Digital applications are not just tools, but essential components of operational excellence and customer satisfaction in the ever-changing logistics and mobility sectors. Quickly and effectively improving these apps is key to strengthening operational teams (including customer support, the sales team and operational management), enabling them to meet market demands and customer needs with agility and precision.

Companies can achieve higher levels of productivity, refine processes and remain competitive in a fully digitalized world by improving digital tools faster.

Also, it’s important to acknowledge that users have no other alternatives. Unlike B2C digital applications, where a poor experience can lead a customer to move on to a competitor. On the other hand, employees and users who interact with internal applications don’t have the flexibility to choose another tool for their daily assignments. This amplifies the importance of their experience and the impact of your work.

What makes it harder for logistics and mobility companies to create good user experiences with their digital apps?

Logistics and mobility companies face some unique challenges in creating compelling user experiences within their apps. Due in large part to the complexity of their operations (B2B2C and B2B2B) and the elevated expectations of today’s tech-savvy consumers and the new generation of employees.

1. Businesses unfamiliar with digital technology.
   Long before computers became as powerful as smartphones, businesses never had a competitive advantage in data or software. First, they have had to learn over the last 20 years, going through all the stages of the digital transformation process (starting with IBM AS/400, Microsoft, now Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics). And there’s still a long way to go when it comes to bringing their entire enterprise up to speed to record all customer data in a structured way. Secondly, customer experience and customer-centricity have rarely been at the forefront of companies’ minds over the past 40 years, so there is a shift in focus from profitability to the customer. And to achieve this, it needs to be managed by operational teams.
2. Costs.
   Most internal technical roadmaps are driven by service companies or software consultants. New applications, updates and patches are therefore planned well in advance and are generally not very flexible. As a result, there is a significant and measurable financial cost for features or solutions that alter the user experience (be they operational teams or customers).
3. Multiplication of tools and systems due to acquisitions.
   Logistics and mobility are among the most active sectors when it comes to M&A activity. One of the challenges is to harmonize the user experience across different applications and systems, which often have very different user interfaces (UI) and user experiences (UX), but to which users are very familiar because they use them on a daily basis.

How to leverage user feedback better in your digital applications?

Effectively leveraging customer feedback collected from your digital tools is key to creating intuitive, consistent and responsive experiences that meet and even exceed customer expectations.

Here are Feedier’s 6 main recommendations:

#1. Lead with In-App feedback

Whilst sending surveys to your customers via e-mail is a great start, collecting in-app feedback, for both mobile and desktop applications, offers a number of benefits:

• A better response rate, which makes the overall results more accurate.
• It’s easier to get user context using your data layer.
• You can target specific events in the customer journey to trigger the survey.

If you use an enterprise customer feedback system such as Feedier and a tag manager such as Google Tag Manager or Tealium, there is often no development cost.

#2. Define a simple framework of metrics based on the NPS and CES

Since you are running multiple apps, we highly encourage you to define KPIs (“Key Performance Indicators”) that can be measured across your entire tool stack (from your customer portal, your quotation system, your CRM, your ERP, your partner portal, etc.).

Example of KPIs:

• How would you rate your overall satisfaction with this app? (rating from 1 to 5)
• How would you rate this app load time? (rating from 1 to 5)
• How would you rate this app’s reliability? (rating from 1 to 5)
• How easy was it to achieve your desired outcome today? (CES from 1 to 7)
• How likely are you to recommend this app to a colleague? (NPS from 0 to 10)

It goes without saying that we recommend replacing “this app” with the actual name of your application.

Within a few months, you’ll have internal benchmarks with which to measure user experience progress at key stages of the user journey.

Always include an optional open question at the end to collect improvements from your users.

#3. Leverage your business data

The complex ecosystem of digital apps – customer portals, quotation systems, CRM, ERP, WMS or partner portals – contains a wealth of in-app business data. Correlating this data effectively with customer feedback can transform your operational efficiency as well as the customer experience.

Below are a few tips on how to leverage this data:

1. Streamline data collection:
   Use a tag manager like Google’s to facilitate data collection and centralization across all your apps. Tags can be implemented without code modification, giving you comprehensive data on user interactions, preferences and weak signals in real time.
2. Personalize user experiences when collecting feedback:
   Adjust feedback survey questions, workflows and survey content according to the customer’s business data. You can, for example, match questions to business data that reflect the use of certain app features.
3. Improve decision-making:
   Harness detailed insights from your in-app feedback and business data to make strategic decisions (e.g. NPS of strategic customer apps vs. NPS of low-income customer apps). From optimizing product offerings to refining customer journeys, data provides a solid foundation for making decisions that align with user needs and corporate objectives.
4. Ensure compliance with regulations:
   At a time of increasing data privacy concerns, make sure your data collection practices comply with current regulations. Using a tag manager to control consent settings and data collection methods helps protect users’ privacy. That’s why with Feedier, no cookies or tracking are used when collecting feedback. Our clients opt-in to the business data they transmit to Feedier and have complete control over their processing for RGPD compliance.

#4. Own the process and own your feedback data

Instead, you may be driven to rely on external consultants and so-called customer experience experts to survey your entire user base, conduct interviews and gather insights.

If you’re the data owner and manage your processes from A to Z :

• You’ll significantly boost your Return on Investment (ROI) as you identify weak signals in the user experience and fix them. Implementing a software system like Feedier will generally be 50% to 90% cheaper than outsourcing the process to an institute.
• You gain in flexibility and accuracy. Measuring the performance and quality of your digital apps in real time, and getting the process under control, means you’ll be much more agile when new apps are launched, or when updates are required due to strategic changes.

#5. Include user/customer feedback data in the decision-making

Release after release has a cost. When planning product sprints with your teams or defining user scenarios, it’s useful to use the flow of customer feedback you have to feed into your decisions ( and your hierarchy’s) and increase the impact of each feature and release.

There are two types of feedback you can get from users:

1. CX KPIs as defined in our second recommendation.
   It’s quite simple to measure the trend of these indicators over time, and to segment them according to your business data (customer type, user region, etc.).
2. Text data (aka verbatims)
   With a Natural Language Processing (NLP) module, such as the one on the Feedier platform, you can easily identify key topics and track all verbatims for specific keywords. Once these have been identified, you can use AI to map out improvements and synthesize the most important ones.

#6. Leverage promoters to improve faster

NPS surveys in your digital applications enable you to quickly identify and segment promoters (NPS score > 8). Once a promoter has been identified, you should include a question following the NPS question, asking the user if they would be interested in joining the “research club” (or a similar name). Doing so, you can quickly build up a list of internal beta-testers and satisfied users who will take the time to provide more detailed feedback on future versions of the product.

Some extra insights from Feedier

Here are insights from the 15+ logistic and mobility organizations that use Feedier every day to improve their digital applications.

• Internal digital applications should have no problem collecting a high volume of user feedback as users are very much impacted daily by these applications. Expect the response rate to be above 30%.
• 100% of user feedback can be enriched with business data. In an industry that is 100% international and where some customers have a massive financial impact, you can always find a way to make the feedback more actionable. Here is a list of common attributes you can expect:
  • Generic:
    • User language
    • Browser / Device type
  • Client applications:
    • Strategic client (Y/N)
    • Client name
    • Client segment
    • Client Region
    • Account manager
• Expect hierarchy to avoid customer feedback when they know the satisfaction is low. That’s exactly the right moment to push because by listening better and applying the right actions, the scores will go up fast and you can easily measure the impact / ROI.
• Expect more teams to be interested when you start listening to your users’ feedback seriously. We highly recommend to group all feedback in one place (no silos) but give specific access to not mix feedback data that is not related. An NPS from a customer support call is very different than your in-app NPS survey.

Our insights are based on our existing customers, but every company is unique, even in a similar industry.

About Feedier

Looking to take user feedback to the next level? Feedier’s Customer Intelligence Platform simplifies customer data mastery (from both non-structured feedback data and structured business data) and accelerates decision-making at the operational level, empowering our users to lead with impactful insights. With Feedier, they harness their customer data and take advantage of AI, and automated reports to illuminate the path forward, ensuring they’re not just competitive but ahead with confidence and clarity.