What if you could easily identify your most valuable customers? Now imagine you have; what would you ask them?
We had the pleasure of hosting James Meeks, Head of Product, Mobile Apps at JCPenney; Lisa Hillman, Senior Manager, Digital Adoption and Strategy at T-Mobile; and Courtney Steffy, UX Analyst at Concur to discuss these questions and more at our recent Customer Love Summit (moderated by yours truly!).
In their discussion, James, Lisa, and Courtney share how they gather customer feedback and insights—on a global scale—using mobile. They also share how they utilize customer insights to redefine focus groups, validate business decisions, and give customers a voice. They wrap up by providing actionable insights into how listening to customers through mobile increases customer loyalty, LTV, revenue, and retention.
If you’d rather read than listen, you can check out the full transcript below. Enjoy!
Transcription
Ashley: Hey, everyone. There’s so many of you. This makes me so happy. Well, thank you guys so much again. I’m Ashley, as Emily said. And today, we are going to be talking about identifying valuable customers and implementing their ideas through feedback. And I’m very excited to have this incredibly smart experienced panel along with us, and I don’t wanna waste any time. So, we are just gonna dive right in to our first question.
So, I wanna begin by talking about segmenting customers. James, I know you and I chatted a bit about this. So, I’m curious around what behaviors your mobile customers take that sets them apart from the rest of your customer base?
James: Yeah. So, a good question. At JCPenney, we consider ourselves to me an omni-channel retailer, right? So, we have our customers who shop online, as well as our customers who shop in the stores. And the stores are a huge part of who we are today. So, one of the things that we’ve noticed about our customers are their device is with them anywhere they are in the world, and they actually want to use our app in mobile technology when they’re shopping in the stores.
So, we like to focus on those customers and those things in features that are gonna help enable them to improve that store shopping experience, right? So, we created a number of things that just aids you while you’re shopping in the store. We released a digital wallet earlier this year which allows them to store their rewards, their coupons, their gift cards, anything that just make the purchase process easier for them. But then we’ve also introduced store modes.
So, one of the things that we’ve found just by gathering feedback on our customers was nobody can figure out the price of an item in a store. And you think fundamentally, right, like, that’s so easy. You put a sign up notes, it’s really not that easy though. You put a sign up, signs get moved, signs get outdated. And then we have this price checkers in our stores for a number of years only to find out that a previous leader said, “We don’t wanna use price checkers anymore.” So, none of them work.
So, literally, you go out to a price checker in the store and there’s a sticky note on it that says, “Do not use me.” So, what we did we did was we leveraged the app and we implemented some technology that allowed us to tap into store pricing for all of our stores across the entire chain. So, now, you can take with the JCPenney app in any stores, scan items, get the price for it directly there. It just really enhances that experience for them.
Ashley: That’s great. Do you guys have anything to add there?
Courtney: So, overall, one of the things that we experience at Concur as a software as a service, expense and travel tool, that’s very global. But we’ve really started launching our mobile efforts fairly recently for software as a service base. And what we’ve learned is that those users really are high frequency users. So, they’re gonna be very, very engaged. And I think that’s kind of what’s been iterated so far, or talked to today so far.
So, what we’ve learned, we’ve had to really like approach them in totally different ways than a lot of our other users because they’re so engaged that they can be a really good listening post for us.
Ashley: And Courtney, I know Concur does this on a global scale as well. Can you maybe share some insight into how you approach that side of it?
Courtney: Yeah, absolutely. So, Concur right now operates in about 22 languages, 15 of which are on mobile. Because of that, they were also a highly configurable product in addition to that. So, we have to look at every single market completely differently. And one of the things that we’ve started doing is looking at the language component and listening to that. We’re starting to figure out how to do sentiment analysis in a machine learning way on different languages.
So, that’s something we’ve just started doing as well as how we actually approach. We know that certain markets are going to be more heavily mobile adapting than others. So, understanding how we treat the actual mobile product for those countries is gonna be absolutely different. One country is not gonna be the same as the other.
Ashley: Makes a lot of sense. So, with segmentation, as we all know, comes metrics, how do we measure segmenting can be very tricky. Lisa, I’d love to hear from you around how T-Mobile is approaching segmentation, and whether some of the metrics you and your team lean on to really understand what’s working and what’s not.
Lisa: Sure. So, hopefully, you all know who T-Mobile is. We’re a telecom provider based here in Seattle, the fortress over in Bellevue. And T-Mobile has historically been primarily a retail-oriented company, retail and customer care, in spite of the fact that we are the mobile carrier and we own and run your device. So, we’ve been on this transformation to move from a retail and care-heavy interaction with our customers to an actual digital interaction. That seems kind of logical since we are the mobile carrier that we would have a mobile app and mobile interaction but it’s so relatively new for us.
So, from a segmentation and a metrics perspective, largely the mobile interactions and app interactions are through service applications, right? So, the T-Mobile app is an account management app. We have T-Mobile Tuesdays, which hopefully all you who are T-Mobile customers and have Tuesdays, where customers are getting loyalty rewards and basically, free products every Tuesday from T-Mobile, and then a variety of others.
So, primarily, service-based applications. So, when we look at segmentation and metrics, we’re usually looking at cost and revenue in terms of financial metrics. And then we look at, sort of, customer attributes like, “What rate plan are you on? How long have you been with T-Mobile?” Some demographic elements but we’re still, sort of, on that maturity curve to understand demographics, channel of origin, whether you come from a paid channel or an organic channel, age, that sort of things. So, it’s still, sort of, an evolution for us.
From a CLV perspective, I think the interesting thing is that we’re starting to see that our mobile digital customers are actually higher CLV for us not just because they are lower cost but they’re actually our more valuable customers. They tend to be our more engaged customers similar to Penney’s, more brand loyal. And we see that also in the surveys and sentiment. We ride the wave of the brand loyalty when it comes to customer sentiments. So, we see that in Apptentive quite a bit and we use it in that way.
Ashley: Also, the metric I kind of wanna dig into, any of you, I’d love to hear from all of you on this. LTV, we’re all looking for the group of customers that have the highest LTV. What that means is so different for everybody, if you’re B2B, if you’re B2C, just anything that has to do with your business can affect this metrics. So, I’d love to hear your thoughts on LTV and how you approach it.
James: It’s an important metric for us just because we don’t only want you to transact one way with us,right? So, if you’re a mobile customer today whether you shop and whatever the app, we don’t want it to end there for. Like, as a company, it just makes more sense for us that we can tie you to the store customer and becoming that omni-channel customer. So, we like to track our customers from like a full life cycle range to know that. What you’re doing online as well as what you’re doing in the store and how can we tie those two back together because, ultimately, you mean more to us in our business.
If we can get you to go through our stores more frequently, that’s gonna get other people into the stores. You guys watch news, store traffic is down, right? So, anytime that we can take, what we do and how we can market and leverage our customers from a mobile standpoint to push them to the stores, it just makes them more profitable for us as a company.
Lisa: So, I think for us, I mean, we look at LTV or CLV but the most important thing is the customer stays with T-Mobile, right? We get them in the door and then we keep them. Upsell is a component but not as important as making sure that they continue their service. So, I think that’s part of the reason that customer experience and customer love is so important to us and always has been, whether it be in the customer service centers or in retail.
So, we spend a lot of time just making sure customers are happy. We are just talking in the other room, a lot of that has to do during the device launch, just making sure they don’t go somewhere else, right? So, when hypothetically something launches in another month or so here, making sure that that moment is perfect for our customers.
Ashley: So, it sounds like mobile moment is the thing that you guys really focus on?
Lisa: It is and I think there are…we know there are key moments in the customer’s life cycle where they will be upset. We know that network obviously is a major component for us and explaining to customers that, “No, seriously, it’s getting better.” But making sure that once you get them over that one network hurdle, that things like Tuesdays is a big component for customers who really love their free pizza or just having that experience. There are customers who had been with T-Mobile for 20 years because they do call the call center and they get that service that they love. So, it’s a question of then how do we translate that into a digital environment?
Courtney: Yeah and actually, at Concur, we’ve got a little bit of a unique perspective. Our customers are actually really not our users. And so, we have a very interesting distinction there where we actually look at really user value. But user value is gonna be more in like frequency of usage, not necessarily a lifetime value. We don’t look at how much they’re spending necessarily. We use that as a segmentation tool, but we don’t necessarily use that as anything more than really, kind of, how we treat them a little bit differently.
So, a large part of what we look at is actually gonna be frequency of usage. So, how often are people traveling, how often are they expensing and catering the product along those lines that’s, kind of, the key way that we look at our metrics.
Ashley: Awesome. All right, enough talking about metrics, you guys. Metrics are great but they are huh. So, let’s switch gears a little bit. I wanna talk about listening to customers. All of you, this is such a priority for you and your product roadmaps and I know we all had very deep conversations in prepping for this panel.
So, I’m very curious around what methods you’re all using to really listen to your customers to gather feedback? Lisa, I’ll start with you. The whole concept of customer obsession at T-Mobile I know, kind of, drives everything. Let’s talk about that a little bit.
Lisa: Yeah, I think… As I mentioned, we’ve been listening to our customers from the beginning because it’s so important to us in making sure that they stay. So, in a digital environment, we use your standard tools, your four Cs, the Apptentive, app stores, things like that. But then, we get a lot of our feedback actually from what we call our frontline. So, our retail stores and our care folks and that manifests everything from groups at the call centers who put intake ticket, send straight to the product team.
So, “Hey, guys, we want payment arrangement to be more discoverable because we’re getting calls about that,” to send sort of thing in the retail stores or its leadership that, sort of, lines up and gives the product teams direct feedback. We’ve got UAT guys who go and read it. So, we’ve got a T-Mobile subwrite it and they read those reviews and provide them to us. So, I think there’s an interest in, sort of, we listen everywhere but then we actually action on a lot of that stuff in ways that you wouldn’t necessarily think.
So, we’ve got emergency response, kind of, team in the socials arena that anytime someone twits a John Legere, please don’t do that today, they’ll raise it up. And if there’s issues like…things happen, like product changes because someone in the call center said, “We need this feature.” So, that’s really cool to see sort of that virtuous cycle of commentary coming back directly from the customers because we always stay on the product side. We can look at the data and we can look at those surveys and, yes, we do prioritize based on that, but those care guys and those retail guys know our customer better than we ever will.
Ashley: Tweeting a John. Ask our emcee Red about that later. All right, Courtney, what about…
Lisa: If it’s good, it’s okay, Red.
Ashley: What about you at Concur?
Courtney: Yeah. So, we actually…I think like for every company, there are so many listening posts for what’s going on with users and what’s going with customers. And one of the challenges we’re actually going through right now is how do we bring all that together. So, we have our customers, so we actually have people that are implementing our software with those customers and we have that listening post. Then we have the actual users through mobile and web. Web, we actually use a homegrown survey satisfaction tool. And then on mobile, we’re using Apptentive, and then we have like a whole variety of different areas.
So, one of the biggest challenges we have is not only getting all that information but then bringing it together and then trying to figure out how we get it out to the organization. So, we’re right in the middle of that hurdle. And I think, poor Veronica with Apptentive team is dealing with all of my slew of questions about that. But it’s been really, really exciting to see some of the changes that have been happening from that and being able to see product actually impacted directly from some of these scenarios. As they were mentioning with Buffalo Wild Wings, a lot of times your users can pre-empt problems, and we’ve definitely seen happen a few times.
Ashley: Cool. So, before we get to James. Courtney, I do wanna just dive in a bit deeper. So, you’re a UX analyst. So, any of you who are interested in talking with someone in UX, Courtney will be a great resource for you here today. And you’re one of the only, I think the only speaker we have coming with that background. How does your experience with your work particularly influence how you implement these channels and how you think about it from the integration perspective?
Courtney: So, it’s actually kinda two-folds. So, not only do we come from the user experience side, so we are ultimately 100% responsible for the user experience. But like I said earlier, Concur looks at customers and users very differently. Like one, there’s a relationship there but they’re super different.
So, we actually find ourselves on the UX team being advocates for the user and having to make sure that we are amplifying that voice as much as we can because we’re like their soldiers in our company that are really trying to make sure that that experience is prioritized even though they’re not the ones with the dollars, they’re the ones that ultimately impact the dollars. So, that’s one of the big ways that’s we’re looking at it, is just really making sure that we are getting that information and the importance of that information out to the organization.
Ashley: Great. So, James, back to the original question around asking for feedback and listening to customers, how does your team at JCPenney approach it?
James: I think similar to everyone up here on the panel, right? We probably ask for too much information from our customers. We’ve noticed that with all the customer’s demographic, they’re very, very detailed in what they’re gonna tell you. So, if you mess up, like, you literally hear about it all day long.
So, we have…not only do we do email, I mean, we have surveys. But then bringing Apptentive on board was really just very, very helpful for us because we had a problem where we only got negative feedback and we never really asked our customers what we thought about or what they thought about us. It was always when something went wrong, they came to us.
But to be able to flip and get in front of their face, we then say, “Okay, well, we’re open at all times.” So, every time we have a release now, we have an email address where you can contact us directly but then we also have the in-app feedback tool. So, we tell you directly, “Hey, send us the message, good, bad, ugly, we wanna hear it.” We get the ugly stuff, people tell me every day they hate so much, they hate the app. But a lot of times, what you find with that dialogue though is they’re telling you what’s really wrong.
So, if you listen to your customers enough, you’ll get the insight into what it is you need to fix and the things that you need to be building or focused on. So, it’s important to us to have our ears to their voice because they help drive the product roadmap at the end of the day.
Ashley: Totally, and it can be tough sitting here, getting these reviews around how much people hate you. Never fine. But, like you said, it drives the product roadmaps. So, walk us through a little bit more about what you do once you have this great feedback, how do you guys implement that? Your mobile team is big, how do you make sure everything gets used out of it and how does it drive the rest of your strategy?
James: It’s really just prioritization at the end of the day, right? So, you have to…everything that you get from your customers isn’t always gonna be beneficial, right? But you wanna give them a platform to at least say, and then you take the data that you have, right? So, you go and see your numbers, we try to be a very data-driven and analytical company. So, we’re always looking at the data and to figure out how our business is performing, and then what’s the correlation between how it’s performing, or how it maybe underperforming, and what your customers are saying about it.
So, we have a forum every morning, everybody is in the feedback, we have to spend time as a product team in the feedback and then it’s, “Okay. What are the top three to five items that we’ve notice that there are themes there, customers keep talking about? How do we get that stuff prioritized into our next upcoming sprint to make sure the that dev team is working on those things to improve the product for our customer?”
Ashley: That’s great. Courtney, Lisa, if you guys have additions. Sure, we’d all love to hear how your teams are also approaching it.
Lisa: Yeah. No, I think that prioritization is key, right? There’s so much to be done, right? Especially when you’re sort of a legacy infrastructure company that’s still on this path and you’re not digital native, right? So, for us, one of our biggest challenges, we can do the UX, we do a lot of usability studies, a lot of focus groups, but at the end of the day, we have to connect into our billing system which has been there for 20 years, right? So, there are certain things that are not always gonna be slightly off that we as product and marketing don’t really want.
But outside of prioritization, I think, like for us, an example is we knew that we needed to do biometrics at some point, right? Everybody’s got fing
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