If your customers have been sharing their experiences with you, you have received some valuable information about your business. Why not add to that value by sharing your customers’ feedback beyond your customer experience team?

Of course, the success of any of the following tactics depends on having an overall strategy to distribute customer experience information throughout the organization in a way that makes improving experiences easy. Once you have the technology and processes in place to understand and improve customer experiences, you can look at promoting the changes you make throughout the organization and back to your customers.

Sharing internally: Motivate your employees

Let’s begin with how you can use customer comments internally. We’ve already shared some ideas here, but there are other ways to keep your employees without direct access to your CEM solution up-to-date with your customers’ experiences.

First, consider displaying scrolling customer comments—think of it as an experience ticker—or a gauge showing overall customer advocacy in your lobby. As employees arrive for the day, they can see what impact their previous day’s work had on the business.

Posting comments and resulting company actions on the company intranet similarly offers a tangible glimpse into customer experiences. Employees who are reminded of the people they are working to serve, and see the impact of their work, perform better than employees who operate in isolation.

Sharing externally: Strengthen your reputation

Sharing your customer comments externally promotes your company and the kinds of experiences that other customers can expect. And if approached the right way, both positive and negative stories achieve this. The positive ones are valuable promotional tools—we’ve all heard how powerful advocates are. Stories of negative experiences—and how you resolved them—reveal how you approach customer issues. This transparency into your actions supports your commitment to customers.

A simple way to share these stories is to post them on your website. If you go this route, be sure to include how other customers can share their stories with you; you might inspire some new stories.

Other easy ways to share stories is including customer comments in your annual report and newsletters.

Finally, using these stories in your formal advertising campaigns—you know, the “actual customer testimonial” type—is effective.

A big leap

The final idea we’d like to share requires a true commitment to customer experience excellence, and confidence in your ability to deliver it: Post real-time customer data on your website. We’re not suggesting you post an entire dashboard, but instead post an indicator, such as your advocacy score, and update it regularly. Here you are publicly announcing your commitment to delivering the kinds of experiences that earn you a high advocacy score.

Risk vs. reward

If you decide to employ customer comments to promote your business, you may face some concerns about revealing too much about your business. But if you are committed to your customers, having customers who are positive about your business shouldn’t be a surprise. And the benefits to your company’s reputation because of sharing actual customers’ experiences are many: Others will appreciate the visibility into how you treat customers, and showing is more effective than telling.

One final thing: If you are planning to share customer comments publicly either on your website or in publications, when customers provide their comments, be sure to ask about using the comments publicly. This is one more way of showing that you respect your customers.

If you have questions about other ways to use your customer experiences, email us, with ResponseTek:CEM in the subject.