolving the high-impact problems that affect usability or lead to user frustration.

Implement changes.

Based on your analysis, create actionable solutions that may involve redesigning onboarding elements, adjusting learning resources, and improving feature discoverability. Apply your changes, but make sure to test them. Continue to gather feedback and fine-tune.

Optimize and refine.

Repeat the test and optimization process as many times as needed. Each iteration should bring incremental improvements based on the latest feedback. Make sure to monitor key metrics like user engagement, completion rates, and satisfaction scores to evaluate the effectiveness of the new onboarding approach.

Communicate findings.

Lastly, document and share your findings and improvements with stakeholders. Provide your recommendations for ongoing adjustments and future enhancements based on the user feedback.

By following this approach, you can ensure that the onboarding process for CloudCanvas is continually refined and optimized to meet the needs of designers like Sarah, leading to a more effective and user-friendly experience.

Product-Led Onboarding Examples

While these examples offer valuable insights into effective onboarding strategies, the best way to truly understand product-led onboarding is to experience it firsthand.

I’ve highlighted below three companies that have mastered the art of product-led onboarding, each showcasing unique approaches that cater to their specific target audience and product offerings.

1. Notion

Image Source

I find Notion’s onboarding approach particularly impressive. Their interactive walkthrough guides users through the basics of creating pages, databases, and notes, all within a clean and intuitive interface.

I love how they emphasize the flexibility and customization of the platform, allowing users to tailor Notion to their unique workflows. The clear explanations and helpful tooltips make it easy to grasp the core concepts, and the ability to create sample pages further solidifies understanding.

2. Duolingo

Image Source

Duolingo, the language-learning app, takes a gamified approach to onboarding that I find both engaging and effective.

From the moment you sign up, you’re immersed in a colorful and interactive world where learning feels like play. The bite-sized lessons, immediate feedback, and rewards system make it easy to stay motivated and progress quickly.

I appreciate how Duolingo uses personalized pathways based on your learning style and goals, ensuring that the onboarding experience is tailored to your individual needs. This gamified approach not only makes onboarding fun but also accelerates the user’s journey to fluency.

3. Slack

Image Source

Slack, the workplace communication platform, excels at creating a seamless and intuitive onboarding experience.

When I first joined Slack, I was immediately greeted with a friendly welcome message and a series of interactive tutorials that walked me through the basics of channels, direct messages, and file sharing. I also received personalized recommendations for channels to join based on my interests and role.

Slack‘s onboarding approach is a great example of how to quickly get users up and running while providing them with the resources they need to explore the platform’s full potential.

Using Your Product to Onboard Your Customer

Great product-led onboarding is more of an art than a science, I’ve learned. It requires understanding your users, their needs, and their journeys within your product.

If you’re new to the process, I suggest starting with inspiration. The examples I’ve highlighted from Notion, Duolingo, and Slack are great case studies you can learn from. From there, really think about your user. Where are their biggest snags in the onboarding process? How can you innovate on those pain points with a video, game, or activity to make the process more fun?

Once you have your PLO ready, you’ll see users who are ready to use your product to tackle their challenges.

Would you make a major purchase without first checking the reviews? In today’s digital age, visiting review sites has become a natural part of our buying process. Reviews give us insight into the quality and reliability of a product based on the experiences of others, which allows us to make more informed buying decisions. We navigate to review sites in hopes of finding transparent feedback that will help lead us to a satisfying purchase.

Whether I’m shopping for a new office chair or booking a hotel, I always check the reviews prior to completing a purchase. My buying journey for software was no exception. When it came time for me to find an NPS survey vendor for my company, I naturally set out to research software options and read the reviews.

If you also check reviews prior to purchasing, you’re in good company. According to TrustPilot, 89% of global consumers check online reviews as part of their online buying journey. And in the software industry specifically, 86% of buyers say reviews are important or very important to evaluate software before making a purchase.

So, which review sites are the best, and are they really all that different from each other? I’ve compiled a list of some of the top SaaS review sites as of 2024 (and a few non-SaaS ones as well). We’ll look at what each review site offers and what makes them stand out. In this article we’ll cover:

Table of Contents

• What Is a Software Review Site?
• The Benefits of Software Review Sites
• What Are the Best Review Sites for SaaS Tools?
• My Favorite Consumer Review Sites
• Summing Up My Favorite Review Sites

Purchasing a new software tool is a major decision, and reviews play a critical role in the buying journey. In fact, the majority of software buyers will read up to 10 reviews before making a decision, and qualitative commentary is the most important factor in the review.

The Benefits of Software Review Sites

Gain First-Hand Insight

Using a software review site in your buying process allows you to gain first-hand insight into what it’s like to use a product or service. One of the biggest benefits of reviews is that you’re hearing directly from the users of the software, without any marketing or fluff in between.

Prioritize Your Criteria

Many software review sites organize their results into buying-centric categories such as the tools’ ease of use, overall pros and cons, user satisfaction, and available integrations. This allows you to easily search for the information you’re looking for about a product, and makes prioritizing your own criteria around the software much easier. Looking for a certain integration? Have a concern about whether a certain feature is robust enough for your needs? This is where you can find out.

Product Comparisons

Software review sites often offer great side-by-side product comparisons, which I recommend taking advantage of. Sometimes, all you need to see is a grid that clearly shows features and specs for two different products. Suddenly it’s a whole lot easier to make an informed decision.

What Are the Best Review Sites for SaaS Tools?

Here are my top five software review sites and why I think they’re worth visiting.

1. G2

Chances are you’ve heard about G2.com or even received a request to review a software tool on their site. Founded in 2012, their site says they’re “building trust by showcasing the authentic voice of millions of software buyers,” and they list that over 60% of Forbes Cloud 100 are G2 customers.

So what makes their review site so great?

• G2 provides extensive reviews from real users, giving you trustworthy insights based on genuine experiences. They use a rigorous review moderation process to ensure authentic results. They even show you the source of the review (if G2 invited the reviewer to participate, etc).
• G2 organizes their review information into four main categories: Product Information, Reviews, Pricing and Features. When you search for a company in G2 and land on that company’s review page, you can scroll and see things like recent reviews, security information, media and official downloads, interactive demos if available, and more.
• The overall review is rated on a 5 star scale, and they also offer a sliding scale rating for things like time to implement, return on investment, and ease of setup. They list out pros and cons (compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes). G2 also lets you search reviews for keywords and includes a section called “popular mention” that provides clickable topics you can sort the reviews by (for example: customer support).

Image Source

• Under the Features tab, G2 offers up top-rated alternative products so you can easily check out the competition, and towards the bottom of the page you’ll find a Comparisons tab that lets you click into a comparison view of the product and a competitor.
• If you search the site by Software and then Category, G2 will show you the best product to choose based on your business segment with its “at a glance” feature.

Image Source

What I think sets them apart:

• G2 reviews hold significant weight for companies. I’ve personally been part of initiatives meant to drive more customers to review our product on G2 because our competitor had more reviews than we did. B2B buyers use and trust G2.
• G2 lets you search reviews for a topic (which I love) and allows you to click on popular topics mentioned in reviews, which makes it easy to find reviews based on your individual buying criteria. I also like that they include review sentiment for things like ROI and implementation.

My takeaways:

• When I’m reviewing software, I naturally come here first. But after reviewing the multiple software review sites in this list, I’ll admit that some of the other review sites make it much easier to share the review data with other people. G2 should definitely consider adding a “download” or “share” option.
• Note that you’ll need to create a free account in order to see the full reviews.
• If you’re a business looking to use G2 to drive customer reviews and use them in your customer marketing, they have a host of other features to explore.

2. Gartner Peer Insights

Gartner is no stranger to data and research, so it doesn’t surprise me to find that they’ve built a software review site. Here’s what it’s about:

• Gartner Peer Insights is a free, public resource that provides access to reviews of enterprise software and services from over 175,000 peers. Gartner vets the reviews to provide objective insights to executives and their teams. Gartner analysts also use the reviews as a source of information for their research.

• Gartner review pages have sections for Product Overview, Reviews, Alternatives, and Likes and Dislikes. A few things I liked right away were the ability to download a PDF of a review page or email the page to someone. If you’re the one in charge of doing a competitive analysis and need to present your findings to others, those options could come in handy.
• Their review score is based on a 5-star rating scale and is broken up into 3 sections: Overall Review, Customer Experience, and Product Capabilities — and you get a separate review score for each section.
• Gartner offers the option to view and download the peer insights data (account creation required). The download expands on ratings by market feature and additional company size information. You’re also given an “overall experience” section with one positive and negative review, as well as likes and dislikes at a glance.

Image Source

• At the bottom of each review you’re given the top alternative products that vendors considered before making a purchase, so it’s easy to explore similar product offerings.

Image Source

What I think sets them apart:

• Gartner’s ability to easily share review information is unique, and the option to email a review page, download the review page, and download data and insights makes putting together a competitive analysis much easier.
• Gartner has created a digital community platform called Peer Community for verified members to engage in discussion and share knowledge. Their website states, “Peer Community produces entirely peer-driven, high-quality, and detailed insights in a trusted environment that is meant to eliminate the distractions of self or brand-promotion, sales, and recruiting.”

My takeaways:

• I like this review site and would recommend it to people in my network. I trust their review validation process and think they bring in a lot of great additional resources and insights into the reviews. Also, the downloadable information in the Peer Insights section had some additional helpful information.

3. GetApp

I wanted to include this one because it’s new to me and I was eager to check it out for myself. GetApp’s site says they’ve been recommending software for 14 years, and they host over 37,000 software profiles with over 2 million reviews. They offer objective, independent research and verified user reviews. Here’s what I found:

• Right from the homepage you’re able to easily search for a software category, which then populates results for you with four ways to sort: Highest Rated, Category Leaders, Ease of Use, and Value for Money.

Image Source

• When you click into the review page, it shows you overall info, pricing, features, reviews, alternatives, and integrations.
• In the info section, you can see the key benefits of the product as well as a section explaining the vendors’ typical customers, support options, platforms supported, and training options. I think this is a nice touch!

Image Source

• The reviews are rated on a 5-star scale overall, but you are also given a review score for individual components, such as Value for Money, Ease of Use, Features, and Customer Support.

Image Source

• GetApp offers suggested software alternatives, as well as an easy “compare” button to launch a comparison.

What I think sets them apart:

• I love that GetApp has an integration comparison tool — that’s something I haven’t seen yet with review sites. Seamless integrations are critical when purchasing a new piece of software.
• I also love that they include a review component on value for money. After all, isn’t that what we all want to know: Is this going to be worth the price tag?

My takeaways:

• I think Getapp brings some pretty unique and beneficial points to the software review process. Things like a vendor’s list of typical customers, their customer support options, and the list of available integrations are things I’d naturally be looking for in my search process, so I like that they did the work for me and provided it upfront.

4. Capterra

Capterra has been providing purchasing insights to buyers since 1999, and they currently host an impressive 2 million verified reviews from real users. Their mission is to “provide you with insights needed to find the best solution for your business based on your industry, size, budget and specific requirements.” They not only offer software reviews, but they have a section for service reviews as well. We’ll focus on the software review section here.

Let’s take a look at what they offer:

• You can search by software category or vendor name. When you click on a vendor to learn more, you can see at the top of the page their overall review score on a 5 star scale as well as how many reviews exist. You can click straight into the reviews to read them from the top of the page, which is a plus.
• Underneath the review score, you have a section with some overall information that includes a recent review, the starting price for the software, and more.

• Capterra provides an easy-to-read list of pros and cons so you can see at a glance what people’s experiences have been with the product. There is also a basic overview of the software tool, available integrations, similar software that you can click over to and compare, pricing information, features, and more. Capterra also gives you an “Alternatives” section where it shows you the overall review rating for a few alternative software offerings, as well as popular comparisons so you can take time to research popular competitive software vendors.
• When you get to the review section, it’s divided into three categories: Overall, Ease of Use, and Customer Service.

What I think sets them apart:

• Capterra offers you the chance to talk to an expert for a recommendation, which can be helpful if you’re feeling stuck in your decision. They also have a dedicated team of software researchers, content analysts, and review moderators to ensure an authentic and relevant review experience.

My takeaways:

• There seems to be less vendor influence on this site than some of the others, making it feel like a neutral research experience. Three separate times throughout the page scroll, there was an option to review or compare alternatives and competitors, which I think gives you a healthy opportunity to do more unbiased research.
• I like that they explicitly include a review score for customer service. Great customer service is key to having a great experience with a product or company.
• You can also filter the reviews by things like company size, reviewer’s role, etc., but I would have liked an option to look at reviews by specific keywords or search for topics within the reviews.

5. SourceForge

SourceForge not only provides B2B software comparison and reviews, but it’s also an open source software directory. Their site states, “Together, our business software comparison platform and open source software directory makes SourceForge the most complete software review, comparison, and discovery platform in the world.” They have a software directory of over 97,000 software titles to review.

For the sake of this review, we’ll focus on their Business Software Review offering.

• The SourceForge site is simple and separated into two main categories: open source software and business software. You can search for an offering or browse by category.

Image Source

• When you click into a software tool to review, you can see their overall rating on a 5-star scale as well as how many reviews have been submitted. You’re shown four main categories at the top of the page: About, Reviews, Pricing, and Features. Within the reviews, you can filter by things like rating, company size, reviewer’s role, length of use, or frequency of use.
• The Features section is the most extensive, showing checkmarks on available features under specific feature categories, such as Artificial Intelligence.
• The pricing section covers the basics and mentions if there’s a free version or a free trial available.

Image Source

What I think sets them apart:

• SourceForge’s ability to also obtain and review open-source software is a standout for the developer community.

My takeaways:

• SourceForge has a large title of software products and an impressive number of reviews, and they cover the basic “need to know” points of a piece of software. However, I find that it’s missing some of the components offered by other review sites that I’d find helpful in making a purchase decision. Things like competitor comparison tools, searchable topics within reviews, and recommended software by category were things that I found missing from this offering.
• I like that I did not need to create an account to access any of the review information.

These are just a few of the many software review sites that are out there. If you’re looking for even more options, check out Trust Radius, TrustPilot, and PeerSpot.

My Favorite Consumer Review Sites

Much like with purchasing software, when it comes to major consumer purchases (or even travel and vacation planning), reading reviews can give you a sense of what to expect with a product or experience.

Research shows that 8 out of 10 shoppers check product reviews on their smartphones while shopping in person at a store, and 91% of online shoppers read reviews regularly before making their purchase. Whether you’re shopping in-store or online, having access to product reviews can help you feel more confident in your buying decision.

Here are a few consumer review sites (in no particular order) to keep handy. These sites include both direct customer reviews and editorial reviews.

1. Trust Pilot

Trust Pilot lets you easily explore categories like banks, stores, companies, and services. The results are automatically sorted by the highest rated companies.

Best for: Finding a new company — like a new insurance agency, bank, electric company, etc. (They do not do reviews for products.)

2. Consumer Reports

Consumer Reports hosts reviews for consumer goods. You’re given free access to see the overview and ratings/reliability for a product, but if you want to see the “recommended” section (results of being tested, reviewed, and rated by Consumer Reports themselves) you’ll need to sign up for a paid membership. You can also access a free buying guide for products to help you with your decision.

Best for: Any physical item that you’re considering purchasing — from cars to toaster ovens, you can find reviews for it here.

3. The Verge

The Verge is a little different in that they don’t host public reviews, but they test new tech gear and give their professional reviews of the product. They also share deals on products they have personally tested and recommend. Plus, they include buying guides to make your research easy.

Best for: Technology purchases. The Verge specializes in reviews and buying advice for tech gear. I liked that they have not only buying guides but gift guides as well.

4. Good Housekeeping Product Reviews

Similar to The Verge, these reviews are crafted by the Good Housekeeping editors who independently research and test products. They may not host public reviews, but their write-ups reference public reviews of the products (Example: “This item has 4.5 star rating on Amazon”), so you don’t have to go out and do the digging yourself.

Best for: Household items like appliances, kitchenware, vacuums, and more.

5. Wirecutter

Wirecutter independently tests and reviews thousands of products a year, and they only post recommendations for products if their team actually thinks it’s the best. You can find their professional recommendations for a multitude of categories like home & garden, kitchen, baby gear, tech, and more.

Best for: Anything you want a more research-focused opinion on. I was impressed that each write-up comes with a “Why you should trust us” section and talks about the research process that each editor does (including talking to professionals in the field).

6. Honest Product Reviews

Honest Product Reviews researches other first-hand customer reviews from websites to create a list of the top five products in a specific category. They include their opinion on each as well as pros and cons, a link to check the price, and an explainer on how they did their research and selected their recommendations.

Best for: If you want to know the top 3-5 items in a specific category, or you have no idea where to begin with your search, this site can give you a starting point.

7. ChatGPT

What can’t ChatGPT do? I asked ChatGPT, “What is the best office chair out there?” and it not only gave me some buying criteria to consider, but it populated a nice list of seven options with their pros and cons. It also asked me if I wanted more information on any of the options listed or advice tailored to my specific needs.

8. Amazon

I know, I know… but I would be remiss not to include them. They carry almost everything and customer reviews are a key part of their platform. I like to filter the reviews by most recent (they automatically default to the highest review), and their newer AI overview in the review section is helpful in pulling out key decision factors and highlighting pros and cons.

There are obviously many more customer review sites, like Google and Yelp.

Pro tip: If you’re a business looking to gain more online reviews, check out these tips and tricks to ask for (and get) good customer reviews.

Summing Up My Favorite Review Sites

As someone who tends to do obsessive research before I make a major purchase, I’m thrilled to know there are so many different review site options out there — and that you can find review sites that cater to a specific category.

My favorite SaaS review site was a tie between G2 and GetApp. In my opinion, G2 and Getapp have created review criteria that not only cater to the initial purchase but also give insights into whether or not customers will see value in the tool and want to renew.

Being able to search for specific topics on G2 and seeing the “value for your money” rating on GetApp allows buyers to do comprehensive research on whether this could be a long-term tool in their tech stack.

In fact, I’d love to see one review site with both of those features combined!

Add in the ability to share the review information or download it and you’ve got the supreme SaaS review site offering.

As a content marketer, I’m constantly experimenting with new ways to incorporate AI into my workflow — to save me time and energy to focus on what I’m best at. I’ve found a ton of interesting use cases in my research, especially how you can use AI for customer feedback analysis.

In our State of AI Report, we spoke to customer service experts to learn more about how they are using AI in their workflow. It turns out 28% of customer service experts use AI to collect and analyze customer feedback, making it the second most popular customer service use case for AI/automation. (First place goes to routing requests to reps, at 29%.)

To learn more about the process, I speak to folks already walking the walk within their businesses. We discuss the tech’s benefits, limitations, and practical applications below.

Table of Contents

• Why use AI for customer feedback analysis?
• How to Use AI for Customer Feedback Analysis
• AI Feedback Analysis: Is It Worth It?

Why use AI for customer feedback analysis?

It’d be all too easy for me to praise AI without a second — let alone critical — thought. (Isn’t that the cool thing to do now?) And I genuinely believe customer support is an area where the pros of AI can outweigh the cons — if you apply the technology thoughtfully within your operations.

But here’s the thing: For you to make an informed decision about how, or even whether, to apply AI to customer feedback analysis, I need to go beyond the benefits. So, for each benefit, I share a corresponding limitation. The cherry on top? Benefit or limitation: I’ve paired each with a real-world example.

Benefit: Analyzing Vast Amounts of Data at Speed

There’s no two ways about it: AI can gather, segment, and analyze an amount of data that’s simply unfathomable to our human brain. What’s more, it can do so in mere minutes — seconds, even. It all depends on the complexity of the task.

If you struggle to wrangle all the customer feedback data you receive across multiple channels, AI could help you analyze it and reap the benefits.

Real-World Example

“I recently worked with a SaaS company that was struggling to keep up with the volume of customer feedback they were receiving,” says Richard Dalder, a business development representative at Tradervue.

To address this issue, Dalder’s team implemented an AI-powered feedback analysis tool. The tool automatically collected and categorized feedback from all channels, using natural language processing (NLP) to understand the context and sentiment behind each comment. “It then generated reports that highlighted key insights, such as common pain points, feature requests, and positive experiences,” Dalder recalls.

Limitation: Fewer Face-to-Face Interactions with Customers

Yes, AI can reduce the time and resources needed for customer feedback analysis. The downside? You can develop a bias toward gathering written customer feedback. We’re talking email, social media, and customer surveys — all of which are helpful.

But in the long term, you risk having fewer face-to-face interactions with customers. Face-to-face customer interactions are a chance to build a genuine rapport, ask follow-up questions, and gain honest insights you might not have gathered otherwise.

Real-World Example:

Justin Silverman, founder and CEO at Merchynt, says their company uses AI now for every step of the customer journey.

That has given the ability to provide their customers with “a near-instant personalized strategy plan based on information we gather during their sign-up process,” says Silverman.

The trade-off? According to Silverman, Merchynt has experienced fewer interactions with our customers. That means they are missing valuable opportunities to gather feedback on how we can continue to improve our offerings.

Benefit: Sentiment Analysis

In 2024, 69% of consumers “would feel positive about using a business if its written reviews describe positive experiences.” Most consumers expect to see responses to their reviews within two to three days (34%) or a week (22%). Further, 11% expect a response the same day — yikes!

Through sentiment analysis, AI can help you understand the emotional context and, thus, the level of urgency behind the customer review (aka feedback.) Here’s how.

Let’s say 100 customers have left you product reviews in the last week. AI can analyze and segment those reviews into categories based on language sentiment. It can also prioritize the reviews in order of urgency. That means you can respond to the most negative customer reviews first and de-escalate the situation before it worsens.

Pro tip: Scale customer support, drive retention, and improve response times with Service Hub.

For a bonus, the faster you respond with a customer service solution, the more likely customers are to withdraw the negative review. Even if they don’t, it shows other customers that you’re timely in your responses.

But wait, there’s more. AI sentiment analysis can also help you improve your products and services.

Real-World Example

“One key application is sentiment analysis, where we use AI to analyze the emotions expressed in customer reviews, emails, and social media mentions,” says Sam Speller, the founder and CEO of Kenko Tea.

“But rather than simply detecting whether something is positive or negative, we can deploy AI to detect more subtle emotions — anger, confusion, delight — in customer comments,” Speller notes.

For example, Speller thinks back to a few months ago. Through the AI sentiment analysis tool, Kenko Tea started seeing more reviews mentioning “inconvenient packaging” in relation to loose-leaf matcha.

Speller adds, “Nobody complained about the quality of the matcha, just the resealable pouch, which wasn’t easy to reseal. We were able to find and implement a new pouch design within a few months, after which the number of negative reviews about packaging dropped by half, and customer satisfaction scores increased by 10%.”

Limitation: Understanding of Nuance

Don’t get me wrong; AI is getting better at understanding the broader context and nuance behind human language. Hence, “sentiment analysis” being added as a benefit of using AI in customer feedback analysis.

That said, sometimes AI might struggle with more challenging issues like high frustration or cancellation intent. And if I’m honest, many folks brought this up as their primary limitation with AI feedback analysis.

I think this is where you need human intervention within the process. By all means, you can use AI to speed up data gathering, analysis, and segmentation. However, a human agent or team member should be involved to review and validate the insights.

Or as Sam Speller puts it: “AI isn’t yet capable of context and nuance. Our human reps are still vital for understanding the ‘why’ behind the sentiment and for adding the personal touch.”

Real-World Example

“AI’s limitations include potential misinterpretation of nuanced feedback and a lack of creativity and emotional understanding,” says Sally Bannerman, director of product marketing at ICUC.Social. According to Bannerman, human analysts complement AI in this area.

“Once our human analysts review these AI reports, they interpret the insights to double-check accuracy and identify more nuanced responses. This is key to connecting the dots between raw data and actionable advice because a robot simply won’t have the contextual knowledge needed to interpret certain trends properly,” Bannerman says.

Bannerman adds that this misinterpretation can lead to inaccurate sentiment analysis and skewed data.

“This is when it is important for human analysts to step in and review the data to provide context, as they’re more likely to piece this information together and make sure the feedback is correctly understood,” Bannerman says.

How to Use AI for Customer Feedback Analysis

Here are eight ways folks use AI to fuel their customer feedback analysis processes.

1. Analyze customer reviews at scale.

Matthew Franzyshen, business development manager at Ascendant, has been a driving force behind the implementation of AI solutions into business processes.

“One major benefit I’ve experienced is the ability to process vast amounts of feedback data in record time,” says Franzyshen. “We once analyzed over 10,000 customer reviews in just a few hours, a task that would have taken our team weeks to complete manually.”

Although AI excels at quantitative analysis, like Speller and Bannerman, Franzyshen also warns us about nuance: “I’ve found that it sometimes struggles with nuanced language or sarcasm, potentially misinterpreting the true sentiment of feedback. To mitigate this, we always have human oversight to validate AI insights.”

2. Determine client satisfaction.

Next up, VP of Analytics Services Ben Vaughan, shares two ways Brewster Consulting Group uses AI.

“Within Brewster Consulting’s clients, we leverage an AI Notetaker (fireflies.ai) to record our meetings and transcribe them. Fireflies.AI has a Chat-GPT-like tool embedded into their platform that allows you to query based on the transcript of a conversation.”

Vaughan adds: “So we’ll ask it things like ‘Based on the conversation, do you believe that Client X feels they are getting a good value for their money?’ or ‘Does Client X exhibit any indications that they may end our relationship in the near future?’ These insights provide a bias-free opinion on client satisfaction.”

3. Facilitate text mining.

“When we do analytics work for our clients, the primary area that we leverage AI in is text mining,” continues Vaughan. “When a customer has a large number of, say, survey responses, we leverage AI to create sentiment analysis and find common words/phrases in the text responses to better tailor the customer’s product.”

Vaughan notes that AI analyzes the responses much faster than a human could and can provide customers with tangible feedback they can use.

“A couple of example phrases we‘ve pulled out are: ‘This event needed more activities’ or ‘The product doesn’t taste like [its competitor],’” says Vaughan.

4. Develop a product roadmap.

Lucas Carval, growth specialist at Mention, shares their use case for AI in customer feedback analysis.

“We recently used AI at Mention to analyze all our reviews from G2 and Capterra, our NPS scores, and feedback from churned customers to better position ourselves in the social listening market,” says Carval.

Carval AI helped the team condense hundreds of reviews into a 10-minute report, which highlighted what customers liked about the software and areas for improvement. Carval categorized the customer feedback into three groups (positive/neutral/negative) using sentiment analysis.

Carval continues, “Based on this information, we’ve developed a product roadmap to address the main issues customers were encountering (mainly to improve the ease of use of our software). This analysis will guide our development for Q3 and Q4.”

5. Forecast trends and opportunities.

Founder and CEO of Kenko Tea Sam Speller, shares more about their experience with AI-driven customer feedback analysis.

“AI can also help us forecast trends and opportunities by analyzing the key topics and keywords that appear most often in customer feedback,” says Speller.

For example, Speller recalls, the company learned from reviews that customers were increasingly looking for recipe inspiration.

“This led us to develop a thorough recipe section on our website as well as our email campaigns with ever-expanding collections of healthy and delicious ideas for incorporating matcha into meals, snacks, and drinks,” Speller says.

The result? “We are able to anticipate and meet many of our customers’ needs, increasing brand loyalty and encouraging repeat business.”

6. Analyze customer emails at scale.

“We use AI to process and understand thousands of customer emails every day,” says Chad Gouws, founder at FDB Analytics. In doing so, FDB Analytics hopes to achieve three things:

1. Understanding how the customer feels about their current problem and the insurance company’s way of handling it so far. If the email is flagged as negative, it is prioritized so that the customer success team can solve the problem, Gouws notes.

2. Identifying trends in the issues that customers face. “We want to find patterns or parts of the business that are having issues so we can solve these issues at their root cause, improving the overall customer experience,” Gouws says.

3. Identifying which competitors customers are mentioning and dealing with to gain an understanding of the insurance landscape.

Gouws warns that data is the main limiter to this approach: “If customers are not communicating through consistent channels or the data is not available in an accessible manner, this method struggles to produce results.”

7. Automatically categorize and prioritize feedback.

“In my experience, one powerful use case for AI in customer feedback analysis is automatically categorizing and prioritizing feedback,” says Jon Gordon, managing partner and co-founder at Sheer Velocity.

At a previous company, Gordon says, there were thousands of customer support tickets and product reviews pouring in daily. Manually sorting through all that unstructured text data was incredibly time-consuming and error-prone.

According to Gordon, they implemented natural language processing models to “automatically tag feedback as relating to specific product areas, surface high-impact issues based on sentiment analysis.” They could then route items to the appropriate teams.

Gordon adds: “This AI-driven workflow allowed us to be incredibly responsive to customer needs, quickly addressing pain points and requests for new features. The AI streamlined what would otherwise have been an unmanageable deluge of data into clear, actionable insights.”

8. Anticipate customer issues before they escalate.

Alari Aho, CEO and founder of Toggl, cites their use of AI in customer feedback analysis as pivotal in enhancing Toggl’s suite of productivity tools. But how are Aho and the team using AI to achieve that?

“We employed AI-driven predictive analytics to anticipate customer issues before they escalate,” says Aho. “By analyzing historical feedback data, AI models can predict which features or aspects of our tools are likely to cause user frustration or delight.”

According to Aho, this proactive approach helps refine Toggl’s product development strategy and customize its customer service responses.

“We specifically use AI here because it allows us to anticipate and mitigate potential problems, ultimately leading to a proactive rather than reactive customer service approach, thereby increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction.”

Despite the success, Aho warns that the initial setup and training of AI systems require “substantial time and data to function effectively.” That said, “the long-term gains in customer engagement and operational efficiency are well worth the investment.”

AI Feedback Analysis: Is It Worth It?

Short answer: Yes. However, it really depends on your situation and setup.

If you have a TON of customer feedback from reviews, emails, and survey responses and struggle to wrangle the data manually, then yes, an AI-driven feedback analysis is worth it.

If you’re a freelancer with a client roster of five? The juice from AI feedback analysis probably won’t be worth the squeeze. You’d be wiser to spend that time on delivering great work for your clients.

That said, even if it makes sense to use AI to speed up and improve customer feedback analysis, it isn’t a “perfect” solution. That’s not to say you shouldn’t benefit from AI’s strengths (volume, speed, segmentation). But remember to pair this with human input and intuition.

When left to its own devices, AI often struggles with nuance. For example, it might completely overlook the sarcastic tone of a review and misinterpret it as the hallmark of a positive customer experience. (Awkward!)

Nuance aside, AI still can’t deliver that personal touch quite like a human can. So, remember to gather face-to-face customer feedback and use your intuition to analyze it occasionally.