Regardless of your business, you have to take a certain step if you want to improve the customer experience both online and offline. It is collecting customer feedback.
Customer feedback is easy to get, but analyzing it and taking proper actions may be challenging and result in mistakes. Moreover, even if you manage to collect data and analyze customer feedback and change something for the better, you will still have to keep track of customer opinions changing over time.
For success, try implementing customer feedback management, which is often abbreviated as CFM.
Using customer feedback to make business improvements
How satisfied are your customers? Where in the customer experience is the customer dissatisfied? If you find yourself in this situation? To understand these questions and others, as well as to address the problems of your clients, apply customer feedback management.
Customer feedback management may be useful for your company only when you are able to capture customers’ opinions in the very moment when the experience is fresh in their minds. In addition, since the client journey consists of several parts, you will need to obtain customer feedback throughout the journey.
For the successful implementation of such a tactic, the process of providing opinions should be intuitive and easy for customers. The smiley terminals of HappyOrNot remove any kind of difficulties and encourage customers to share their opinion.
Types of customer feedback
Customer feedback is not limited to one format only. There are seven types of feedback that businesses should consider.
Customer Feedback Survey
Such surveys are beneficial for customers, being simple and fast, and are crucial for a company as well. How to make an excellent customer feedback survey?
- Define the goal and explain why you need a survey
- Ask unbiased questions
- Provide surveys to customers via appropriate channels
- Make the survey short
- Give incentives for taking the survey
- Give customers several options to choose from
- Don’t forget to send a reminder to respondents
Please note that customer surveys may differ from industry to industry. Thus, once you select a type of survey to be used, you will need to compare your results with your competition by using NPS.
Customer Interview
With the help of customer interviews, businesses obtain information about the customers’ needs, feelings, problems, and potential solutions. The goal during interviews is to find out what the problem is and to solve it with your help.
Interviews may be planned and ad hoc. The former includes scheduled interviews with preset questions related to the experience in your industry or business. The latter involves spontaneous conversations with the customer regarding their experiences.
Tip: Ask open-ended questions to facilitate discussion.
Customer Focus Group
Focus groups with customers may be helpful when making decisions regarding different aspects of your business, such as branding, solutions, and strategies.
It is fast, simple, and inexpensive. Besides, customers can interact with each other to inspire further discussions, and thus make the process of finding solutions more efficient.
Tip: Conduct the meeting whenever you need it.
Social Listening
As we’ve already mentioned above, social media has become an indispensable part of customer service. However, opinions posted on such platforms aren’t always positive. But this fact shouldn’t discourage companies from using this platform.
Instead of that, turn social media into a source of valuable feedback by using social listening techniques. Social listening refers to tracking and analyzing mentions of your company, brands, products, competitors, or industry on social networks.
Additionally, polls may be used to boost online engagement. With the help of polls, businesses will be able to understand how their audience sees the brand, nd ensure consistency between customer feedback and strategies.
Online Reviews
There is much unexplored potential in online reviews. They don’t necessarily concern a product, but may involve the experience with services provided. By sharing the information from online reviews, customers inform other customers about their buying experience.
Thus, other people can make an informed decision, which may influence the success of sales. Businesses may promote good reviews on their social networks. As a result, businesses will receive feedback from customers and engage with them.
How to manage customer feedback in five steps
Feedback management consists of several steps, including gathering, organizing, analyzing, taking action, and closing the feedback loop.
Gathering Feedback
Gather feedback across all channels—surveys, live chats, social networks. It is necessary to use customer feedback software to centralize all received information. For example, G2 is such a great tool.
Organizing Feedback
Put all feedback into certain categories—bugs, feature requests, and general satisfaction level. Don’t combine quantitative feedback with qualitative feedback. Quantitative refers to scores, whereas qualitative refers to open-ended questions. Such categorization will allow you to manage the feedback better.
Analysis and Insights Extraction
Use some analysis tools to identify the recurring issues in feedback. If many users face the same problem with a certain feature, you should change it. Here, automation may help you, as the AI-driven system detects negative opinions and identifies which feedback is critical.
Acting on Feedback
Action should be taken fast. Don’t simply gather feedback,k but show the clients that you hear their needs by implementing some improvements and informing them about the actions you take.
Quick fixes are especially important to improve the clients’ satisfaction quickly.
Closing the Feedback Loop
Always follow up. Let clients know what measures were taken based on their opinions. For example, inform them about introducing a new feature that they had asked for.
This approach turns feedback into a cycle of improvements.
Conclusion
Customer feedback management isn’t about collecting opinions anymore. Today, companies turn feedback into valuable insights by analyzing opinions, making changes, and keeping improving the services and products according to customer expectations.
By using various channels to collect feedback, organizing it, acting upon it, and closing the feedback loop, businesses develop a culture of continuous improvement and improve customer experience, loyalty, and relations with customers.
