What is Close Looping and how do you do it?

Have you ever received a survey, filled it out meticulously, only to never get a response back? Chances are, this has happened to you. Customer Feedback often gets lost in an endless void of incomprehensible data. Close Looping prevents this from happening.

In a study, it was concluded that, “Although 95% of companies have collected feedback from their customers for years, only about 10% use these suggestions to change their processes and improve customer experience.”

In a nutshell, “Close looping” means responding to customer feedback and resolving customer issues.

Ideally, any NPS initiative must have these three components-

1. Measure
2. Act
3. Grow

Majority of the organizations do not implement this, which is one of the reasons that customer feedback gets lost in a black hole of data. Interestingly, Numr is one of the few programs that passionately advocates for this.

Closed Loop Feedback empowers an organization to start and continue a dialogue with customers, immediately after a transaction.

Act, primarily refers to acting on the data that you have collected. This is where ‘Close Looping’ is performed. Essentially, close looping is carried out to deal with the triggers that have been raised.

What are the two types of Triggers?

1. Database Triggers
2. Individual Triggers

Database Triggers

Database Triggers are triggers that are raised when a score that you’re measuring (for instance, a C-Sat score, wait time score et cetera) is falling.
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Database trigger for customer churn graph

An alarm is set up at a certain threshold. Whenever that threshold is crossed, the alarm is raised, and a manager is notified. The manager then analyses the problem and neutralises it, at the earliest.

Individual Triggers

Individual Triggers are triggers that are raised for a single customer. They can be based on-

1. Open-ended Text
2. Rating/ Score

Open-ended text responses are examined by utilising NLP (Natural Language Processing). The text is analysed via a Machine Learning Algorithm, which

• Figures out the important words and phrases in the text, and
• Categories them (into positive and negative, for example)

Rating/ Score

Rating/ Score is measured by a question or a group of questions that ask the customers to rate a service or a product on a scale on 1 to 10, post transaction.

So, once a trigger is generated, one should immediately engage with the customer and try to empathetically understand, and then resolve the issue.

It is only after the issue is resolved that the loop is closed.

In an Individual Trigger scenario, it is important to figure out who to trigger and when an action plan needs to be formulated. For instance, maybe for a high value customer, say 7 is a trigger but for a low value customer, the trigger is 4.

Taking about his business philosophy, Jeff Bezos famously claimed that “the most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer”.  

Close Looping doesn’t merely prevent Defectors from defecting but also provides a chance to turn Passives into Promoters. It allows for real time addressing of customer issues. It leads to more engaged employees and more satisfied customers. Close Looping bestows organisations with the ability to recover customers every single day.