Best Practices of Collecting Customer Feedback

Feedback forms and customer surveys have been around for decades — first in physical form and nowadays digitally — yet, many customers show a rather adverse reaction to participate and perceive it as a waste of their time to provide feedback which companies rarely follow up on or act upon. Digital transformation is about to change this! Trailblazers in the digital arena regularly excel at interacting with customers and users in a highly personalized manner through digital channels and feeding inputs and reactions straight to the product and operations teams, where short development and decision cycles allow for fast reactions. Many digital products not only utilize feedback which has been actively requested, but make voicing users’ opinions an integral part of the product experience. Imagine what Uber would be without it’s post-ride rating system and what Amazon, Yelp, and TripAdvisor would be without their user reviews.

Customer feedback management is a process of requesting and managing your customer feedback.

Here are the benefits of managing your customer feedback efficiently.

  • Improves products and services
  • Helps in new product design
  • Enhances customer relationships 

Collecting feedback is not difficult but there are some principal rules that apply to all feedback channels. Following best practices of collecting feedback will maximize not only the amount of feedback you collect but also its usefulness.

What is Customer Feedback Management?

Customer feedback management (CFM) is the process of integrating and leveraging feedback collected from multiple channels to make your product or service better. CFM breaks your overall feedback management into actionable insights, thereby helping you streamline your efforts.

Why is Customer Feedback Management Important?

Customer feedback is not just a damage-control mechanism. It is a valuable resource that helps you align your improvement efforts and user experience to get the desired outcome. But feedback means little by itself. You need to attach a clear action item to your customer feedback to drive progress. Customer feedback management is the process by which you can collect, organize, and implement the feedback you received. Having a customer feedback strategy is essential if you survey a lot of customers and often. Start with these 5 best practices for customer feedback management.

#1. Define a goal before starting collecting feedback

Some people make the mistake of jumping into collecting feedback with no clear goal. They just set tools up and see what they can find out. It’s not the best choice. You should define a goal first. It will lead you to choose the right technique and then the right tool. Example: If you want to find out how people assess your new website, you should probably choose website surveys. But if you want to discover what people are saying about your competitors on social media, you should choose social media monitoring.

#2. Choose the right technique

As mentioned above, the goal of collecting feedback influences the choice of a technique. Also, take into account your resources. If all members of your team are already working overtime, then you should look for a tool that requires as little effort to set up and handle as possible. In this is the case and you want to collect feedback on your website, then you should probably choose a website survey tool rather than live chat which requires constant attention and spare capacity.

#3. Make analyzing collected feedback a part of your routine

Feedback tools provide you with the most value when you regularly assess results, look for improvements, create new surveys, etc. Depending on the size of your company and the amount of feedback you collect, you might be able to spot trends in a matter of days after launching the survey. Making analyzing results a part of your weekly routine will help you make the most of collecting feedback.

#4. Experiment

Don’t be afraid to experiment. For example: if you’re using social media monitoring, try changing keywords from time to time. When you’re using website surveys, try different questions, and targeting options. Decided to use live chat? Then try different targeting settings and pre-defined messages. Experimenting will help you improve achieved results and research different issues.

#5. Turn conclusions into decisions

Analyzing feedback is also not enough. Draw conclusions and turn them into decisions regarding your offer, marketing communication, or website design. Then analyze feedback to track how people assess the results of those decisions. This iterative process will provide you with the best results possible.

Conclusion

Finally, do more than thank your customers for feedback. Trade templates for personalized acknowledgment messages every time your customers give feedback. Update the progress. And most importantly, act on the feedback for greater customer success. 

Customer feedback will provide you with the necessary information on how to improve your services by giving your users exactly what they wanted. Depending on your business, be it a college auxiliary service, an event planner, or a theme park administrator, knowing what your customers think about your services is information worth having.

Companies that have been pursuing rather traditional (non-digital) business models are beginning to act and shape their customer relationships in similar manners. Talking to multiple clients and industry professionals, we see a significant desire to leverage the voice of the customer in not only improving instantaneous customer service, but also in the long-term development of products and service offerings. Listening to our own customers, we have heard loud and clear that there is a need for a comprehensive playbook of best practices, which firms can leverage to improve customer feedback management. Like any good author talking on a late night show about their new book, we have selected some highlights to share. For more information on the playbook of customer feedback management and the learnings from industry best practices, feel free to contact us at KBI Marketing.

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