Your Voice Matters: How CSG Forte Acts on Customer Feedback
Here at CSG Forte, we believe that listening alone is not enough to be truly customer obsessed. We have to learn and respond from customer feedback to deliver the best experiences for our customers.
Our goal is to deliver the best payments software on the market to meet the needs of individual consumers, and the employees of government agencies and businesses large and small that serve them. And that’s why customer feedback—your feedback—is so critical.
Before we dive into the ways we listen and share what we do with that feedback, we want to say thank you. Thank you to those who took the time to answer our customer surveys, participate in a client advisory board, or interact in a usability study.
Read on to learn how we transform customer feedback to better results for everyone.
Why Care About Customer Feedback?
When customers share their feedback with companies, they often do so in the hope that the product or service will improve. In fact, responding to feedback is a key step to ensuring continued client satisfaction. Sadly, only 5% of companies use their customer feedback.
This is surprising. After all, PWC reports that experience is a major influencer for 73% of purchase decisions.
Why is there such a disconnect? It’s because listening to your customers isn’t easy. Doing something with what they say is even harder.
But that challenge means the opportunity is great. For businesses to thrive, they must be good stewards of their customer feedback.
Why Customer Feedback Matters to CSG Forte
Beyond the bottom line for our business, customer feedback is one of the key ways we know whether we are fulfilling our goal of being customer obsessed.
“It’s only by talking to our customers that we can get a complete picture of how well we’re doing as an organization,” says Jeff Kump, Head of Payments at CSG Forte. “Revenue, renewals, and usage statistics are valuable, but customer feedback helps keep us aligned to true market and customer demands, allowing us to improve the experience for our clients and their end-customers.”
Backed by a culture of accountability and invention, CSG Forte believes that every failure and success is an opportunity to do better in the future.
But lots of companies talk about how important their customers are. The proof is in being one of the few companies (again, less than 5%) who actually do something with their customer feedback.
How CSG Forte Listens
Our team looks for opportunities to get customer feedback wherever it can have an impact. The ways we do this vary by project, but just a few of these are surveys, interviews, client advisory groups, usability sessions, and . We receive between 70-100 responses on our performance from our customers every month, which tells us what we’re doing well and where we need to improve.
With each of these methods of collecting feedback, our goal is to gain insight into various aspects of CSG Forte from the customer perspective. For example, by identifying what areas are frequently noted as needing improvement, we can better devote development resources to building new capabilities, fixing tech debt, or improving existing features. Let’s dig into that.
Pulling Back the Curtain: Acting on Customer Feedback
Once you collect customer feedback, how do you use it? Here at CSG Forte, we incorporate that feedback into our product planning, software development and overall strategy.
This happens in a few different ways. For example, feedback from client advisory groups becomes part of our strategic discussions around product development and resource allocation. Let’s dig in deeper with two examples.
Turning Feedback Into Better Results
One way we use customer feedback is to look at trends and frequent challenges to change our processes. For example, customers who have been using CSG Forte for five or more years tended to be the most satisfied, especially when compared to customers of three years or fewer.
When we realized this was an area for improvement, the payments team went to work, creating new onboarding resources and streamlining merchant activations.
The onboarding improvements have already shown results, according to Jeanette Mbungo, Vice President of Payment Operations at CSG Forte.
“We were able to point to enhancements that we’d made based on that feedback. The way we work with partners to help them onboard merchants and team members has shortened their activations and increased overall satisfaction,” says Mbungo. “That let us prove internally that acting on our customer feedback can make a real difference.”
Individualized Responses: Turning Payment Challenges to Journey Success
When a customer is having a challenge, customer support is often the first stop. But what if there is a disconnect? That’s one place customer feedback truly shines.
Consider one of our real estate technology clients. The customer support team had been informed of and addressed several issues, but the client wasn’t seeing as much success as expected. The answer to why only became clear when we cross-referenced recent survey responses from their employees and noticed some common themes.
“Once we had a clear picture of what wasn’t working, we started a much closer partnership with the client,” says Kump. “We were working directly with them to improve the customer journey—not just for them, but for ourselves.”
This meant that CSG Forte was able to address the customer’s challenges head-on and simultaneously make it less likely that this situation would arise in the future.
The result? According to Kump, “a loyal client and tangible benefits for all of CSG Forte’s customers through finding effective, repeatable solutions to those issues.”
Customer Feedback Makes CSG Forte Stronger
Why does all of this matter? We listen to our customers and act on their feedback because it makes our business work better. With the world’s best clients and a clear vision of how we can improve CSG Forte, we are confident that the best is yet to come.
As CSG Forte continues to develop, we have also expanded our connection to other CSG offerings like CSG Xponent. This builds on CSG Forte’s impressive DEX offering, allowing our customers to integrate the digital payment experience into the overall customer journey like never before.
We hope this blog serves as an example to businesses across industries. If you’re interested in giving customer feedback a more impactful role at your business, we’re here to help with that as well.
We want to again thank our amazing client base for their feedback. To learn more about how CSG Forte delivers a great payment experience for our customers, get in touch today.