It can sometimes feel like the sole purpose of collecting customer feedback is to show how great a company is: positive NPS scores, glowing reviews, or relatable case studies on the website. But collecting data for data’s sake is not enough when it comes to customer experience. In the digital age, it’s easy to collect feedback on your products or services but the real question is what you do with all that information. 

Bill Gates once said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Customer feedback, especially negative ones, is an often untapped pool of learnings for business development. When you take a closer look at the data you collect, you can gain insights and build strategies to increase customer retention and grow your business. 

In this article, you’ll learn a step-by-step guide on how to turn your customer feedback into strategic opportunities. 

Start with your goal in mind

Before you set up a new survey or send an email to your customers asking for their opinions, be clear on what you want to achieve. There is plenty of data available when it comes to your buyers but not all will be meaningful for your business. 

Once you have answered these questions, you can start to collect data and measure it meaningfully. 

Collect customer feedback 

For many businesses asking your buyers for input is a continuous process. You might have already set up different ways to collect reviews and comments. To ensure you get the most out of your data, we gathered five best practices to collect customer feedback: 

1) Make it easy to collect data: 

Your users should have a simple way to say their opinion which requires very little effort. For example, you can ask them if their experience was good or bad after purchasing by clicking on a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon.

Consider including simple CSAT surveys after every ticket interaction or at the end of your newsletter. Alternatively, you can have a quick pop-up survey after a conversation with customer support asking (1) if the problem got solved and (2) if the agent provided clear and helpful information.

2) Reach out to your customers where they are: 

Your users have different preferences on the channels they primarily use, such as social media, emails, calls, or messaging. Make sure that they can reach you where they prefer to interact with businesses. Tools such as Netigate featuring Lumoa make it easy to distribute surveys via a variety of channels, so you don’t have to waste time with manual copy-pasting. 

3) Ask for feedback at the right time: 

Nobody wants to answer a customer feedback email they received at 3 am in the morning. Your timing when reaching out to your buyers matters. As an example, a great time to ask for input is right after they purchased to find out if the buying experience was smooth. 

4) Make it worth their time 

Your customers take time out of the day to give you feedback. You can easily incentivize them by offering rewards such as credits in your store, free shipping, or a gift raffle. You can be creative! For instance, Amazon tells you a joke after seven reviews: 

5) Talk to your customer service employees 

Your customer service team has the closest relationship to your customers. They know their struggles, what upsets them, and how they prefer to be addressed. Talk to your customer service team to learn more about customer sentiment and their common issues and requests. 

Analyze your customer feedback 

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you have a lot of customer feedback data. If you followed step 1 and got clear on what you want to measure and why, you can avoid the famous analysis paralysis. 

Instead of barely tracking your data, you want to focus on creating actionable insights. They are data sets that prescribe a direct, meaningful action you can take based on the analysis of raw data. Rather than basing your strategy on anecdotal evidence or hunches, actionable insights allow you to make informed decisions. 

With the modern technology available, you don’t have to go through hundreds of voice recordings from customer calls anymore. Netigate Featuring Lumoa offers analysis tools such as sentiment analysis or text analysis to make analyzing your data easy. 

Turn your Customer Feedback into strategic actions

The next step is to take everything you’ve learned so far and turn it into strategic actions. We organized the strategic actions that can be taken from customer feedback by departments. This way, you can easily find what you are looking for. 

Product Development and Management

1) Optimize your products 

Customers might not be the best to give you ideas for innovating your products, but their feedback helps you with optimizing products. Your customers will tell you what they don’t like. With generative AI tools such as “Ask Lumoa”, you can find recurring themes and topics in your customer feedback and decide how you can improve their experience. 

Often times, customers even share concrete suggestions for a feature they want. You can look through the data and see how many users are asking for a certain feature. Based on the requests you can prioritize which features are added when to the roadmap. Needless to say, this greater focus on product improvement and innovation can increase your revenue by expanding your customer base and retaining customers.

2) Find and fix technical issues 

We all hope that there are no bugs in our products, apps, or websites. But it happens. Your users are a great way to find out about technical issues. When you see a spike in complaints about a certain feature or page, make sure to investigate! It’s a great chance to quickly fix it, learn from your mistakes, and share with your customers what you improved. 

3) Anticipate shifts in the market 

Customer feedback can help brands stay ahead by foreseeing changes in the market and aligning their positioning accordingly. Once you understand the underlying drivers of what your customers want, you can also predict their future user behavior. 

Customer Support, Success and Experience 

1) Personalize the customer experience

When you receive customer feedback, you want to offer a personalized experience for your user. People want to feel seen and heard. Customers who are new to your services will need a different support than someone who has used them for years. You also want to make sure what the user has discussed with another agent, so they don’t have to repeat themselves. 

2) Go the extra mile for your high-value customers

If you are interacting with customers who have been with you for years and have high sales, prioritize that they get the support they need. An unhappy customer can turn into a brand advocate if you offer them a great experience when they are reaching out to you. 

Marketing & Branding 

1) Establish a strong brand 

If you want to have a peek inside this room and hear what people are saying about your brand, customer surveys are a great tool to do so. Your customer’s perception defines the brand’s reality and the easiest way to learn about it are brand perception surveys. 

“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

– Jeff Bezos

Open-ended questions can be an excellent source of how your audience sees you and how they speak about your brand. Have a look at the words they use when they talk about your company. If there is a huge difference in how you want your brand to be perceived, you should investigate! 

2) Hone in on your marketing message

Your customers are a great source for your marketing content. When you incorporate the words they are using when they talk about your product, you can talk to them, not at them. Understanding their tone of voice also helps you to create authentic messages that resonate on a deeper level with your users and build an emotional connection. You are speaking their language. 

When you look at this example from Slack, you can imagine that one of their current users mentioned “I wish there was a better way to work with people outside my company”. The website copy speaks the customers’ language and easily explains the benefit of the product instead of purely focusing on describing features.

3) Segment your audience and personalize their marketing

Ideal Client Personas (ICP) are a great way to segment your audience but all too often they are based on assumptions about your users. Looking through your customer feedback can help you update or add ICPs based on how many customers struggle with the same issue or have the same preferences. Instead of assuming who your ideal audience is, you can make data-driven decisions. 

Based on your segmentation, you can then target them with personalized campaigns: Offer the new pair of sneakers to sneaker enthusiasts or showcase a highlight video for the new feature you added in your app after popular demand from your users. 

4) Showcase positive quotes and review 

Customer reviews are a great way to build trust with your audience. Use positive quotes or testimonials on your website, show excellent feedback scores, or implement a feedback widget to showcase reviews as they come in. Authentic reviews can be more powerful than perfectly polished ad copy. You can even add customer satisfaction scores or quotes in your sales decks or pitch decks to show them to your (potential) investors, partners, or leads. 

Sales 

1) Identify unique sales points

Every business has assumptions about what their unique value proposition is. But when you take a look at your customer feedback, you can see what your customers genuinely appreciate about your brand, product, or services. Use this information in your next sales call or add it to your sales material.

2) Decrease the churn risk of your customers 

Retaining customers makes business sense: Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. You can identify when customers are unhappy and reach out to them before they leave. A simple “we haven’t heard from you in a while” email can have big effects. Based on their feedback, you can try to fix any issues before they don’t purchase anymore. 

3) Find brand advocates 

Customers see themselves reflected in the brands they support. There’s a sense of connection, ownership, and loyalty. When you receive positive customer feedback, you can ask them to write a review on Yelp, Tripadvisor, or Google Business. Remember: people buy from people. If they see that others are enjoying your product, they are more inclined to trust you and buy it. You can also invite users who are continuously happy with your service to become brand affiliates and promote you. 

Management

1) Create a feedback culture

Your employees need to understand why customer feedback is so important and what impact it can have. As a manager, you want to build a habit of measuring customer experience and help your team understand how they can use it to make data-driven decisions. A first step can be to send this article to your team. 

Encourage your team members that a bad customer experience is an opportunity to do better. Customers who reach out to you with negative feedback are the ones who care about your brand. So use this opportunity of a bad customer experience and make sure to improve the product or service for everyone. 

2) Avoid analysis paralysis 

Your team should not feel overwhelmed with too much data or tools they don’t know how to use. Put time in everyone’s calendar to upskill the team and give them the space to continuously educate themselves on how to analyze data and create actionable strategies based on it. 

3) Break communication silos 

Information often sticks with one department in companies, usually the one most closely associated with the information. Encourage the different teams to share customer data and feedback freely. You can even have a regular check-in meeting where customer support shares which issues have arisen so that the rest of the team is aware. 

Step 5: Close the Customer Feedback Loop

You’ve done great so far: You collected actionable insights and turned them into concrete actions for each department. But now it’s time to communicate the changes with your customers aka to close the customer feedback loop. 

If you haven’t heard about it before, the customer feedback loop is a customer experience strategy that aims to constantly enhance and improve your product based on user reviews, opinions, and suggestions. As a last step in this process, you want to let your customers know that you listened to them and to show your commitment to a better user experience. 

You can ask your customers to try out changes to increase user activation. When your customers see that your company values their voice, it can be an effective way to enhance customer experience.  

Step 6: Make collecting and analyzing customer feedback easier for yourself 

Thankfully there are great tools to support you with collecting and analyzing feedback from your customers to turn it into strategic opportunities. Netigate Featuring Lumoa offers ready-made survey templates, and you can reach your customers at ​​difficult touchpoints using tailored distribution methods like SMS or QR codes. You can use the customer retention software to understand the factors impacting customer churn, boost retention, and ultimately save costs. 

The best part: Netigate is also an employee experience (EX) solution. You don’t need another tool to collect feedback and analyze employee data but can use Netigate to elevate retention and productivity in your team. 

Wrapping it up

Your business strategy needs to take advantage of customer feedback. While it’s easy to collect data, the real value comes from how you analyze and use it. You can do this by starting with a clear goal in mind, gathering feedback, analyzing it, turning it into actionable strategies, and closing the feedback loop. And you’ll notice the difference in your customer retention, customer experience, and growth your business.

Additionally, don’t just focus on positive reviews and NPS scores. It’s not the only metric for success. Understand your customers’ needs and continuously improve your products and services as well. The right tools can make this process easier, so you can gather, analyze, and lastly, turn your customer feedback into strategic opportunities. 

Ready to enhance your customer experience? Check out how we can help you.