If you want to deliver truly delightful customer experiences, understanding your customers' needs and preferences is essential.
The best way to understand what your customers want is through feedback.
From collecting feedback using surveys to delving into online communities and using technology for analysis, we’ll uncover the strategies and techniques to boost your customer feedback processes.
Let’s start by defining what customer feedback means.
Customer feedback is the information and opinions that customers share about your product, service, or brand. You can gather various insights from customer feedback.
Collecting feedback is also important because allows you to take the comments and use it to improve processes. It also helps build trust by showing customers that you’ve taken their feedback and done something about it. This is especially important when it comes to negative feedback.
Customer feedback can:
There are two primary types of customer feedback: solicited and unsolicited.
When collecting solicited feedback, you actively seek customers’ opinions. You can collect feedback via surveys, questionnaires, or feedback forms. Solicited feedback allows you to focus on specific aspects of your offering or service.
Unsolicited feedback, on the other hand, is unplanned and is shared by customers unprompted. You’ll find this type of feedback in social media posts, online reviews, and interactions with your support team.
There are multiple ways to gather customer feedback, understanding the different methods and following best practices will ensure a smooth collection process. Here we’ll explore the different options available to you.
Satisfaction surveys and questionnaires are classic feedback for soliciting structured feedback.
Social media and review sites contain a wealth of unsolicited feedback. Here, you’ll often find customers giving unfiltered feedback on their positive and negative customer experiences.
Conversations through emails, live chats, and support tickets can provide you with nuanced insights into your customers’ individual experiences.
In your journey to gather feedback effectively, you might be working with multiple channels such as email, live chat, SMS, social media, and telephone. This can easily get complex.
An omnichannel contact center lets you engage with customers via multiple interconnected channels.
Using an omnichannel contact center like uContact, you can automate sending customer satisfaction surveys after each interaction, regardless of the channel. You can create a customized report with all the data in one place, making it easy to analyze data from different sources.
Online communities are dynamic spaces where customers come together to engage in discussions. These are spaces where you can join, observe, participate, and facilitate conversations to obtain deeper insights from customers and prospects.
As a brand, you may have forums, knowledge bases, or learning academies already on your website. If so, take advantage. (Don’t worry if you don’t have these resources in place. You can still gather valuable feedback through the various feedback methods outlined above.)
By analyzing the discussions, questions, and shared solutions, you can gain insights into common challenges and interests.
Feedback from your customers will help you refine your offering, support, and overall customer experience.
To effectively gather customer feedback, you can employ a variety of methods, including surveys, social media, online reviews, support interactions, and online communities.
Here are three effective techniques for gathering audience insights:
Consider organizing a virtual workshop where customers can share their thoughts on your products and services.
Suppose you’ve launched a new app. You can use feedback events to get comments related to your app's features. Using this method, you can guide discussions, receive immediate feedback, and better understand pain points.
Take to your company's X account (formerly Twitter) or Instagram stories to poll your followers and customers
For instance, you could ask users their favorite feature in your latest software update. This approach not only encourages engagement but also provides a snapshot of popular preferences.
Pro Tip: Instagram survey and poll interactions are valuable signals for the platform's algorithm. By encouraging this interaction, you can help your page gain greater visibility.
Integrate a short survey within your mobile or web applications. You can prompt users for feedback after they've completed a purchase or a task.
For example, an e-commerce app could ask customers to rate their recent shopping experience after a purchase. Customers may be more likely to offer suggestions or comments while the experience is still fresh in their minds.
Active listening is more than just hearing words; it's about understanding your customers' message.
For feedback delivered face to face, over video conference, or by telephone, focus on being present and in the moment. Give your undivided attention to what's being said.
Active listening is more than just hearing words; it's about understanding your customers' message.
For feedback delivered face to face, over video conference, or by telephone, focus on being present and in the moment. Give your undivided attention to what's being said.
Here are some best practices for active listening:
Remember that you're not trying to defend your product or your organization's decisions. Rather you are there to collect and absorb as much information from your customers as possible.
You might be wondering, what does empathy have to do with analysis? Having an empathetic perspective can help you uncover insights that aren't explicitly stated.
For example, suppose a customer gives this feedback: “I’m having trouble with the new update. It’s frustrating and confusing”
A non-empathetic analysis might lead to fixing the issue and offering clearer instructions.
On the other hand, an empathetic analysis prompts you to put yourself in your customers' shoes. You might realize that the customer relied heavily on the previous version and is struggling to adapt. By empathizing, you recognize the emotional impact of the issue. You can then address the technical issue but also consider providing tutorials and guides to ease the transition.
Emotional feedback often contains rich insights. When responding, acknowledge the emotions the customer is expressing. The same applies to both positive and negative emotions.
For example, if a customer expresses frustration due to a technical issue, empathize with their frustration. Assure them that you're working to resolve the problem. The ability to respond with understanding diffuses tension.
Learn More: How to improve customer experience in a contact center
Integrate feedback widgets and pop-ups into your website or app to capture customer opinions while they're still fresh.
For instance, you could employ a pop-up after a customer completes a task, asking them about their experience. These prompts encourage immediate responses and ensure you get feedback at the most opportune time.
Integrate feedback widgets and pop-ups into your website or app to capture customer opinions while they're still fresh.
For instance, you could employ a pop-up after a customer completes a task, asking them about their experience. These prompts encourage immediate responses and ensure you get feedback at the most opportune time.
You can get beyond surface-level feedback with AI-driven sentiment analysis.
These tools can automatically analyze customer comments, reviews, and messages. It helps gauge the emotional tone behind the words. You will gain deeper insights into not only what customer sare saying but how they are feeling.
Web analytics tools provide a wealth of insights into user behavior on your digital platforms. By examining user journeys, click-through rates, and interactions, you can uncover patterns and pain points.
For example, if users frequently abandon their shopping carts on a particular page, it might indicate usability issues that require attention.
Now that we know how to collect customer feedback, it is time to put it to use. By analyzing and interpreting feedback, you can identify trends, address pain points, and drive improvements that align with your customer’s desires. Here we’ll dive into how you can get started.
When reviewing feedback, look for recurring issues, themes, or praise.
These patterns can reveal common pain points, preferred features, or aspects of your product or service that stand out.
For example, you might notice frequent feedback expressing the desire for a specific functionality. This can be an opportunity to improve the product.
Recognizing trends within feedback will help you better understand your customers and make better-informed decisions.
Use monitoring metrics like Net Promoter Score or Customer Effort Score (CES) to help identify patterns in what customers value or struggle with.
Learn More: How To Measure Customer Experience: Tracking Key Metrics
Segmenting feedback into categories helps you organize the information for clearer analysis.
For example, you can put feedback into categories related to processes, agents, or platforms. This feedback can be deemed positive, negative, or neutral based on the sentiment expressed.
This segmentation will simplify your analysis process. Additionally, it will provide a quick overview of customer sentiment and gauge how well your offerings are perceived.
Keeping up to date and responding to negative feedback is vital. Your goal should be to respond as quickly as possible, as delays can often exacerbate the problem.
Keep in mind though, negative feedback should be welcomed. See it as an opportunity to learn and grow. It is inevitable that you will receive negative feedback. But, if you approach it with openness and curiosity, you will gain a better understanding of what your customers need.
That’s why, at net2phone, when feedback scores fall below a threshold, like a 3 on 5 or less, we reach out to the customer right away to better understand. Customers are often happy to have the conversation and be heard. It helps to diffuse the situation and allows us to address the issue and learn from it.
Where there would be categorical prioritization is if you see many similar reports coming in very quickly. Perhaps this is an outage or other urgent issue. This can be critical to customer satisfaction, so you should focus on addressing this first.
Learn More: Customer Lifetime Value: Why it Matters & How to Measure it
Delving into customer feedback isn't just about gathering information; it's about extracting valuable insights that can help shape business strategies. Once you have mined customer feedback for insights, you can gain the knowledge needed to enhance your offering and even gain an edge over your competitors.
Let's explore how you can extract insights from feedback to drive positive change:
Imagine analyzing feedback and noticing a recurring frustration among customers. Perhaps your e-commerce platform's checkout process is often cited as a problem.
This is a valuable sign pointing to a pain point.
By addressing this issue and simplifying the checkout process, you can enhance the overall customer experience.
Keep in mind, feedback isn’t always explicit. Perhaps you notice that customers aren’t completing transactions or logging off somewhere during the purchase process. This is also feedback.
Suppose you spot consistent praise for your personalized onboarding experience from your customers. This can be either through surveys or through unsolicited feedback that you may find on social media, review sites or other online communities.
This signals a customer delight factor – something that sets your business apart.
By identifying these unique strengths, you can emphasize them in your marketing efforts. You can even build upon them to increase customer satisfaction.
Share glowing reviews with support teams and other departments and try to replicate that customer delight factor going forward.
Finding these points of customer delight will allow you to leverage your strengths and stand out.
Imagine that your customers increasingly start asking for a mobile app version of your web-based service.
This is valuable feedback that gives you an opportunity to innovate.
By listening to these suggestions, you can develop a mobile app that aligns with customer preferences and improve their experience.
Consider comparing your customer feedback with that of your competitors.
Perhaps customers consistently complain about slow response times regarding a competitor's customer support. Now you’re aware of a weakness in their service.
By addressing this area in your own support strategy, you can capitalize on your competitor's shortcomings. You can position your business as a superior alternative.
Learn More: What is customer experience management strategy
By now, it’s evident that customer feedback plays a critical role in customer experience (CX) initiatives. In this section, we explore the advantages (pros) and potential challenges (cons) that businesses encounter when leveraging customer feedback for CX strategies.
Collecting and using customer feedback is a critical part of improving customer experience.
By actively using multiple feedback methods like satisfaction surveys, social media, and online communities, you will be able to understand your customer's preferences and pain points. Use this insight to inform your decision-making and create better products and services.
However, be aware of challenges like feedback overload and biased input. Despite the challenges, customer feedback is a powerful tool to enhance satisfaction, foster loyalty, and drive business growth.
Want to dive deeper into the world of customer experience management? Learn valuable insights and strategies to drive business growth in this comprehensive guide: Customer Experience Management: The Complete Guide