Why you should tackle “the short loop” as well as “the long loop”

If you want to increase user satisfaction and brand loyalty, you'll need every discipline across your company to contribute.

But this won't happen overnight. These are long loop investments that require sustained time and energy.

That's where short loops come in.

Long and short loops – what's the difference?

A long loop is a long-term, high-effort change to your brand, product, or user experience. This could be a new version of your app or device, a rebrand, or a complete overhaul of your support center.

When planning long loops, it's important to gather as much data as possible to steer your brand and company in the right direction.

The fixes, upgrades, and improvements that come out of your research will likely require large investments of time. But they're essential for keeping your system fresh and alive while improving the way users feel about your products.

A short loop, on the other hand, is a set of changes that can be actioned sooner and faster. This is known as dynamic engagement.

Some situations can be improved or entirely resolved using dynamic control of engagement with your users.

Three ways short loops and dynamic engagement improve your user experience

1. Creating patience

Imagine that you've just released a firmware version with a bunch of issues or your entire support center has lost power. What do you do?

While your team is working hard to resolve the issues, you can engage with any users who are affected. And with one simple message, you'll reduce everyone's stress levels and minimize the number of support tickets coming in.

2. Improving issues

Another scenario. Problems in your onboarding process are causing users to churn and return their devices.

In the long term, you may want to look at improving device connectivity, but this will take over a year and some issues still may slip through the net.

With dynamic engagement, you can identify common roadblocks and engage with users in the moment. This will help them solve their problems in real-time, improving your bottom line in locations where your product is lacking.

3. Enabling fluid control

Now, what if you want to be really personalized – like sending review requests or feature adoption messages to the right segments? 

The long loop approach would be to set everything up in your app or device, collaborating with your development team to build native notifications and popups. But this will take a minimum of two weeks for even the simplest A/B test.

By giving your engagement team full control of the user journey instead, you'll save a huge amount of time and effort while allowing for definite, complete, and quick optimization.