Congrats! You are in charge of collecting feedback from your customers and it’s flowing in fast. The C-suite is eager to get value out of all the data you’ve collected.

Unfortunately, you’ve had some setbacks getting your colleagues to care about what you are hearing from customers. Many folks who have a strong feedback program in place still struggle with evangelizing insights with other teams. Whether your role is in Marketing, Success, Support or Product, if you are in charge of your company’s feedback program, you know this pain. These other teams are often focused on their own objectives for business growth.

You know that leading companies are focused on aligning all functions around customer experience, but how do you get the other teams to grasp the potential benefits? How do you make it relevant to them?

All About the Customers

Looking at how customers are changing, how they are evolving, Forrester finds that customers are becoming more willing to experiment, more information savvy, and they are growing in their device usage, digital/physical integration, and self-efficacy. (Source: Twitter)

These customers want and expect a good experience, are willing to pay more for it, and will take their money elsewhere if your company cannot provide it. Not only will they jump ship, they’ll tell 15 or more people about how unhappy they are with your treatment of them (Slideshare: CX for Executives, Esteban Kolsky, ThinkJar).

On the flip side, “loyal customers are 5x as likely to repurchase, 5x as likely to forgive, 7x as likely to try a new offering, and 4x as likely to refer [your company to others]”. Every single team at your company contributes to the loyalty and trust between your customers and your company.

Here are a few ways to show them:

Quantify Customer Feedback

There is strength in numbers, literally. When anecdotal feedback is pit against hard numbers like revenue and churn, it doesn’t always get the attention it deserves. Metricizing all of the feedback you receive, using a “north star” customer experience (CX) metric –like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) or Customer Effort Score (CES)– is one step you can take in garnering respect for your feedback program. Remember, what gets measured, gets done.

Avoid getting caught up in choosing among the numbers, and stick to one or two that compliment each other.

Once you have a customer feedback metric to track over time, pairing this number with specific comments made by customers can be particularly impactful in a company all-hands meeting or a board meeting. The numbers make it objective and trackable, while the quotes tell the story behind the number.

Show Them How the Sausage is Made

The numbers you throw at them, NPS, CSAT, CES, might just be random acronyms that lack depth of meaning for the other teams. Give them a brief explanation of how you got these numbers, summarize the studies backing them up, and show them how the numbers affect their metrics or reflect trends in their metrics.

Show them that these CX metrics and comment feedback can be the symptoms that help diagnose a problem they may not be aware of, allowing them to be proactive in their solutions. With solid analysis of trends in your feedback, all the teams in your company can uncover overarching issues and opportunities that may alter how things work in the company overall.

Know Their Motivators & Inject Relevant Data Into Their Workflow

Find out what each team cares about and integrate it into their workflow. For example, if the sales teams lose part of their compensation based on how many of their customers churn in the first 6 months of use, show them that your program can use CX metrics to flag customers at risk for churn. You can also identify for them the customers that may be open to upsell or referral opportunities. Integrating this data into Salesforce contact and account records means that Sales managers always have that business intelligence in real-time.

If the marketing team has been asked to provide more testimonials/ case studies, set up a Slack channel feeding them comments from promoters exclusively. Pulling quotes for a promotion becomes a 2 second task, and they’ll also know which customers would be open to being contacted to be a case study.

But why stop at the marketing team? Every team can have their own Slack channel for customer feedback! The product/engineering team would benefit greatly from seeing comments related to your application/product and feeding these to them in real time can improve their response time. This will enable them to get ahead of the little issues before they become big problems.

Create a Powerful Cross-Functional CX team

Having a cross-functional CX team (including a C-suite sponsor) that meets regularly makes prioritizing strategies easier for everyone. Engineering may be seeing a lot of comments about errors, but in the aggregate, that could be peanuts compared to the number of people commenting about pricing. Having a tool that pulls out relevant trends from the flood of qualitative data can empower this team to direct strategic attention to changes that can have the greatest impact on growth.

Customer-Centric at Every Level

Collecting feedback can be daunting because you want to get as much out of it as you can, for everyone. On top of that, not everyone will recognize the benefits of this feedback immediately.

“Every organization, every company across the line needs to go from a relatively anonymous relationship to a one-to-one relationship with the customer. They need to think, ‘How do I connect with my customer in a whole new way?’ No industry is exempt from this transformation.” – Marc Benioff, CEO at Salesforce

Taking the steps to make cutomer feedback relevant to the different functions in your company will transform every level of your organization. When every team values customer feedback, the organization overall is more customer-centric, and everyone feel empowered to proactively serve customers with empathy, ultimately leading to growth and a strong brand.