Inner Loop vs Outer Loop

Improving your customer journey isn't a one-department, let alone a one-person exercise.

It is a team objective.

Using the indicated methodology to react appropriately to customer feedback is one of the most powerful weapons we have to change the minds of detractors since we demonstrate to them that we are not only listening but proactively acting to improve their experience with our product or service.

Often when we talk about closed loop feedback, most minds in CX space gravitate to Inner Loop. But what happens when the business gets recurrent tickets about the same issue over and over again? Wouldn't it be more practical to tackle the issue from its root?

If you'd like to learn how to make your CX team more productive while solving recurring issues with a more practical approach and what outer loop has to offer to your CX program, keep on reading.

What is Inner Loop?

Inner loop is the resolution of specific customer problems at different points of contact. Inner loop is trailing, reactive, and tactical. It is still important for detractor recovery purposes and still very critical for each customer who gets that opportunity to interact and get feedback from those who serve them, particularly on the front line.

Inner loop seeks to identify in a timely manner if a customer is expressing any disagreement associated with a recent interaction. This early detection should allow us to channel the case to a responsible team that carries out the "closure" by expressly offering a resolution.

5 ways to leverage the use of Inner Loop

Operating the inner loop requires systematic coordination between various areas of the organization, which is why it is important to outline its operation to guarantee its correct operation. Here are five keys to making the best use of inner loop:

Inner loop seeks to identify in a timely manner if a customer is expressing any disagreement associated with a recent interaction. This early detection should allow us to channel the case to a responsible team that carries out the "closure" by expressly offering a resolution.

1. Evaluate the experience

Include in all your surveys, transactional and relational, a question that allows you to group customers according to their assessment. The most used examples are Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). We recommend using AskWhy because it calculates your NPS score, uncovers the reasons behind it and enables customers to give additional information.

Make sure your survey allows open comments. Remember that a detractor / dissatisfied customer is likely to express their dissatisfaction in more detail. These comments are very useful when analyzing the root causes.

2. Listen first

Before contacting customers, make sure there is some preliminary work to analyze each particular case. If possible, provide as much operational data as possible to allow the management areas to consult the client's history with the intention of preparing a closing alternative.

When contacting the client, empathy must prevail. Therefore, the first thing is to offer an apology and give you the right to tell us about your situation with the degree of detail you want or need. During this part of the communication, it is essential to maintain active listening that allows us to validate our solution alternatives.

3. Offer a solution

Having carried out the previously mentioned work, we should be in a position to explain to the customer what are the causes that have led to their disagreement and what are the alternatives available to them.

There will likely be cases in which the client demands a solution that we are not able to offer. In these situations, it is advisable to clarify the reason why we cannot specifically offer what they are asking for.

4. Learn and improve

Identifies similar situations that occur most frequently and analyzes which solutions have given the best results. Make sure the entire resolution team knows about the most successful cases so they can replicate them.

5. Scaling up an issue

Make sure your survey allows open comments. Remember that a detractor/dissatisfied customer is likely to express their dissatisfaction in more detail. These comments are very useful when analyzing the root causes.

The Outer Loop teams should analyze each of these situations to offer root solutions.

Inner Loop vs Outer Loop.

Why considering Outer Loop is critical for a CX program implementation?

Having inner loop in your CX program is a great place to start. With inner loop you could say the journey would be:

A negative survey - Have a negative response - Respond to that response - Fix it - Ticket closed

Some brands thrive on building out responses to each of their customers and having a system that is rotated based on that. But ultimately, you need to be able to do a little bit more with your customers than just that.

But it really needs to go beyond that. If you have the same issues occurring over and over and over again to different customers, you need to be able to respond to them at a higher level.

This is where Outer Loop comes in.

What is Outer Loop?

Outer loop is the process of designing action plans for systemic improvements based on learning and standardization of cases derived from the inner loop. Taking an outer loop approach helps prioritize and take action on customer complaints to earn increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

It provides a more leading, proactive, and strategic approach to fixing customer issues, taking it to a different level than what most brands are doing at present.

With outer loop you can analyze the set of situations presented in the inner loop, seeking to give a systemic sense of what is happening with your customers.

Thus, closing the outer loop means developing initiatives or plans that include solutions to repetitive problems or formalizing actions that maximize the benefits of successful procedures.

A strong outer loop has three attributes:

• It's robust. Uses input from customers, employees, benchmarking data and other sources to guide decisions.


• It's rigorous. It can gauge how a given initiative might affect retention, revenue and other measures.


• It's transparent. It inspires confidence among employees who can see the company's efforts to improve.




5 ways to leverage the use of Outer Loop

With outer loop you can analyze the set of situations presented in the inner loop, seeking to give a systemic sense of what is happening with your customers.

Take a look at the five ways you can make the best out of outer loop:

1. Analyze trends
2. Prioritize corrections
3. Action plan design
4. Monitor and track initiatives
5. Communicate accomplishments






1. Analyze trends

Outer loop concentrates the feedback brought by the customer and performs an analysis to identify patterns that indicate the presence of deviations that require treatment at the organizational level to be exploited or resolved.

It is strongly recommended to associate deviations with specific touchpoints and stages within the customer journey.





2. Prioritize corrections

Most likely, over time, your team could accumulate systemic deviations that require specific treatment. It is critical to establish a criterion to prioritize those situations that have the greatest impact on the customer experience and that represent the least implementation effort for the organization.





3. Action plan design

Based on your prioritization, create multidisciplinary teams responsible for devising, planning and implementing the actions to transform the experience. Compare experience indicators before and after the solution to determine the success of each of the initiatives.





4. Monitor and track initiatives

All the actions that arise from outer loop necessarily have an impact on the areas of direct contact with the customer and, therefore on the way inner loop is being executed.

Ensure that all work teams know in detail what improvements have been implemented to ensure that they have the desired effect when interacting with the customer.





5. Communicate accomplishments

One aspect that we tend to pay little attention to is the communication of the organizational achievements that result from the operation of the outer loop. By internally communicating the results of the actions, we generate a greater climate of involvement on the part of the different work teams.





Inner Loop and Outer Loop

Who should use Outer Loop?

Outer loop often sits above the store level and it can include store personnel, but it should be a team of people that use outer loop. This way you and your team can build out initiatives around your different customer feedback and make a viewable impact on the organization.

With outer loop you can:


• Fix recurring issues. Reducing the recurrence of a root cause is the goal to really provide a positive customer experience and reduce churn risk.


• Prioritize. Focus on the more important initiatives, whether they require low or high effort, as well as the impact it would generate by choosing to solve an issue above others.


• Save time. Using outer loop is also practical for the CX team as it enhances their productivity because they don't have to go out, retrieve data and manually transcribe it.


• Keep the team accountable. Initiatives and tasks have a section to add the person (s) responsible for each effort and activity to track and monitor the team's progress easily.


• Unlimited use. With outer loop you can create unlimited initiatives, just like the surveys and closed loop feedback system.




Outer Loop by QuestionPro: Step-by-Step

How do you close the entire feedback loop with your customer? Here's an overview of how using outer loop by QuestionPro CX helps businesses address their customer's issues more proactively.

First, we use our exclusive AskWhy feature in a survey to pull in and look at the root causes to look at the analytical side of what your customer didn't like about a business service. This is an actionable insight critical to solving the problems that customers have to understand their pain points and how you can fix them. It is within these root causes that brands leverage towards being more strategic with their customer experience program.



NPS root cause

After a customer completes a survey, the company gets a ticket via email with the contact information and survey responses that the customer made. We're all familiar with that. However, while the email is immediate, the response to the customer may not be as immediate. It's still dependent on humans and still sometimes prone to stumbling even in response to that.

When we look at the insights we're gathering on our AskWhy Journey Dashboard, it's becomes easy to see the customer root causes in an agile and digestible way.

AskWhy Dashboard

Similarly, in our closed loop feedback system (all within QuestionPro CX platform), we can see all of these insights are reactive. When you think about it, it matters little the speed or resolution time or even the percentage of closed versus open tickets metric you have when fixing and closing all these tickets.

Why? All the statistics built around a closed loop feedback inner loop system, those tickets or customer complaints still represent a failure in the service.

With outer loop, we go beyond that service failure to decrease and eliminate the root cause of the same issue that many customers may be facing with your product or service.



Closed Loop Feedback

With outer loop you can start leveraging some of the key things that any business needs to do not just to fix recurring errors but fix them from the root to avoid service recovery from the start.



Outer Loop Quickview

When you look at outer loop quick overview (image above), it enables the user to see the description, initiative name, and lane organization for easy visualization. Your team can also record self-stated progress called “Huddles,” which can be continually updated to keep track of the initiatives.

In the next image you can see how outer loop provides the user to create warnings for activity monitor thresholds, having that dual accountability where the CX manager can track their team's progress and activity.



Outer Loop Warnings

As initiatives are built, you and your team have the ability to see what effort and impact will be, build your teams, name them, add a description, edit the lane where you want your initiative to be, and choose the root cause from the list available from the AskWhy survey responses.

Outer Loop New Initiative



The user can also easily see the initiatives as demonstrated below. This helps your team to prioritize based on this and take on the initiatives that are most important to the organization.



Outer Loop Quadrant

Let's say you have an open initiative where customers are complaining that a variety of products they need for their office supplies is not available in stores. As an example, you can view how a win (Mid-effort-High impact) “Customer Product Needs Audit” individual initiative looks like.



Outer Loop Tasks

As shown above, the users can create tasks for the initiative so the team can easily access their task lists, the task owner, contributors, when's due and the status of the task - all in one screen.

The user can also mark the completion of phases and add comments, so everyone in the team is on the same page regarding the progress (or what is stalling progress) of the initiative.

In addition to organizing and keeping accountability for tasks, you can also use the huddles tool built within outer loop to record a comment on how the initiative is doing at a more granular level. You can also use it for accountability, assigning tasks, adding initiative updates, reassigning roles, or even finding out what's holding on any progress, given the case.



Outer Loop Huddle

It's an all-in-one place system, as your build out these initiatives and make progress throughout checkpoints. Your CX team can have a centralized location for everyone to access easily. It is not sitting in someone's folder or in a G-Drive. This way, the CX team can see what it critical and the status completion of each project.



Outer Loop Metrics

As shown above, the user will be able to see the progress through the checkpoints using the NPS measurement to track month by month the advances of an initiative, directly correlating with the scores customers are providing. This is helpful so the team can easily visualize how fixing a recurring issue from the root decreases the percentage of root causes overall.



Outer Loop Activity Tab

Outer loop also provides a tab of activity, where users can monitor and keep track of activities made throughout an initiative on a very detailed level.

Outer loop gives the ability to start the initiative, build the tasks around it, hold the team accountable through huddles and then be able to access all the information in one place to understand the KPI metrics that you're tracking against a particular initiative.

If you'd like to learn more or have questions about the Outer Loop QuestionPro CX feature, schedule a demo with one of our CX experts and we'll be happy to team up and help you reach your CX program goals.