How to track and manage customer feedback is a challenge many organizations encounter daily. This is especially true when dealing with massive feedback from many digital sources and multiple channels.
This process may overwhelm you—unless your customer feedback management process is effective, that is.
In this article, we’ll help you understand what it is, how it functions, and why it’s essential to the development of your business.
Keep reading.
Why is it important to learn how to track and manage customer feedback?
You might wonder why it’s important to your company to learn how to track and manage customer feedback. What advantages does tracking and managing customer feedback offer?
Well, for one, loyal customers expand a company quicker than sales or marketing.
We’ll never learn what influences the customer journey to happiness if we don’t get feedback and identify patterns from customers. Building customer retention and loyalty won’t be possible if we don’t understand what motivates them.
And to prove it, here are some stats:
- After a 5-star experience, customers are 2.6 times more likely to make larger purchases from a business.
- An excellent customer service experience has a significant positive influence on recommendations for 94% of customers.
- Also, profits can rise by up to 95% when client retention rates rise by just 5%.
- As many as 22% of a company’s clients might be lost with only one bad review, right? Any business would struggle to recover from just four negative reviews, which can turn away 70% of potential clients.
Most companies are continuously looking for ways to identify their customers’ needs. They’re also looking at how to improve customer satisfaction quickly and correctly. Here, the value of client input becomes more important.
Gathering client feedback is crucial for every organization since 52% of people worldwide feel that businesses must act on the feedback given by their consumers.
Here are a few extra benefits of learning how to track and manage customer feedback:
1. Customer feedback enables you to identify your strengths
What draws clients to your business and makes them want to return time and time again? Well, again, you’ll have to ask your customers.
2. Customer feedback also enables you to identify your mistakes
Your product design team, service and support staff, customer success team, and even your sales team can all benefit from this knowledge.
Have there been a lot of product returns or requests for service refunds? Do you have issues with customer churn or general growth?
Your customers will be able to explain to you why.
3. The best copy is the feedback from customers
The most excellent way to connect your homepage or landing page copywriting with what other consumers might be looking for is to use your customers’ comments and feedback.
Excellent content marketing benefits from customer feedback. Customer reviews can be transformed into blog entries, Q & As, and even Knowledge Base articles.
Before you begin customer feedback management, the first step is to get customer feedback. Let’s break down the different customer feedback types before discussing how to achieve them.
The different categories to track and manage customer feedback
Every bit of client input is worthwhile. But, the kind of feedback you gather may change depending on what you hope to learn from your clients.
These six consumer feedback categories are ones you might want to ask about:
1. Customer loyalty metrics
2. Feedback on customer satisfaction
3. Sales feedback
4. Customer service feedback
5. Customer preference comments
6. Demographic data
7. Social media monitoring
1. Customer loyalty metrics
These metrics show how loyal your customers are to your brand and how inclined they are to support it.
Your choice of metrics is crucial to the effectiveness of your program for collecting customer feedback.
You won’t find an “all-purpose” strategy for customer feedback metrics, but a few are popular among many organizations:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) – One of the most well-liked loyalty metrics, NPS is a terrific tool for assessing customer loyalty.
- Customer Effort Score (CES) – It measures how much effort a client must expend to make a purchase, get help, or interact with your business or product in general. This can be either online or in person.
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT) – This is a metric that measures how effectively your website satisfies customer expectations.
- Goal Completion Rate (GCR): These metrics count the number of users who have finished a specific task on your website or mobile app.
We’ll examine a few of these later in the article.
2. Feedback on customer satisfaction
The Customer Satisfaction Score indicates how happy your consumers are with your goods, services, and other brand interactions.
Answers to questions like “How did you use…?” and “How did you feel about…?” are examples of the functional and emotional metrics considered in this kind of feedback.
You can gather it using comment sections, pop-up forms, and post-purchase forms.
3. Sales feedback
Customers can express their feelings about their interactions with your sales staff and the entire sales process by providing sales feedback.
Improvement of sales representatives, training, and leadership, and a stronger connection with your leads and prospects, depend on this kind of feedback.
Take direct, post-purchase phone or email surveys to collect customer feedback like this, and follow up with prospects who didn’t clinch the deal.
4. Feedback from customer service or support
Similar to sales feedback, customer service or support feedback looks at a customer’s interaction with a service or support representative.
It’s essential to enhance customer service and support. Plus, it may offer your product teams insightful feedback on negative feedback, design, functionality, and use cases.
You can follow up on customer support tickets with phone or email surveys to get this kind of feedback.
5. Client preference comments
Feedback on client preferences only reveals which goods or services—yours or those of your rivals—they prefer. Understanding how to effectively position your products and target your clients with this information is helpful.
The good thing is that you can collect this kind of input by checking discussion boards online. You can even conduct focus groups and keep an eye on trends and buying behavior.
6. Demographic data
While you might not think of demographic data (such as geographic area) as feedback, this information can be crucial for enhancing your business’s sales.
Also, it might influence customer service and how you position and market your products. Location, gender, education level, marital status, and other demographic details are important.
Use online pop-up forms to collect this data. You can also use post-service or post-purchase surveys.
7. Social media monitoring
In addition to collecting data from Net Promoter Score (NPS) and CSAT surveys, you can learn more about what your customers honestly think of you using tools like Google Alerts or Mention.
They assist you in finding forums and social mentions about your brand on websites like TripAdvisor, Yelp, Quora, Facebook, Twitter, and other independent review sites.
Let’s now discuss leveraging the customer feedback loop to gather customer input.
Track and manage customer feedback using the ACAF Customer Feedback Loop
The ACAF Customer Feedback Loop is a tactical approach for obtaining and putting into practice customer feedback.
This approach has four stages, starting with collecting feedback and ending with closing the feedback loop. Let’s define these phases and the actions taken in each of them.
- Ask
- Categorize
- Act
- Follow Up
Image courtesy of: www.zonkafeedback.com
1. Ask
Collecting customer feedback is the primary goal of this stage, and feedback surveys are the best way to collect them.
Simply ask the clients their opinions about your goods and services and their interactions with your business at this point.
For this step, surveys are developed and distributed to clients via email, SMS, websites, kiosks, and other channels. You can also ask customers for comments when they visit your location.
For this purpose, you can conduct surveys using devices like iPhones, iPads, Android tablets, and smartphones. You can even place these devices in unattended kiosks at your location.
2. Categorize
This phase concentrates on segmenting the clients or the feedback information based on numerous factors.
The responders can also be divided according to the issues they have voiced:
Common issues
This includes respondents who brought up the same common issues in this area.
For instance, if you work in the SaaS sector, clients may frequently complain about poor internet signals at a specific time of day or in certain weather conditions.
Personal issues
In this section, you can list respondents who had problems with specific items. These include getting a damaged product or waiting too long for delivery.
Arguing with a customer care representative and receiving food that wasn’t fresh also form part of this section.
3. Act
The actual process of closing the feedback loop takes place at this crucial point. Here, you must now respond to the input that you collected. The following are some of the things you can do:
- Thank the complimentary responders who thought well of you. Assure them that you’ll keep giving them a fantastic customer experience.
- After expressing gratitude to the respondents who provided an average rating, find out what you can do to make their experience even more enjoyable.
- Express your regret to the respondents who gave you negative feedback about their unpleasant experiences. Find out what went wrong by asking them.
- As soon as you learn about your consumers’ problems and worries, promise them that you will respond appropriately and promptly.
- Try to estimate the time and date when you will be able to correct the problem.
- Work on the concerns that the customers have raised. Inform them of the status of the issue resolution procedure.
- Take the steps necessary to increase customer satisfaction, such as exchanging a product, offering a replacement in the form of a gift or free service, returning a product, etc.
4. Follow up
Following up with your customers is as vital as acting on client feedback. Customers need to be aware of the improvements you are making for them.
As a result, you must let your clients know what actions you are taking—or have already taken—to enhance their customer experience.
Additionally, follow up with your clients to find out if they are happy with the results of your actions.
Second, imagine that after receiving some feedback from clients, you decide to change something about your company or make decisions based on their suggestions.
It is always a good idea to inform your clients of this. And let’s face it, your clients will be incredibly flattered to know that you’re changing something based on their feedback.
Best practices to track and manage customer feedback loop
Here are a few best practices for building an effective customer feedback loop as you develop your customer feedback strategy.
1. Make sure you are reaching your clients through the appropriate channels
Ensuring you are meeting your clients where they are is crucial. After all, unless your customers are avid social media users, you won’t get much insightful feedback if you do your surveys on social media.
Find out which platforms your customers visit most often, and use that information to guide your customer feedback process.
2. Use customer feedback to improve your service or product
We’ve mentioned this before, and we can’t stress it enough! It’s crucial to follow through on client feedback when you receive it.
Customers want to know that businesses care about what they have to say and are willing to make the necessary adjustments to satisfy them.
3. Quickly put adjustments into action
Try to take care of the low-hanging fruit as soon as possible (such as outdated knowledge-based content or broken links on your website).
When feasible, be specific about the timeframe of any significant changes you plan to make (such as upgrades to products or new services).
The different types of customer feedback
Proactive feedback and reactive feedback are the two main categories you can use to classify customer feedback.
Information you gathered from your users proactively, such as by sending them a real-time survey, is known as “proactive feedback”.
On the other hand, the information a user submits voluntarily, such as feature requests or bug reports, is referred to as “reactive feedback.”
1. Reactive customer feedback
Any uninvited feedback from customers is considered reactive customer feedback.
This kind of feedback often falls into one of three categories: new feature requests, customer requests for enhancements to current ones, or reports of broken features.
This includes suggestions for new features, comments made via live chat, issue reports, and app store or other third-party website evaluations.
Here, you gather feedback on general feelings, such as when someone is dissatisfied with your goods, but this usually happens only after you ask your clients for their opinions.
Reactive feedback is crucial, but you also need to consider the context in which it was given.
This kind of uninvited input might offer insights that are worth exploring or acting upon. But it should be verified in a broader context before being considered.
Neither a demand from a particularly powerful salesperson nor your CEO’s most recent concept should dictate your product roadmap. You still need to carefully consider them.
For sure, but you must also verify these inputs using proactive feedback-gathering techniques. We’ll discuss these shortly.
To put it another way, you should never overreact to a single piece of criticism, especially if it comes from an unexpected source.
2. Proactive customer feedback
Proactive customer feedback is when you actively seek input from your users and customers rather than waiting for them to contact you.
Although several proactive strategies exist, user interviews, usability testing, focus groups, and customer surveys are the most prevalent and readily available.
a. Net promoter score (NPS)
NPS is frequently used to assess how your customers perceive your business in general (“How likely are you to recommend this product to a friend?”).
It can be a quick and inexpensive approach to gauge client happiness with your product, even though it may not be the ideal metric for gauging a product’s performance.
While you won’t get detailed information about precisely what your customers are happy with and what they feel is lacking, this lets you get a pulse check on overall customer happiness with your product.
b. In-app surveys
One of the simplest, quickest, and most organic ways to proactively collect feedback is through in-app surveys. Send a survey to users who have just finished exploring your new feature and ask them what they think of it.
It’s convenient because the customer doesn’t have to leave your product to give their opinions. And the experience will still be fresh in their minds, allowing you to collect accurate analytics.
It’s vital to remember that timing is everything when it comes to in-app surveys. You shouldn’t send an NPS survey or a 60-day check-in survey to a customer who is having trouble using your product or who has only been a customer for 30 days.
Getting the most accurate and valuable results from in-app surveys depends on getting the timing right.
c. Customer interviews
Most teams will interview customers as part of their plan to collect customer feedback at some point.
A more open-ended approach, such as an interview, allows the client to elaborate on issues they cannot address through multiple channels.
This format frequently enables a more thorough process. It can range from the product’s overall value to specific comments on certain product characteristics.
Whether they are done online or in person, interviews might be pretty challenging. This sort of feedback gathering is not the most scalable method.
It might take a lot of time to get feedback from the product team and the people who participate in the interviews. So, collecting enough data points is challenging to guarantee that the feedback is representative of your entire user base.
d. Focus groups
Focus groups are a larger-scale method of gathering input than interviews.
For early-stage businesses, they are likely to consist of people who reflect their ideal customer profile (ICP). Existing consumers, frequently their highest-paying or VIP customers, may make up the focus groups for larger organizations.
Focus groups allow for more depth. The opportunity to have a face-to-face chat (even if it’s over virtual video conferencing) can enable more relevant questions. You can also get immediate clarification on some topics.
Note, however, that you can only have a certain number of participants in focus groups. Plus, they may be costly and time-consuming.
So, asynchronous feedback collection methods, like in-app surveys, will allow you to reach a larger audience. But you’ll probably obtain more insightful input through in-person methods like focus groups or user interviews.
e. Usability tests
When testing usability, you’ll want to watch the user complete a preset series of tasks to assess how easily they can navigate them.
Usability tests can offer valuable insights into the precise ways in which users are interacting with your product, even though they are not as scalable as things like surveys.
Like focus groups and consumer interviews, usability testing can be expensive and time-consuming. But they’re a fantastic way to test new functionality in action to see how users receive it in real-time.
How to thank customers for their feedback
Given how customers spend their valuable time responding to your inquiries, expressing gratitude to new and existing customers will make them feel appreciated and inspired to participate in future activities.
There are two ways you can thank customers for their feedback:
- Tangible benefits: These benefits consist of any reward with monetary value, such as vouchers, discount coupons, ebooks, audiobooks, free access to content typically purchased, online courses, or webinars.
- Intangible incentives: Unlike the prizes above, these rewards don’t necessarily have monetary worth. When only a particular group of customers (focus groups) is requested to participate in a study, these kinds of acknowledgments convey a feeling of influence, gratify curiosity, or give a sense of distinctiveness.
Regardless of how you answer the customer interviews, be sure to thank them for a job well done. Don’t forget about tailored responses. Sharing your survey results with respondents is another smart move.
Tools to track and manage customer feedback
A software solution that assists organizations in gathering, measuring, and analyzing customer feedback is helpful for companies to base choices on feedback and statistics.
We have assembled the most excellent customer feedback mechanisms and tools available to provide you with the precise information you require. Here’s to more client feedback and improved service!
1. AskNicely
The AskNicely platform gauges NPS, the industry benchmark for measuring loyalty and forecasting growth. Additionally, AskNicely is capable of doing this with just one inquiry.
2. CustomerSure
CustomerSure provides real-time, actionable insights that aid the company’s growth.
The most attractive feature of this customer feedback app is how it puts equal emphasis on gauging satisfaction and making it simple for you to make improvements.
Pricing starts at €199/month.
3. InMoment
InMoment actively encourages users to post online reviews. These include customer feedback, outreach, analytics, and employee involvement.
This tool offers multi-location support and provides incredibly detailed data. Customer feedback is gathered using video, voice, text, and active listening.
4. Podium
Podium is a technology that effectively collects all evaluations, comments, and communications in one location.
It enables companies to proactively request online reviews, which may lead to increased sales. Additionally, small businesses find it incredibly simple to manage their entire internet reputation from one location thanks to the aggregate dashboard.
Pricing starts at $289/month.
5. SurveyMonkey
A very secure, encrypted survey platform, SurveyMonkey has a ton of survey tools where you can gain insights into what your customers think.
This product feedback program may meet almost all survey needs because it has flexible and collaborative features. Pricing starts at $31/month.
6. SurveySparrow
SurveySparrow is one of the top product feedback platforms on the market.
Its conversational interface guarantees 40% more responses than any other product feedback tool in the market. Pricing starts at $19/month, billed annually.
7. Typeform
Thanks to its straightforward and appealing survey solutions, Typeform is a well-known and highly user-friendly tool for collecting feedback.
Many users enjoy its interactive, “one question at a time” format of survey experiences. Pricing starts at $29/month.
8. UseResponse
Customer service software frequently provides more than just product and customer feedback. For instance, UseResponse runs a help desk and offers customer service across all available channels.
Additionally, access to a live chat client is available in addition to UseResponse’s community forum and feedback system.
9. UserReport
UserReport is built around two straightforward tools: a feedback forum and a survey tool. It runs as an integrated component of your website or app, enabling you to have direct engagement with your consumers.
You can learn about who they are, what they are looking for, and how you can improve. UserReport offers Google Analytics integration, and it’s very easy to use.
Final thoughts on how to track and manage customer feedback
It is more essential than ever to create a customer-centric culture and pay attention to consumer input.
Here are some steps you can take to maximize the value of your customers’ opinions for your company:
- Recognize the type of feedback you value the most.
- Establish a procedure for gathering such market voices.
- Gather and classify user input.
- Conduct data analysis to thoroughly understand client opinions and trends.
- Make use of the data acquired to help your business succeed.
Finally, select the top customer feedback management program to automate and professionally handle your tasks. Use qualitative feedback to raise customer happiness. Remember, customer success is crucial to business expansion.