A Beginner’s Guide To Customer Feedback Management

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The present business environment requires companies to manage unsecure supply chains, numerous communication channels, and demanding and vocal customers to keep up with the competition. It’s not enough just to produce a fantastic product or service. Businesses should also consider the experience for customers.

A personalized and responsive customer experience is a top priority for 88% of businesses. It is logical, considering that 96% of customers say they’ll discontinue dealing with a business after a bad experience.

Companies must improve customer experience to reduce friction points, churn and increase sales and customer satisfaction. It involves being aware of your customer’s preferences, complaints, and experiences to help you determine areas of improvement and assign the proper resources to make positive changes.

Companies must use customer feedback management (CFM) to gather the data needed to improve customer service, and companies must use customer feedback management (CFM).

CFM allows companies to actively collect information about their customer’s experiences, needs and suggestions, which can be utilized to improve the delivery of services, enhance the quality of products and services, and increase customer satisfaction.

With the help of customer feedback software and the best practices for gathering and analyzing various types of feedback from customers, companies can be positioned to keep more customers and increase their current customers’ loyalty.

Table of Contents

What is Customer Feedback Management?

Customer feedback management(CFM) refers to gathering customer feedback through multiple sources to help guide company decisions and improve customer satisfaction.

At its heart, CFM is a customer-centred approach to business. CFM uses customer feedback to provide the most enjoyable customer experience and products.

It’s useful to imagine the management of customer feedback as a loop, which comprises these steps

Request feedback from customers
Categorize: Sort feedback into distinct groups
Act: communicate feedback to appropriate parties and come up with solutions
Follow-up: keep in touch with your customers to assess the effectiveness of your efforts.

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In each step of the feedback loop for customers, companies use feedback from customers’ tools and software to help them collect information, analyze, organize and take action on feedback to bring about meaningful changes.

The kind of feedback we receive from customers is divided into two distinct categories: direct feedback and indirectly based feedback. Both of these will be talked about in the next section.

Types of Customer Feedback

Direct feedback from customers is derived directly from the explicit requests you provide to customers, such as completing surveys following purchase or submitting reviews. Feedback from indirect sources is provided but is not requested, such as comments on social media, posts on the internet or even product returns.

Other forms of customer feedback are:

Sales of products or services
Support tickets
Bug reports and technical issues
For product or service walkthroughs
Customer complaints
Suggestions

By analyzing the feedback from CFM, businesses can pinpoint their most valuable customers, improve their processes for revenue growth and build stronger connections among their brands and customers.

Customer feedback management aims to identify ways to make customers happy and transform negative experiences into opportunities to engage customers positively. For instance, 95% of people say they’re willing to cooperate with a company following an unpleasant experience if the complaints are resolved.

The Difference Between a Customer Complaint and Customer Feedback

Before we start to the next step, let’s take a minute to distinguish a complaint by a client and customer feedback.

The major difference between the two is the time and how information is communicated.

A complaint is presented following a customer experience and is only negative. Feedback can also be sought out before or during the customer experience. Feedback can be good, bad or neutral, based on the context.

Problems with the product or service trigger customer complaints, the lack of empathy displayed in interactions with support personnel, or insufficient or delayed response to requests for reviews or help. However, customer feedback could include praise and suggestions for improvement to the product or feedback about the quality of a customer service encounter.

Businesses must be alert to the power of complaints since angry consumers are louder than happy ones. Customers who had a negative experience with a company or its representative are twice as likely to tell people than those with an excellent experience.

The unfortunate reality is that the majority of complaints from customers do not get reported. It means that public complaints are just the tip of the Iceberg. That means that the majority of negative interactions are not on the radar of a company, which could delay finding solutions and increase churn as well as loss of revenue.

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Managing customer feedback is intended to minimize the number of complaints and ensure that complaints are handled promptly and effectively. With this approach, companies can limit the harm inflicted on their brand reputation through unhappy customers and discover ways to turn negative feedback into creative solutions.

Why is Customer Feedback Management Important?

Customer feedback management confers multiple benefits, including:

Reducing churn
More revenue
New products and services
Stronger customer relationships
Data about the most important customer groups

While it is beneficial to get new customers, there’s the same value in retaining current customers. Attracting new customers costs 5 to 25 times more than keeping existing customers happy. Additionally, even a small 5 % increase in retention rates can boost profits by 25% to 95.

In addition, managing customer feedback is essential to let customers feel that you are concerned about their satisfaction. Customers leave companies for various reasons, but 68 % of consumers say they quit because they believe a business does not care about their needs.

Companies who take the time to hear customer feedback and make changes based on this information demonstrate their commitment to establishing solid customer relationships. Despite a bad encounter, 83% of customers are more loyal to brands that address and resolve their issues.

Through CFM, companies can benefit from valuable information to improve their products and services to provide customers with a better experience. If used properly, businesses can use this information to beat their competition and make more money at a lower cost than solely focusing on finding new customers.

Customer Feedback Management Channels

No matter your industry, there are various methods to get customer feedback to enhance the customer experience.

Some of the most commonly used methods of managing customer feedback are:

Focus groups
Customer interviews
Surveys
NSA
Third-party reviews
Email
Live chat
Text
Social media

Traditionally focus groups, as well as customer interviews, were the mainstays of the majority of CFM initiatives. Focus groups provide companies crucial information regarding a specific segment’s brand, product or customer reviews. In the same way, customer interviews give details about a particular customer’s experiences with a firm.

Customer feedback software utilizes in-app surveys and net promoter scores (NPS) surveys, making it simple and affordable for businesses to automate CFM.

While in-app surveys provide insights into a specific experience, NPS surveys are critical in helping companies know how customers feel regarding their company. While different programs score their results differently, all NPS surveys gauge customer loyalty to a particular brand.

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Text, live chat, and email are the most personal, popular and effective customer feedback management tools for managing customer feedback.

With the rapid digitalization of customer service, customers need to be able to contact businesses swiftly and efficiently when an issue occurs. Automating responses and personalizing messages can give more interactive feedback to customers and increase the probability of obtaining important information.

Social media and third-party reviews websites serve as community forums where people can voice their displeasures and talk about their top brands. The majority of 51.7% of customers expect companies to respond to their concerns within seven days. Making sure to be active on various platforms can assist businesses in meeting the expectations of their customers regarding service.

Customer Feedback Management Software

As we mentioned earlier, the software for managing customer feedback can help you automate the collection of feedback and aggregate feedback. It also helps you analyze metrics and make decisions based on the data. Below, we’ll suggest top-quality software tools.

Service Hub

HubSpot’s Service Hub includes a tool for customer feedback, which helps you comprehend the perception of your customers and identify opportunities to take steps to satisfy your audience.

Survicate

Survicate lets you connect with customers in the areas where they are most engaged. It also helps you gather feedback to help you assess their level of satisfaction with your company. It also lets you examine data from this platform and then take concrete actions to improve your customer experience.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey lets you design and distribute surveys to different aspects of your company (products, customer loyalty, interactions with service, etc.) to learn more about customer satisfaction.

5 Customer Feedback Management Best Practices

Identify Objectives

Before companies start collecting customer feedback, it is important to determine what data they want to collect.

Gathering the most feedback across various subjects is tempting, but it isn’t a good idea. If your feedback requests aren’t specific and focused, you’ll end up with a random set of customer information that won’t permit you to discern patterns.

Read more: Essential Parts of a Website.

Effectively managed CFM programs can help businesses detect patterns of product faults and customer service issues, and a lack of satisfaction. This information assists CX teams in developing a plan which outlines the areas where there are issues in the supply, use and customer service of your services and products.

Choose the information you want to gather for the customer’s overall experience, interaction, product, or service. Ask for feedback, and customize the process to suit your goals.

In time, more customer feedback can be used to refine goals and ensure they align with your company’s goals.

Gather Feedback Using Multiple Channels

If you’re a consumer or business, there’s nothing as a single size that fits all. It is also true for managing customer feedback since no single type of customer feedback will be sufficient to gather all the information needed to make informed changes to your CX design.

From interviews, in-app surveys, and emails to NPS, Businesses have many choices to select from when creating a complete CFM program. Businesses can get more information through channels tailored to gather specific data types than using only one channel.

It’s also better to customize several channels to perform certain tasks rather than try to modify the same channel to fulfil each goal.

Now, deploying different channels to gather and respond to customer feedback is no longer merely a nicety but a necessity for all businesses aspiring to become online. Remember that 90% of consumers want companies to ensure regular interactions across different channels.

Sort Feedback into Categories

There is a variety of feedback, from service and product reviews to feedback from support that describes a particular event or interaction. The challenge is to analyze all of these data simultaneously is a guaranteed chance to slow your CFM process and not be able to implement meaningful changes.

When companies are soliciting customer feedback, the next step needs to be to arrange the feedback into relevant categories. Organizations can review the data by separating feedback into categories and see which patterns appear.

As a rule, companies should not mix qualitative and quantitative data. However, there are instances when quantitative data could help clarify qualitative data or fill in holes in the CX narrative.

Act Upon Customer Feedback

The purpose of collecting customer feedback is to be useless without doing anything with it. It’s not sensible collecting feedback to put it aside to be used on a rainy day. You will not only waste time and money to collect the information, but your customers will also be left wondering if you care about them.

Prioritize addressing the most important issues affecting your user experience and bottom revenue. From there, you’ll be able to take on the more common but less important concerns aired by most customers.

If possible, seek the opportunity to make fast minor changes to ease the current pain points to help you win wins. Rapid and prompt response lets your clients know that you’re a responsive company to feedback from them and that you take their concerns seriously.

Track and Follow-up on Results

If you’ve implemented the CFM program and you’re responding to feedback to make modifications to your business isn’t a guarantee that your work is complete. Remember the customer feedback loop that was mentioned earlier. CFM is a continuous process that could lead to massive changes in the way the business of a company is conducted.

The destruction process through creativity continues, and companies constantly seeking ways to improve their products and services and respond to customers’ needs tend to stay around for more than one business cycle.

Once implementing feedback from customers to improve services and products or improve customer service, companies must monitor their customers’ responses to observe their reactions to these changes. The personalized responses show an organization’s commitment to this CFM process and allow businesses to get more feedback.

Depending on the outcome, businesses may have to make additional adjustments or establish new goals for CFM. Depending on the response, companies may need to make further adjustments or identify new problems CFM processes to resolve. It is essential to be open to feedback from new sources to ensure that the cycle of innovation and growth runs at its highest level.

3 Examples of Customer Feedback Management

Uber

Uber, a ride-sharing service Uber has implemented measurement-based feedback for customers as an integral part of its CX design.

Users can participate in in-app surveys after every journey to rate their drivers between 1 and 5 stars. They can also select from various categories to justify the reasons. If a driver has gone far beyond the call of duty to provide an outstanding service to their customers, they are encouraged to leave specific praise for the service of the driver, their manner or even how they navigate.

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While it’s not a lot, Uber’s CFM process lets it detect and swiftly correct drivers in trouble. It allows Uber to keep the high quality of its driver database and decrease the chance that users have unsatisfactory experiences.

Zappos

The e-commerce giant Zappos is well-known for its prompt and dependable customer service. The shoe retailer online allows customers to connect with customers via all-hours chat and telephone service easily.

By keeping several channels of communication open all hours of the day, Zappos can ensure that they can stop problems early before they become major complaints. It allows the retailer to stand out from its rivals by giving customers a pleasant customer experience.

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In contrast to other companies that only respond to customers’ concerns, Zappos is proactive in its efforts to offer top-quality customer service. The company’s policy of free delivery and returns for 365 days proves the company’s willingness to experiment by incorporating customer feedback, which has resulted in the company having an ardent following, even in the highly competitive online retail market.

Apple

Few companies have taken the development of their products and services more seriously than Apple. Over time Apple has built an ardent fan base mostly because it understands the needs of its customers.

Apple consistently ranks top in satisfaction surveys with customers because it has earned a reputation for always looking for and utilizing customer feedback. After each sale, Apple sends the buyer an email with feedback on the purchase.

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In addition, Apple relies on NPS surveys to gauge customers’ satisfaction concerning its products, services, and in-store and online experience. Apple then uses these scores to create the features of its new products to appeal to the broadest range of consumers, drive further sales, and increase brand loyalty.

How to Get Started Using Customer Feedback Management

Customer feedback management is as much a method as it is a complete approach to business.

Businesses that successfully implement the CFM program commit themselves to providing a superior customer experience. They also prepare themselves for future innovation thanks to the cycle of the customer feedback loop.

To begin implementing CFM, companies must get each employee on board. CFM is a requirement for the company’s culture to be customer-focused and customer-oriented, which means acceptance from everyone from the CEO to the customer support personnel who answer live chats, telephones and emails.

Then, they can incorporate CFM into the CX design and develop an outline of what they want to achieve. With the help of software for customer feedback, firms can automate specific tasks and collect important quantitative and qualitative information to help them understand patterns and pinpoint the most common issues.

At this point, the only thing left to do is ensure that you take action on the feedback and follow up to determine if the reaction was enough.

CFM is an essential element in building a culture of work based on customer feedback. A well-designed CFM process can be important in losing your customer’s competitors and preparing your company for a long and successful future.