Almost 96% of customers believe that customer service is a key aspect in determining their loyalty towards a brand.
Customer feedback is extremely useful for revealing problems or weaknesses in a business.
With the right techniques to gather, manage, and utilize customer feedback, firms can save time, enhance the accuracy of their data, and handle that data more efficiently.
Why Is Customer Feedback Management Important?
Not merely a damage-control system, customer feedback management is valuable for aligning your improvement strategies and user experience to the desired level. But the procurement of feedback is only a part of the process. To allow customers to extensively engage with your business, you must take actionable steps on the shortcomings depicted by the feedback collected.
Having a customer feedback strategy within your marketing pipeline is vital. Start with these seven effective practices for efficient customer feedback management.
1. Define Your Objectives
Starting out with predefined objectives collected at the beginning of your feedback process can help determine important business decisions.
While there are various types of tools available in the market to acquire customer feedback. Many of these tools can lead to collecting massive amounts of customer data with no clear message, leading your support agents to skim through all of these data sets and miss important details.
Instead, start by identifying your goals. You can choose to collect feedback for the vertical that’s most needed – be it the entire customer experience, a certain touchpoint, or new product development.
2. Align Your Feedback Process with Your Objectives
Among customer survey metrics, some standard metrics available for marketers are the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES). You must identify the best-suited metric that aligns with your company’s goals and objectives.
Customer Loyalty and Retention –
NPS is a comprehensive predictive analysis, informing you how likely customers would recommend your business to other buyers.
Customer Satisfaction –
CSAT is a crumbled approach, depicting the percentage of customers who are satisfied with your firm’s service or a specific department.
Potential Dissatisfaction and Churn –
CES measures the required amount of effort that your customers must apply to get something done.
3. Gather Feedback from Various Channels
Collecting feedback is easier today than ever before. From mobile apps to pop-ups to social media survey forms, you can transform any platform into your feedback channel with simple tools. While in-app surveys point out specific usability issues, website pop-ups help you gauge the overall experience of a customer from your website.
Here’s an example of feedback collected via Instagram stories using a question sticker.
4. Segregate Your Acquired Feedback
A multi-channel feedback survey is resourceful. But it also serves as a medium to set up the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools. The best way to categorize collected feedback from various sources is to segregate them into support and product feedback.
Support Feedback
According to a recent survey, almost 33% of customers dissociate from a brand after having just one bad experience.
Support feedback data can help you to gauge customers’ sentiments and provide relevant solutions through your business to minimize future risks of bad experiences.
Product or User Experience Feedback
Product feedback is further segregated into technical and feature issues.
Technical issues can vary from malfunctions to server issues and serious product bugs. In such scenarios, your product team must respond to the technical issues immediately. This can restrict your customers from accessing important features of your website or products.
Feature issues mainly refer to requests, such as a search query within your blogs or a wishlist functionality on a landing page. Feature requests may not be an urgent affair, but they are highly insightful customer data that you can hardly find anywhere else.
5. React According to Customer Feedback
Dig deeper into customer feedback and be rewarded with actionable insights for your business. The best way to approach them is on the basis of priority and volume. A featured page that depicts product highlights with a 404 error is of higher priority than a popup covering web content. You must address the issues that are preventing users from getting value from your site.
Most companies treat the opportunity of following up with customers who provided feedback as an optional thing. However, sending a follow-up on a certain query or a process will only make the customer feel delighted and important to the organization.
6. Utilize Feedback for Internal Brainstorming
Customers can come up with great ideas for your line of business. Starbucks even houses a ‘submit your idea’ campaign asking their loyal fans to chip in with ideas for improvement and innovation.
Every customer journey is different from the other, and equally important is their feedback.
Rather than focusing on market trends, attention towards every instance of customer feedback can enhance your product or service. In a room full of contradictory visions, customer feedback can provide the much-needed balance to your brainstorming sessions in your organization.
7. Implement a Formal VOC Program
The Voice of the Customer (VOC) program refers to acquiring customer feedback, monitoring its bits and pieces, and implementing solutions actively to achieve business growth. Having a formal VOC program in place will provide the all-important stability and prevent the whole feedback system from getting bamboozled. It applies at every level of an organization, allowing collaboration and active cross-functional participation.
Summing Up
Customer feedback management is a key aspect in the process of expanding businesses. Once you’ve interviewed your customers and drawn insights, you can make small adjustments, solving problems, and serving their demands. This will provide the right direction to your business success, satisfying more users and boosting company sales.
