Best Practices for Getting the Most Out of Customer Feedback

Here are a number of steps to consider as to how you can execute your feedback use:

1. Divide feedback into categories: product, customer service and marketing. If you investigate feedback sources—social media, forms, website—you will accumulate a lot of problems and ideas. Of course, the goal is to try and address each one. But with time and resources constraints, that may not be practical, or even possible.

Hence, you want to turn feedback into actionable terms. Take for instance, something like “Your navigation is confusing.” Such an observation could be interpreted as “Simplify site navigation.”

From here, you have to divide everything according to which aspect of the business the feedback applies.

Is it about your product? Or is it the reliability of customer support? What about the marketing tactics—does the customer have any suggestions about them?

This can make it easier for you to prioritize which changes you can immediately start with that will give quick wins, and which ones need to be addressed intermediately. There might even be feedback that can prove to be a game changer for you in the long term.

2. Act on the feedback. This is where you work on the feedback within your team.

First, take one item of actionable feedback and gather input for change from the relevant people: your front-line employees and managers.

Next, set up a plan and test it against your resources. You may even consult with customers at this point to ask if the change is even worth testing.

Create a workflow that relays relevant feedback items to dedicated team members. With this, you can devise a plan and test it in specific intervals where you share updates about the changes with relevant members. This keeps them on track without causing a disruption to your overall operations.

Finally, assess how the testing results fare over a given period of time. Did they achieve your target within your set parameters? Assess with your team (and with customers) how well the goal was achieved.

Customer feedback can drive everything from short programs to business transformation. The important thing is to make sure that you prioritize solutions, and that the right people know about the feedback.

3. Follow up after making some changes. When it comes to feedback, many companies tend to focus too much on the process of collecting and analyzing it in order to satisfy their customers’ demands as soon as possible.

But what many forget about is getting back to customers after the changes or updates have been implemented.

It’s important to close the loop with customers who were part of the feedback process. Indeed, this step is critical because it lets clients know that they are driving change and that their input is actually heard.

For instance, if you gathered feedback about adjusting your return policy, you may want to survey customers about your current policy. After implementing changes within a few months, touch base with them again to learn their sentiments regarding the change.

Be it through personal communication or other channels, you have to thank your customers and find out whether the issue really has been corrected. If you want a faster way to reach customers, connect with them via social media channels, as 95 percent of consumers aged 18-34 are more likely to follow a brand through social media sites.

By doing so, you are adding a human touch to the whole transaction, and that can make a huge difference in engaging your customers for a long time.

4. Look at other potential improvements. When you gauge sentiment before and after each action, you will get an idea of whether what you changed has made any real impact.

But aside from the direct matter at hand, you can also use feedback information to rescore any related processes that may further improve your business.

Taking the previous example, if your customers mention making the return policy more generous, it might signal that your item details (size, specs) can be made more accurate to reduce the likelihood of product returns.

This means that with feedback, you can continuously explore beyond the feature that is being discussed in the feedback item. By analyzing what other features are related to the main feedback subject, you can keep improving many aspects of the business.

The Takeaway

Customer feedback is one of the most crucial resources to bolster the growth of your business. Managed right, it can become a way not only to establish a healthy flow of ideas between you and your valued customers, but also to connect with them. It’s a matter of prioritizing, testing, and keeping the communication open as to which piece of feedback may result in positive change that both your customers and your brand will benefit from.

Danielle Canstello is part of the content marketing team at Pyramid Analytics, which provides enterprise level analytics and business intelligence software. In her spare time, she writes around the web to spread her knowledge of the marketing, business intelligence, and analytics industries.