Why we’re launching a customer sentiment tracker

Reconnecting companies with their subscribers was a big reason for starting Substribe. The subscription model should foster a stronger connection with customers, but this isn’t always the case. Companies can get lost with delivering product, acquiring new customers, and business as usual.

When there’s a catalyst for change Substribe get called in to make that reconnection. We get cut through on customer need, product development and willingness to pay. We do this using our advisory sprints, speaking at length with customers and aligning teams around a mandate for action.

But the world is constantly changing, so we wanted to work out ‘how might we’ help our clients on an ongoing basis?

We found the answer with tracking customer sentiment. We’ve learned this can be used to identify shifts in customer need, as well as problems and opportunities within the product/service mix.

In the past year we’ve developed a tool that does just that – tracking five of the most important customer sentiment measures. You’ll recognise four of them, but we’ve added our own proprietary question, the must have score.

Surveys aren’t always deployed or used correctly to be useful. NPS, for example, is often used, but ends up as a vanity metric with no meaningful action on how to use it and improve things.

Why is that? This can be down to:

• Ownership – unable to action sentiment to impact product/service outcomes
• Independence – metrics go wrong when self reported
• Segmentation – lack of depth in analysis
• Communication – survey fatigue when the feedback loop isn’t closed

We want to take all these negative variables away and manage the process, which looks like this:

Step 1 – a baseline measure of performance, and how you compare to our Substribe benchmark. This is why we’re giving step 1 for free (to qualifying companies).

Step 2 – the real value comes from collecting data at regular intervals. This is when you can see how your scores change over time.

Step 3 – the quantitative and qualitative information enables us to identify patterns and themes. This will help to create a roadmap of actions for product and customer facing teams.

In a recent project, we were able to identify specific gaps in content that led to decline in sentiment for a key persona group. The team have clear action steps to take and even featured the output in their company kick off.

Want to join our beta programme? Please get in touch with Steve Budd.