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Most companies measure success on metrics like profit margin or conversion rate. Yet, these data are often detached from your customer’s actual sentiments.
It’s also essential to collect your customers’ feedback. Hear their thoughts about your business to make informed decisions and improve your products or services.
Feedback collection is crucial in maintaining customer satisfaction and loyalty. Around 83% of customers are more supportive of brands that listen to their feedback.
In this article, we discussed how to obtain customer feedback to help you improve and refine your business strategies.
What is Customer Feedback?
Customer feedback refers to customers’ views, insights, or sentiments about your products and services. Simply put, this indicates customers’ level of satisfaction and comments about your business.
The simplest form of customer feedback is ratings. For instance, a customer who had a great experience with an e-commerce store can rate its website “five over five (5/5)”. Meanwhile, a customer who had a displeasure dealing with an online seller can rate it “two over five (2/5)”.
Customers can also provide written feedback to a business. A customer who receives a delayed package can send this feedback to the store’s website: “Slow delivery time, very unsatisfying”
Why Is Customer Feedback So Important?
Feedback collection can assess customer’s sentiment, business performance, and points of improvement.
- Assessment of customer’s sentiment: Customer feedback tells you how people perceive your products. For instance, if customers indicate that they dislike your recent product release, you can modify or pull it out from the market.
- Measurement of Business Performance: Customer feedback is also an indicator of your business’s current capabilities. For instance, if many complain about delayed receipt of orders, it might indicate some logistic bottlenecks on your part.
- Determination of Potential Improvements: Customers are the end users of your products so they can provide useful insights on how to improve. For instance, customers can suggest additional features, designs, or components for improvement in your product.
6 Ways to Collect Better Customer Feedback
1. Know the type of customer giving the feedback
Every customer has a unique background and experience. So, make sure to check the person behind each feedback. Say a loyal customer purchases appliances from a store for 10 years. But recently, he complained about the quality of the latest model. Based on this feedback, the store must investigate recent modifications in the product that altered its quality.2. Feedback matters prompted or not
Many customers provide unsolicited comments that are also worth considering. As a business owner, you might view your products with “rose-tinted glasses”, ignoring their flaws or issues. As end users, customers can spot these problems for you. Say a clothing store is confident of its products by top-notch designers. Yet, some customers suggested changing the store’s current designs because they’re outdated or unfashionable.3. Explore what motivates your customer
Obtaining valuable customer insights entails sufficient customer feedback. So, explore ways to motivate customers to share their thoughts and opinions. Strong emotions: People tend to speak more with heightened emotions. So, when customers experience something they strongly like (or dislike), chances are they’ll give honest feedback. Incentives: Offer discount promos or reward points to entice customers to share feedback. Ability to influence: Remind customers that their voice matters. Tell them that their feedback will serve as a guide in improving products.4. There’s a strength in numbers, especially in customer feedback
Prioritize issues with a high volume of feedback. For instance, if over 70% of feedback complains about your newly launched product, focus on addressing these complaints ASAP.5. Repetition is key
Aside from volume, check also the repetition of feedback you receive. For instance, a store that repeatedly receives requests for returns or refunds must check the quality of its product, shopping platforms, or freight mechanism.6. Learn what’s at stake
Your top priority should always be high-stake feedback or those that might compromise your store’s reputation and customer welfare. For instance, if a customer reported unauthorized logins in his account, you must look it up ASAP for potential security breaches.How to Collect Customer Feedback
Chat
Direct communication through live chat is a seamless way to obtain customer feedback. You may use AI chatbots to ask real-time questions to customers, extracting their insights about your products and services.
Short surveys
Surveys can measure customer satisfaction with specific product features. A survey may prompt customers to rate their experience or write their viewpoint (in their own words). You can use online forms and put them into your website for a survey.Social Media
Consider reviewing people’s comments and comments on social media pages. While most of them might be non-constructive, harsh, or sarcastic, they can still provide insights into people’s perceptions of your product.7 Steps to Analyze Customer Feedback
1. Collate your data
Customer feedback will come from different channels – social media, email, SMS, or live chat. So, your first goal is to organize them into a spreadsheet.2. Organize the feedback
Every feedback must be metadata indicating relevant information like feedback content, feedback theme, feedback date, source, customer’s monthly spending, and customer’s first purchase date. Here’s an example:| Customer ID | Feedback content | Feedback type | Feedback date | Source | Customer total spending (monthly) | First purchase date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 152754 | “Very disappointing. I requested a refund but until now it’s not been credited to my account”. | Delayed Refund | 08/04/2024 | Chat | 350 | 01/04/2022 |
3. Get an overview
Scan thoroughly the feedback data you organized. You’ll notice that this feedback is varied in terms of theme, details, and sentiment. Your goal is to spot patterns and commonalities to help you “summarize” them.4. Code the feedback
A feedback code is a concise but informative description of feedback. Coding your feedback helps you pinpoint recurring feedback and narrow down your analysis. So, you must add another column in your spreadsheet for this info. Say customers complained about your customer support’s late responses. You can code this feedback as “CS slow response time”.5. Refine it if necessary
For a more accurate and specific description of feedback, you must refine your codes. Going back to our example above, the initial code used is “CS slow response time”. But upon rereading, you noticed that the delay can be “channel-specific”. Some responses are delayed via the website, but fast on phone and email. So, you can refine the code as “Website CS slow response time”.6. Compute the codes and see the results
Count the quantity of feedback per code to determine the most frequent customer views or sentiments shared with you. Prepare another spreadsheet to tabulate the codes’ frequency.7. Summarize your findings and discuss them with your team
Upon discovering the most popular feedback, summarize them and prepare a report. Send this report to the appropriate department for resolution. For instance, if “Website CS slow response time” is a popular feedback. Send them to the CS team and they can address this by training a customer support AI chatbot.Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is a customer feedback system?
A customer feedback system is a structured framework of tools and strategies for feedback collection.
How can I ask for feedback from my customers?
You can use an AI chatbot (for the website), manage social media channels, or administer surveys.
How can I organize customer feedback?
Sort feedback as metadata in a spreadsheet and describe them using “codes”. Afterward, summarize your analysis and make a report.
