Inner and outer loops

For an effective CLF process that enacts change within the organization, CLF must be shared in both the inner and outer loops.

The inner loop promotes individual or team-level learning and change. It refers to the process by which frontline employees and teams:

• Receive feedback directly from the customer
• Follow up with customers regarding the feedback to gather additional information
• Identify and execute on actions and coaching needs.

The outer loop refers to the process by which learning and feedback from the inner loop are aggregated, analyzed, and prioritized to address broader and systematic improvements. It supports improvements that go beyond the individual or team. Changes of this sort often involve new policies, processes, technology, pricing, and even product features.

B2B and the third loop: the account loop

For B2B programs, it is not enough to focus on the feedback from individual customer contacts and make inferences about improvements that are necessary across every customer relationship. B2B programs must also aggregate that feedback at the account level to get an overall view of the health of each customer relationship. The account loop provides a more complete view of customer relationships, and improves B2B programs by:

• Identifying actions to improve individual relationships
• Providing insight into the level of risk of customer churn
• Identifying promoters that can help generate additional business.

Conceptually, the account loop is between the inner loop and the outer loop. Feedback helps you identify account-specific improvements, but those improvements do not necessarily scale to all of your customer relationships.

Beyond the overall customer score, pay particular attention to the level of engagement and responsiveness from customer contacts. Take special note of any customers that are either completely unresponsive to surveys, or whose key decision makers are not responding over the course of your survey program. For example, it is vital that you close the account loop with customer contacts that control a budget. It is often the silent accounts that are most at risk of churning, so be mindful about mitigating that risk.

General best practices

The CLF process is an especially important part of driving accountability at all levels and innovating continuously at scale. Effective closed loop processes are scalable, reliable, and accurate. They designate responsibility for closing the loop, setting alert triggers, and escalating unexpected scenarios. General best practices include:

• Setting objectives for the CLF process
• Closing the loop on all actionable comments, within established time frames
• Supporting employees who close the loop
• Categorizing root causes for organizational improvement

Additionally, Business-to-business (B2B) programs have complex customer relationships and diverse customer contacts, requiring a nuanced approach in the way you capture feedback, follow up with customers, and act on their suggestions and concerns. B2B feedback design typically requires surveys that are tailored to contacts’ roles, routing feedback to multiple internal stakeholders, and following up both with individual customer contacts and with the account overall. Best practices include:

• Assuming there might be an issue when key stakeholders do not respond to surveys
• Closing the loop with all contacts at top-tier accounts
• Aggregating individual feedback across an account to provide a more complete view for account-level follow-up

While the best practices above help to create the inner loop (and account loop), the outer loop is what supports the ability for companies to innovate continuously at scale. Aggregated information from the inner loop, operations, employee feedback, and insights become innovative ideas and improvements that can be tested and rolled out broadly. For example, if an organization learned that phone calls were more effective in closed loop activities than email, a global policy can mandate that all alerts must be closed through a phone call.

Invitations and surveys

Including fields for the following information in your invitation file can help support your CLF program, especially for alert assignment and notifications:

• Responsibility — The agent or account manager responsible for following up with the customer
• Customer information — Such as name, email address, and language
• Customer value — Such as their role, tier, tenure, purchase history, and so on
• Transaction — The date, location, and value
• Product or Business line — This helps with alert assignment and reporting

Ensure that your program has a plan for reaching out to customers that respond. Some approaches include:

• Automatic opt-in — Assuming your customer want to be contacted ensures that you are able to reach all of the customers that submit surveys. Additionally, if your customers are not expecting a response, it can be a welcome surprise to receive follow-up.
  Important: Some countries and states have privacy laws that require customers to grant explicit permission to contact them. Identify whether such laws exist where your customers live.
• If we need clarification about your responses, may we contact you? — Use this question in surveys if required by privacy laws where your customers live. Note that with this option, you are likely to receive opt-in from more customers that have complaints than customers that have had a good experience. Give an option for No and more than one option for Yes (such as Yes, by phone and Yes, by email). Most customers prefer to be contacted by email, which eliminates the need for a series of customer-contact questions in the survey.
• I have an issue you can help me resolve — Give Yes and No options for this question, allowing you the ability to contact customers that leave the question unanswered. This approach can require considerable time and resources to help resolve customer issues, so consider carefully whether this approach is best for your program. As you consider, try to balance the fact that some customers might expect to be contacted only if they answer with an explicit Yes, with the need for your company to close the loop with customers. If you have reason to expect more than a 10% abandonment rate for this question, consider using it for permission to contact customers.

If your program asks users for permission to contact them, consider not including survey questions that prompt customers to enter their contact information. Not including these questions improves response rates. It can also help to prevent the collection of inaccurate or incomplete contact information. Companies should improve their customer-contact collection methods, and not rely on the survey taker.

Lastly, consider how users should contact customers when closing the loop:

• Personal phone call — This is best for high-value transactions and customers. It also allows users to understand and resolve issues more precisely than with other methods.
• Personalized email — Less intrusive than a phone call, and still personalized.
• Email template — This is best for low-value transactions, and for a high volume of responses. It also requires less training for how to interact with customers.
• Mixed — Implementing multiple methods allows choice based on customer type, value, volume, and user preference.

Typical alert workflow

In Medallia Experience Cloud, CLF workflows are triggered by alert emails, which are generated automatically when a survey response meets defined criteria. The following image shows a typical CLF alert workflow:

In this workflow:

Alert triggers and priorities

When building alerts, consider what metric to use for triggering the alert. If your primary objective is to coach your frontline staff, use a metric like Agent satisfaction or Location. If you intend to save at-risk customers, trigger alerts on scores such as Likelihood to Recommend (LTR) or Likelihood to Return. If you want to combine both objectives, use Overall Satisfaction and LTR.

When you first develop a program, use 2 or 3 alert types to focus on your main priorities. As you verify that staff is efficient and responsive, consider supplementing your high-priority alert types with those that add value beyond score increases. For example, you might create alerts based on growth opportunities (when customers express interest in additional services or products) or just after customers have started using a new product or feature. You might begin with one of the following priority structures:

• Focus on low detractors and unresolved issues — First priority is to users that have not yet had their problem resolved, and then to users scoring the key metric lower than 4.
• Focus on all detractors and unresolved issues — First priority is to users that have been responded to, but have indicated that their problem has not yet been solved. The next priority is to users scoring the key metric lower than 7.
• Priority to high-value customers and detractors — In this scenario, give first priority to high-value customers with a key metric (such as LTR) lower than 7. The next level of priority might be key accounts and executive customers, regardless of score.

Remember that a survey response can generate only one alert, so it is critical that you prioritize alerts. In general, Medallia recommends that you focus on the following order of priorities:

1. Legal key words
2. Social key words (especially for hospitality companies)
3. High-value and executive detractors
4. Unresolved problems
5. Other key words
6. Other detractors
7. Growth opportunities
8. High-value and executive customers (regardless of score)
9. New initiative/feature/product usage
10. Response notifications

Alert assignments

When determining who should respond to each alert you create, consider users' authority and skills. Users must have the authority to take action when they are assigned an alert, and they need access to information relevant to the customer's experience (in Experience Cloud reports and possibly other sources of data). Users might also need training before you roll out a CLF process. For example, users must be able to listen to feedback actively, follow up professionally, and be able to draw out the underlying cause of customers' problems.

If the needs of authority and skills are met, plan a general approach for alert assignment:

• Centralized team — With this approach, a small, centralized team of users is assigned alerts from a pool. The outer loop is easier to close with a small team handling alerts, and training is easier with a smaller team. Consider starting with this approach before allowing the larger frontline staff to respond to alerts.
• Customer-facing fontline staff — With this approach, a frontline staff member interacts with customers. The exact role of the user depends on the program. For example, with relationship management programs, the account manager or sales director might be alerted. With transactional programs, the call-center manager or location manager might be alerted. Whomever receives an alert owns (and is accountable for) the customer interaction. The assignee is usually not the person that caused the customer problem, so he or she must have the maturity to handle the customer interactions, and the knowledge to resolve problems. This approach might require additional training.

You can create a process that allows users to reassign alerts to other users, allowing individuals with the right knowledge or domain expertise to resolve a problem more quickly. For example, an escalated alert might be reassigned to a store manager if the store team is unable to resolve the customer's problem. If you allow reassignment, pay careful attention to users' data access. Many users are set up to see feedback only for their specific area (such as a contact center or a claims area), but not multiple touch points. Make sure users have access to the data they need to resolve customers' problems.

Use one of the following methods for defining the email addresses you use for alert assignments:

• Org hierarchy — For most programs, it is most efficient to use the org hierarchy. In this case, the company must provide email addresses as part of the org hierarchy file. Alert emails are then based on the unit assigned to each survey record. If the org hierarchy is updated, new alert emails are sent to the updated email addresses. To store alert email addresses in the org hierarchy, create email unit data fields to capture alert emails for notification/overdue/escalation workflow, and include the alert email addresses in the org hierarchy data spec and importer configuration. For more information about the org hierarchy, see:
  • Unit groups and hierarchies
  • Org hierarchy field
  • Org hierarchy filtering
  • Retrieving unit group (hierarchy) information
• Invitation file — You might want alerts sent to some users that are not in the org hierarchy, or that are different based on each record. In this case, the company must provide those email addresses as part of the invitation file, essentially associating an alert contact with each potential respondent before the surveys are sent. You might need different fields for each alert status, such as New, Overdue, and Escalated. After a survey is created, alert email addresses do not change unless you update the email fields through survey update, or use a k-field to map the old email address to a new email address. For more information about invitation files, see Upload file.
• Fixed email addresses — If the company cannot provide alert email addresses in the invitation or org hierarchy file, or if the company wants to use a centralized team for responses, determine whether the company has fixed email addresses or mailers you can use in the Send to fixed email property when configuring alerts. You can also create a lookup table (as described in Lookup tables) that can be used by either the invitation importer to set alert email e-fields during the invite process, or alert email k-fields. A benefit of using e-fields with the lookup table is that email addresses used for email notification are stamped permanently on the record, and can be used in troubleshooting or reporting. If a k-field is used, the values change anytime the contents of the lookup table are changed.

For more information about alert assignments, see the Alert rules section of Create and alert and the Alert settings section of View and configure alerts.

Reporting

Every new Experience Cloud instance includes CLF reports, available in the Resolve tab of the reporting application.

Closed Loop Tracking subtab

The How are we doing with alerts section includes charts and tables that present an overview of the alerts generated and closed for your program. The dial chart shows the percentage of alerts closed within the service level agreement, while the line chart shows the same information over time and compared to other units in the organization:

The tables in this section show detailed statistics for alerts, spread across different units or unit groups. For example, an executive user (the Branch Corporate/Insights role) sees tables that detail alert performance by region and by area.

Click View Details at the bottom of either table to open the Responses List report, filtered to show the responses that generated alerts, listed in the order alerts were generated. To see detailed response information about any specific unit or unit group, click the name of that unit or unit group.

The Where can we improve section provides insight into the root cause of the alerts. The line chart shows a distribution of customer problems over time, while the table shows key scores from responses identifying those problem areas.

Click View Details, a unit or unit group (in the table), or a data point (in the line chart) to see more detail in the Responses List report.

Closed Loop Learnings subtab

This subtab mimics the presentation of the Responses Form report, but shows only the relevant information users entered when working to resolve alerts.

Use this report to identify what the organization can do to improve customer service. For example, you might identify issues with the internal processes, or the way customer support staff interacts with customers. Click Go to Survey for any row to see details for that response and the work done to resolve its alert.

Custom CLF reports

If you are not using a Rapid Deployment Solution, you can create CLF reports as custom reports. Start with the following templates, and modify as needed:

• [CLF] Alert Summary Table
• [CLF] Alert Status Distribution
• [CLF] Alert Closure Time

For detailed information about working with custom reports, see Custom reports.

CLF Implementation process

Begin your CLF implementation by developing a CLF project plan. Templates for these plans are available to Medallia employees and partners. Contact the Medallia Expert Services team for templates and other information. After developing your plan, follow the process outlined in the following steps:

1. Build the alerts that notify users of customer feedback that needs attention. For detailed information, see Advanced alerts.
   Note: Each survey record can generate only one alert.
2. Review the Responses Form report, and make any changes needed to display the information users need to close the loop. For detailed information, see Configuring Responses reports in Setup.
3. Configure rapid Rapid Response emails for the different surveys in your program. For detailed information, see Rapid Response emails.
4. For companies that have only English-reading users, enable Enhanced responses.
   Note: Do not enable Enhanced Responses for companies that have non-English-reading users because of the following limitations:

   • Subscribe emails (those that are sent to the user when subscribed to a record) cannot be translated.
   • Default labels for Stars cannot be translated. Although the labels for the Red, Yellow, and Green stars can be edited by each user, the Important label and No Star reset cannot be edited.
5. Consider creating custom reports to track alerts (by units, specific survey questions, and so on), to ensure that you are aware of problem areas your customers have identified. For detailed information about creating custom reports, see Custom reports.
6. Build Case Management Forms to support alert workflow, capture additional feedback from customers, and track interactions between users and customers. For detailed information, see Case Management Forms.
7. If you are implementing social feedback, ensure that you understand the Management response feature of social feedback reporting, which enables users to respond to reviews posted publicly on review sites. For more information, see Advanced Social Feedback configuration and Respond to Social feedback.

8. If you want to let users respond to customer feedback through mobile devices, implement Medallia Mobile.

9. If you want to make it easier for managers to connect with employees that are responding to customer feedback, implement Medallia Voices.

10. If needed, modify Health Check reports to provide the information managers need to monitor user engagement with Experience Cloud reports.

11. Test your implementation. Be sure to cover the following platform areas (on browsers and in Mobile, if used in your program):

    • Auto Importers for invitations and org hierarchy.
    • Surveys.
    • Alert notifications and escalations, including emails.
    • Role-specific testing for alert assignments and workflow, reports (including Responses, CLF, Health Check, and custom reports), Rapid Responses, and Case Management Forms. For more information about roles and capabilities, see Roles.
    Note: Contact your Medallia expert for templates to assist your testing.