A closed-loop program allows an organization to systematically follow up with individual customers who are affected by an experience, as either indicated by their feedback or uncovered through analytics. Connecting one-on-one with customers to acknowledge and improve their experiences will provide a number of benefits to both your CX program and your business overall. It helps forge the types of strong emotional bonds that are critical for long-term customer loyalty and retention. It surfaces systemic – often unknown – issues along customer journeys as well as opportunities to expand relationships that are already going well. It enables the organization to better understand customers’ true needs, expectations, and challenges, fueling the creation of standout new experiences. Plus, because a strong closed-loop program embeds customer-centric insights and actions within teams across the organization, it plays a vital role in both spreading and aligning enterprise-wide CX practices. 

In fact, this practice of “closing the loop” with individual customers is such a fundamental CX activity, XM Institute has identified Immediate Response as one of the 20 XM Skills organizations must build to master the discipline of customer experience management and, more specifically, one of the four insights-driven action loops of the Respond Competency. In this initial phase of the development process, you are establishing a strong, sustainable foundation for your closed-loop efforts by first defining clear program objectives that support your broader CX and business goals and then putting a plan and team together to help you achieve those objectives. 

Some activities you may want to carry out in this step include: 

• Identify explicit program objectives. Before you can architect an effective closed-loop system, you first need to define specific program objectives. The aim here is to set North Star goals that will inform the direction of the rest of the closed-loop development process and help you track and communicate the value of this program to relevant stakeholders. These objectives may include anything from quickly surfacing and triaging issues, to building customer loyalty by differentiating yourself from competitors, increasing revenue by shifting detractors or passives to promoters, or expanding existing relationships. These objectives should be rooted in your organization’s CX vision and broader business objectives and should include specific numbers where possible (e.g., “We expect teams to respond to 100% of all closed-loop triggers for a customer response.”) To secure genuine buy-in and ownership – a requirement for any successful closed-loop program – include key stakeholders in the development of these objectives and ensure you have the necessary reporting and analytical capabilities to effectively track and communicate progress across these goals.
• Inventory existing feedback sources. Your closed-loop program will (hopefully!) eventually encompass a number of closed-loop workflows, each one triggered by a different set of criteria originating from a variety of customer feedback sources. The goal of this activity is to put together a list of those different customer feedback sources – such as surveys (including relationship, transactional, and journey), social media posts, contact center conversations, and third-party rating sites – to help you pinpoint which ones you would like to build workflows off of. While you will narrow down this list in later steps, it’s valuable to build this inventory as a reference artifact early on as it will influence where you decide to start your program and which business areas you choose to partner with. In addition to existing listening posts, this inventory should also include other key elements of your VoC program, such as listening cadence and volumes of responses, which will inform your closed-loop strategy in later steps.
• Determine your starting point. There is undoubtedly any number of customer experience areas you could begin building a closed-loop program around. The goal of this activity is to pick a single business unit or team to partner with first, allowing you to refine your strategy and master the details required to effectively scale the program. The group you decide to partner with first should own one or more of the customer listening posts you identified in the last bullet and be willing to work with you on implementing the necessary closed-loop activities and processes. This group should also be in a position to help you deliver on the program objectives you previously identified. Starting small with willing business partners will give you the opportunity to test and improve the initial workflows, follow-up activities, and enablement efforts before rolling them out more broadly.
• Assemble your working group. Once you’ve identified your program objectives and the business unit you plan to partner with first, you then need to establish a working group to coordinate the build and execution of this initial closed-loop program. This group should consist of the stakeholders you need to support this process and may include a representative from groups like IT, the executive team, internal enablement teams, partners or technology vendors (including your Voice of the Customer (VoC) provider), and, most importantly, leaders or owners of the business area you are starting in. The goal here is to set up a governance structure early on that involves all the key decision-makers in the planning and development of your closed-loop program and keeps them engaged throughout the process. This will eliminate roadblocks or hiccups down the line.

Once you have set the strategic direction of your closed-loop program and assembled your initial collaborators, you then need to identify which exact customers and feedback sources are going to activate this follow-up process. Rather than diluting your efforts by trying to respond to every single customer who provides feedback, you should instead start small. In this step, you are, in partnership with your collaborators, selecting just one or two customer segments and triggers to focus on initially. 

Some activities you may want to carry out in this step include:

• Select listening post(s) to build a closed-loop process around. Based on your program objectives, your inventory of potential listening posts, and which business areas you are initially partnering with, determine which sources of customer feedback you would like to anchor your closed-loop program on. The goal of this activity is to identify one or two sources of customer feedback – such as an NPS survey, a post-event survey, a third-party rating review site, social media platform, etc. – to be the origination point of your closed-loop process. Make sure that whichever listening post you choose is owned at least in part by the team you’re working with. For example, if you are working in a resort setting, this list of feedback sources might include a post-stay email survey, a mid-stay pulse, in-moment questions, and review sites such as TripAdvisor, Google, or Facebook. If you’re starting your closed-loop program with the hotel front desk teams, you might choose the post-stay survey as your point of origin. 
• Select one or two closed-loop triggers. Once you have identified which feedback source you want to ground your closed-loop program in, it’s time to get specific about which exact triggers within that listening post are going to activate a closed-loop response process. These triggers could be a score on a specific question (e.g., a detractor on a NPS question or a low CSAT score on a post-event survey), an indicator that they encountered a problem (e.g., selected “report an issue” on a digital passive listening post or “no” when asked whether a contact center agent resolved their query), a keyword in unstructured feedback (e.g., used “dirty” to describe hotel room in open-text response or posted about waitress “unfriendliness” on Yelp). It might also be from the customer affirming they would like the company to follow up with them after the survey. While closed-loop programs often initially focus on recovery efforts following poor experiences, they could also address opportunities to expand or deepen customer relationships. The goal here is to identify a few initial triggers that reflect the program objectives you identified in Step 1, are supported by your business partners and working group, and have the right conditions in place for success. Don’t trigger a closed-loop response on areas you can’t act on. We recommend starting with just one or two triggers and then expanding to more as your program matures. 
• Calculate response volume. After you’ve identified which triggers are going to activate a closed-loop response, you then need to calculate the expected response volume associated with those triggers. The goal of this activity is to get a handle on the amount of time and resources the internal stakeholders following up on these responses will have to commit to closed-loop follow-up. For example, if your program goal is to decrease the number of detractors, you would first need to understand how many customers complete your annual relationship survey and, of those, how many give an NPS rating of 0-6. Without knowing the potential volume, you are liable to overwhelm the stakeholders responsible for following up on the feedback and alienate the customers expecting a response. 
• Identify which customers to follow up with. Based on the calculated response volume – along with other mitigating factors, such as the CX maturity of your organization or the capacity of your business partners – you then need to determine which exact customers you plan on following up with. This may be every customer who responds to the trigger in a certain way or, if your resources are limited, a particular segment of important customers. For example, if you find that too many customers give an NPS rating of 0-6 for the ticket owners (e.g., account executives, customer success leads) to follow up with all of them, you may need to add additional trigger criteria. You could choose to perhaps only follow up with severe detractors (NPS of 0-3), loyalty program members, or customers in a strategically important segment. The goal of this activity is to determine – based on organizational capacity, the goals of your closed-loop program, and your broader business strategy – which customers you will respond to first. 

Now that you know what’s initiating your closed-loop process, you need to create the underlying ticketing and workflow system to route the relevant customer feedback to the individuals and teams responsible for acting on that information. Tickets are created when the specific criteria you defined in the previous step are triggered, and workflows are the path those tickets take to get to the appropriate stakeholders in the appropriate systems and formats. The goal here should be to work towards an entirely automated closed-loop system that sends out tickets, alerts, reminders, and escalations directly to the people responsible for following up without any manual intervention.

Mapping this process correctly is critical to ensuring feedback is acted on swiftly and effectively, and it often requires close collaboration with groups like IT and VoC providers, as well as the leaders who own the business area(s) that house your initial triggers.

Some activities you may want to carry out in this step include:

• Assign closed-loop ownership. Now that you’ve defined your closed-loop triggers, it’s time to determine which internal teams and individuals are responsible for following up with the customers who meet those criteria. The goal of this activity is to determine who should be primarily responsible for responding to the closed-loop ticket and who else should be notified of the feedback. For example, if a B2B company’s closed-loop process is triggered when a respondent gives a low score on the NPS question on its annual relationship survey, it may identify an Account Management team leader as the primary ticket owner, but it may also notify the actual Account Manager, Renewals Manager, and the Solutions Consultant on the account as well. One important consideration here is whether you want to centralize or decentralize closed-loop follow-up. While a centralized approach does have a few benefits – such as efficiency, consistency, and a trained team – in general, we recommend opting for a decentralized approach as a single, central closed-loop team often lacks important insights into the process and context around the experience. Centralized teams also often struggle to consistently communicate relevant insights back to the business owners who ultimately need to be driving these experience improvements.
• Choose where to send ticket notifications. If closing the loop requires employees to leverage a completely different set of tools, applications, or systems than the ones they normally use, they are much less likely to do it. The goal of this activity is, for each of the teams who are responsible for following up on customer feedback, to identify where you want closed-loop notifications to appear. If you are early on in your CX journey with limited integrations across business systems, you might start by only triggering a notification via email; whereas if you are more advanced, you might start sending alerts to a wider variety of systems. For example, for salespeople, you might want to trigger closed-loop alerts within email, Salesforce, and Tableau, while for product owners, you might want to route alerts through Jira or Slack. For employees who spend most of their time on the floor of the business – such as wait staff, in-store employees, or housekeeping – consider how digital tools like handhelds or mobile phone apps could help them track and respond to customer feedback while away from a computer. 
• Identify customer response channels. There are a number of different channels you could use to follow up with customers, including email (most common), phone calls, SMS, in-app messaging, social media, etc. The goal of this activity is to determine which of these channels to use to close the loop with customers. It’s important to keep a few things in mind here. First, what are the resources at your disposal? If you are under severe resource constraints, you may need to start with mass communications, but more personalized approaches, like emails, phone calls, and in-person conversations will be more valuable in the long run. Second, does the customer have a stated preference? This might be their response to a survey question on “What is the best way to contact you? (phone number/email address)” or part of an onboarding questionnaire. Third, which channel did they send the feedback through? We recommend closing the loop using the same channel they submitted feedback through whenever possible. Fourth, what is the goal of this follow-up? For example, email is better for tracking activities through VoC or CRM tools, allowing you to track response times and feed information into a customer’s profile for future reference and insights, whereas phone calls are more effective for escalated situations. And lastly, are there any compliance or privacy factors – like GDPR requirements – you will have to account for? Just remember, this follow-up is part of the customers’ experience, so it should be positive and on-brand.
• Establish closed-loop metrics and targets. When customers provide feedback, they expect the organization to listen and take action based on what they shared. Closing the loop with customers will validate those expectations, demonstrating that you genuinely care about their perspective and are willing to at least consider the issues they raise. However, you will only enjoy these closed-loop benefits if you respond to their feedback in a timely fashion. The goal of this activity is to identify – in partnership with relevant business leaders – which metrics you want to track as part of your closed loop program (e.g., response time, percentage of closed tickets, percentage of tickets escalated, etc.) and what targets you want to initially put in place around those metrics. For example, organizations often aim to initially follow up on feedback within 24-72 hours, starting as soon as the customer submits a survey, and close a ticket completely within 30 days. Regardless of the exact response time you commit to, it is critical that the stakeholders who are closing the ticket can take the required action within the designated timeframe; otherwise, you will be demoralizing internal employees and undermining customer trust in your brand. Document these metrics in Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that you socialize both internally and externally and recognize that they may vary by customer segment.
• Define escalation criteria and owners. Inevitably, some closed-loop follow-ups will require additional time or resources to adequately address the customer’s feedback. For example, resolution may be outside the scope of the closed-loop owner, the issue may require additional research to diagnose and fix, or the problem might present PR risks if not handled delicately. Sometimes the closed-loop process itself may break down or get delayed, like if the closed-loop owner ignores the ticket. The goal of this activity is to identify which issues may need to be escalated and then design workflow pathways that escalate the ticket to more senior team members, such as executives, senior business owners, or a CX Center of Excellence leader. Ensure these escalation owners understand when and how they will be pulled in, and set their expectations around the amount of time it should take them to resolve the escalation and what resources are available to support them.
• Design a draft workflow map. Now that you know what is triggering each closed-loop follow-up workflow, who the ticket is going to, and in what system, it’s time to document all this information and then validate it with business and technical partners. The goal of this activity is to have a simple document capturing the set of workflows you expect to stand up. This type of asset is a valuable tool for communicating and socializing important information about your closed-loop program with all your different collaborators, from business and technical partners to your working group members and other relevant stakeholders. We recommend including information such as criteria triggering your closed-loop response, the expectation for response time, primary ticket owners, escalation criteria and owners, and the expected impact if this process fails. It is also important to ensure you build in the ability to capture the root cause of the initial trigger, which will help drive the later actions.
• Collaborate with technical partners to build out workflow integrations. Once you arrive at the point of actually creating workflows that trigger tickets based on certain customer responses, you will likely need to partner with technical groups such as IT and/or your VoC provider. The goal here is to work with these teams to implement the technical aspects of your closed-loop program, such as ticketing, alerts, workflows, and integrations. While these partners should have been involved throughout the development process, it’s important here that they clearly understand your closed-loop program’s vision, roadmap, and workflow map to ensure you are all aligned. We recommend coming prepared with all detailed information such as the email addresses of those who will receive the alerts, preferred channel of response, and expectations on response time, all of which will help this process proceed more smoothly.

A successful closed-loop program requires a strong change management philosophy. Everyone involved in the process must first understand their individual roles and responsibilities and then needs to have the tools, resources, skills, and motivation to carry out those closed-loop activities consistently and effectively. In this step, you are documenting and communicating procedures, developing strong training plans and content, and creating specific resources and job aides to support that learning. These activities should all be supported by a dedicated group of internal experts that people can turn to with questions or requests throughout this process, such as your CX Center of Excellence.

In addition to building an individual’s knowledge and skills, this step also encompasses activities to build the broader organization’s knowledge and skills. Here you should also design consistent processes to capture feedback from both customers and employees, surface underlying trends, and share those findings with the right people across the organization. This ongoing motion will not only align cross-functional decisions and initiatives, it will also help foster a more customer-centric, empathetic company culture. 

Some activities you may want to carry out in this step include:

• Build a suite of closed-loop enablement materials. Ultimately, your closed-loop program will only be as effective as the employees who are carrying out these activities. The goal of this activity is to develop a comprehensive set of training and resources that prepare and empower employees to successfully follow up with customers. This should include both closed-loop training courses – delivered through new hire onboarding and regular refresher sessions – as well as tools and artifacts they can use to respond effectively in the moment. These resources – which may include step-by-step instructions, templates, talking points around common problems, next-best-action recommendations, role-clarity documents, resolution and escalation guidelines, FAQs, etc. – should be embedded directly into the ticket so the closed-loop owner has them on hand when they’re following up. We recommend partnering with groups like internal enablement teams as well as your VoC or CRM provider to help build out these tools and design these trainings. Just remember, these enablement materials are not static documents; they should be revisited and updated regularly as your closed-loop program expands and you learn more from customers.
• Empower closed-loop owners to resolve issues themselves. Organizations will often design and implement a successful closed-loop process and then forget to empower their employees to actually fix the issues customers are complaining about, resulting in frustrated customers who receive nothing more than a generic “We are sorry that happened” message in response to their feedback. The goal of this activity, therefore, is to ensure that the closed-loop owners who follow up with customers have the training and tools necessary to provide real-time service recovery while they engage with customers. When employees know they have an array of tools at their disposal – such as the ability to replace products, offer future discounts, or provide refunds – they will be able to respond to customer feedback more quickly and confidently. 
• Create role-specific dashboards for closed-loop reporting. To help everyone involved in the closed-loop process – from the frontline ticket owners to functional leaders and executives – track these follow-up activities, create role-specific ticket reporting dashboards. The goal of this activity is to drive action and accountability by providing stakeholders with the information and motivation they need to effectively close the loop, thereby achieving the business goals you identified in Step 1. For example, each ticket owner should see a dashboard that displays information relevant to their specific tickets – such as the number of open tickets, the percentage of tickets closed within 48 hours, and a table with recent tickets – while their team leader’s ticketing dashboard should show team-level metrics. The owner of the closed-loop program should have a dashboard tracking cross-functional performance at a high level, yet with enough detail that they can meaningfully act on the data (e.g., trends, volumes by department and root cause, and a snapshot of the current situation). The business leaders on your working group, meanwhile, should see high-level insights over their functional area as well as the results of root cause analyses.
• Celebrate successes. One effective way to both motivate employees and keep closed-loop activities top-of-mind for the organization is to reward and recognize the individuals and teams who particularly excel at following up with customers. This could include highlighting successful ticket owners in public shoutouts, customer testimonials, or more formal awards and incentive programs. The goal of this activity is to showcase what good closed-loop practices look like and inspire others to replicate their behaviors. Not every success you celebrate needs to be a heroic effort. Smaller wins and consistent performance that have led to tangible value for the business (e.g., higher satisfaction, retention, revenue, referrals) are also worthy of amplifying.
• Use closed-loop findings to drive enterprise-wide experience improvements. One of the major benefits of a closed-loop program is that it helps organizations systematically uncover and remediate underlying issues that are resulting in poor customer experiences. So while simply responding and following up one-on-one with customers is a strong first step, true systemic change happens when you use the information gleaned from both customers and employees during this closed-loop process to drive the other three insights-driven action loops: Continuous Improvement, Process Integration, and Strategic Decision-Making. The goal of this activity is to identify the root causes of pervasive issues, uncover opportunities to improve customer experiences, and help stakeholders across the business understand and care about CX. 
• Teach ticket owners the S.P.A.C.E. Model. While your exact closed-loop process will be completely custom to your organization’s and program’s unique needs, as you design this process we recommend following the five principles of XM Institute’s S.P.A.C.E model to ensure that ticket owners are empowered to not just reduce customer churn, but actively improve customer loyalty and build your brand. First, make sure your closed-loop process is speedy by finding and managing cases quickly. Then, personalize the process by allowing customers to choose their own resolution path and preferred contact methods, and ensure you are authentic by responding in a way that demonstrates empathy and reflects your organization’s brand. This process should also be consistent within and across case types. And finally, make sure your design your closed-loop program in a way that is emotionally aware – managing the emotional peaks and ends of the recovery journey and using deep listening to calibrate your CX metrics. 

Building a closed-loop program is not a one-and-done activity. While your program should start small – with just one or two initial workflows – to realize all the benefits outlined in Step 1, you will eventually need to expand your efforts to encompass a wider range of customers, triggers, and business areas. In addition to increasing the volume, you should also continue to refine and tailor your closed-loop activities to drive deeper connections with and insights from the individuals you follow up with. Here you are also establishing and monitoring a suite of metrics to ensure the closed-loop processes you put in place are performing according to expectations and delivering on the objectives you identified in the first step. 

Some activities you may want to carry out in this step include:

• Monitor response rates and success metrics. Rather than defining targets for your closed-loop metrics early on and then never revisiting them again, you need to constantly monitor and recalibrate the goals for your program. This activity aims to ensure that, as organizational priorities shift and the organization forms new habits around closing the loop, the targets you set for your closed-loop metrics – such as response rates and time – remain optimized. These targets, which should be set in collaboration with business partners, should be high enough to be aspirational, yet realistically achievable so they do not demoralize closed-loop owners. Proactively monitoring these metrics will also help you uncover potential opportunities or challenges in the process that you need to address. For example, if a team of closed-loop owners has a 0% response rate, there may be an issue with the workflow that isn’t routing those alerts to the team correctly. On the other hand, if a team has suspiciously quick closure times, it may be an indication that they are gaming the system and not following the prescribed process. Proactively monitoring these metrics will help you identify issues in both the technical elements of your program, such as workflows and ticketing, as well as the change management and enablement aspects of your efforts, such as where you may need more coaching or enablement materials. 
• Check in with closed-loop owners regularly. As with the rollout of any initiative or project, it’s important that you continue to improve upon the closed-loop follow-up process once it has been deployed. The goal of this activity is to stay closely aligned with the teams and individuals who are responsible for implementing your closed-loop strategy in order to understand the successes and challenges they’ve experienced. These check-ins could take a variety of different forms, including a recurring check-in meeting with some of these stakeholders, focus groups composed of closed-loop owners, or quarterly reviews with business partners. Regardless of the exact form, these meetings are vital, not only for identifying ongoing process improvements, but also for building support and buy-in from stakeholders by demonstrating that you care about this process and their experiences. 
• Demonstrate the ROI of your closed-loop program. Once your program has had some time to run its course, begin exploring how to tell a compelling ROI story around the effect this closed-loop process has had on relevant business metrics or goals. A good place to start is by looking through available experience and operational data sources to identify opportunities to show that closing the loop has helped drive outcomes such as increased revenue, repeat business, or positive feedback. For example, you could show that customers who received a closed-loop follow-up are 8x more likely to be promoters compared to those who didn’t, and promoters are 70% less likely to churn and have a 75% higher average upsell deal size compared to detractors. The goal of this activity is to ensure continued cross-functional buy-in and support for closing the loop by making a clear and compelling business case for these activities. This becomes important especially as you begin thinking about expanding your program to new areas or additional workflows across your organization.
• Identify additional workflows to add to your program. Once you have rolled out all the elements of your initial closed-loop processes and they are all working as expected, reconnect with your working group to identify which workflows (if any) you would like to implement next. For example, if you grounded your initial closed-loop trigger in a relationship survey, you may next want to set up a workflow around a post-event survey in a high-impact area, such as following an onboarding journey or after a contact center interaction. The goal here is to thoughtfully expand your program to begin improving customer experiences at scale and systematically reap the benefits highlighted in Step 1. As you increase your portfolio of workflows, keep in mind that consistency across follow-up activities is essential.