Outreach, Inc. is a Colorado Springs-based company that equips more than 200,000 churches and ministries with physical and digital products, including journalism, marketing resources, and church engagement capabilities.
“We try to have a culture of listening at Outreach, both internally and externally,” Jamie Stahler, VP of Marketing, Sales, and Partnerships at Outreach, told AskNicely. But they were struggling to do that without any program in place to collect and analyze feedback. “We thought we were doing fine with our customers, but occasional feedback — both positive and negative — during meetings made us wonder how widespread certain issues or sentiments really were. We realized we needed consistent, reliable feedback to guide our decisions. Good data leads to better decision-making. At the time, we weren’t tracking our Net Promoter Score (NPS), and AskNicely helped us change that.”
“We got AskNicely because it could give us more direct access to customers to hear what we're doing well, which we want to do more of. But then, also, areas where customers are frustrated, we want to hear that, too, so that we can fix it,” Jamie said. With this mindset and AskNicely, they’ve been able to increase their NPS score and the number of reviews they have. Read on to learn how they did it.
A vital part of improving the customer experience is using the feedback collected across teams to help make internal change that has external impacts. To do this, Outreach utilizes AskNicely’s Slack integration, closing the loop between their customers and their internal teams.
“When a customer responds, we get the Slack notifications. We've got a whole bunch of people in our company on there, so they can see directly what customers are saying,” Jamie said. “Everyone from the sales team to customer service, marketing, and even the executive team utilizes the Slack integration to stay in the loop with customer feedback.”
With so many eyes on the feedback, anyone from any team could quickly jump on negative comments and tag the relevant team member right in Slack. This significantly sped up the response times, enabling them to reach out to a customer quickly. “Customers would get a call from us before they could even call customer service to complain about an issue,” Jamie said. This helped to improve customer satisfaction overall, and Jamie attributes a rise in NPS scores to this proactive approach.
All of this hard work to provide an improved experience for customers and quickly solve problems helped Outreach improve tits reputation online too. For years, their Google reviews went unattended. But Jamie decided to change that, “To me, that reputation is really important,” he said.
Before focusing on reputation, Outreach had just five reviews on Google, Jamie said, but now they have more than 500 reviews with a 4.9-star rating. “If somebody's never heard of us before, and they want to know if we're legit or not, they go to Google and they can see we have great ratings,” Jamie said.
To grow this solid reputation, they enabled AskNicely's automated Review Request. Then Jamie responded to every review they got for two years. He’s since had to enlist other team members to help him because the sheer volume of reviews got too high for him to handle on his own, which is a great problem to have.
During quarterly company-wide meetings, the customer experience data from AskNicely is used to highlight real highs and lows for employees. Screenshots featuring NPS scores, ratings from customers, and even direct comments from customers are featured heavily during these meetings.
Outreach uses this data to show teams how their work on new products or features directly impacts customers, or to highlight stellar customer service representatives from reviews.
But it’s not all about praise, it’s about growth too. “Internally, we try to be intentional about listening,” Jamie said. “This means listening to customers and employees. During these meetings, employees are presented with negative reviews too, and everyone works through how they could improve the experience and change in the future. This helps provide the team with an opportunity for feedback and reinforces that culture of listening,” Jamie said.
With a focus on growth for the future, Outreach was able to cultivate a proactive customer experience while improving customer satisfaction overall. Internal teams were brought into the day-to-day of customer feedback and the macro level with quarterly meetings to talk strategy and specific examples.
The results are an increased NPS score, more Google reviews, and a team ready to offer the best customer service they can, armed with insightful data and insights into what their customers are looking for.
