12 Effective Tips for Creating Customer Feedback Strategy

When it comes to gathering client feedback, it’s easy to get caught up in many options. It isn’t easy to know where to begin with so many clients and opportunities to interact with their remarks and observations.

One thing is sure: taking a strategic approach to gathering client input guarantees that you never stray too far from your industry’s requirements, even as those needs alter. Especially if you have thoroughly designed your customer feedback strategy, it helps you stay ahead of your competitors.

Customer service feedback is a robust tool that can provide your leadership team with insights that design a course ahead for every aspect of your firm, from product to UX and customer care. This is essential in terms of consumer need fulfillment.

Creating a customer feedback strategy can be tricky. It’s important to make sure that you are collecting the right type of feedback and using it to improve your business. Here are some tips for creating an effective customer feedback strategy.

What Is Customer Feedback?

Customer feedback is information, thoughts, problems, and suggestions offered by your product users or segment regarding their interactions with your organization, products, or services. This feedback improves customer experience and may enable good change in any organization, even when unfavorable.

Feedback from customers regarding their interactions with a service or product is an opportunity. Its goal is to expose the degree of happiness a customer has achieved and assist development, consumer experience, and marketing teams in determining where they can improve.

Companies can gather proactive consumer feedback through a customer feedback system consisting of polling and surveying clients, interviewing them, or soliciting reviews. Teams may also gather feedback passively by giving consumers an option in the product to express comments, concerns, or praises.

Customer feedback is vital since it acts as a guiding tool for your company’s success. Everybody wants to know whether their company is doing well or poorly from the perspective of its consumers.

You can uncover diamonds amongst the feedback that make it simpler to change and adapt the client experience over time. In short, feedback keeps your consumer at the center of everything you do.

A corporation can never know if its product is valuable to its clients until they receive customer feedback. The product and go-to-market teams will not know whether they are cultivating loyal clients until they see if they are receiving value. You will also be unable to check your customer retention and customer lifetime value, which you can only measure efficiently with a good customer feedback loop.

How to Gather Customer Feedback?

Now that you know what customer feedback is and how and why it is essential to tech businesses and industries, including those working in the service sector, we shall look at the various methods and ways your business can collect feedback for customer feedback analysis.

1. Feedback Surveys

Feedback surveys are not only one of the most accessible tools you can deploy to gather feedback from your customers and target segments, but they’re also the most effective if formulated correctly.

When using feedback surveys, you need to keep a few factors. Consider the time at hand that your customer will have and what type of questions you would want to include in the survey.

You can, of course, use a Likert scale and have customers answer questions based on their liking, or you can even use a more objective approach where customers can give answers in a yes or no form. Whichever method you ought to use, remember that it should align well with your internal systems and help you achieve your end goal of improving customer experience.

2. Customer Contact Forms

Customer contact forms or customer service forms are the forms that are usually available on your websites or social media. You can also disseminate these forms to your customers through emails. Customers provide specific details regarding their contact information and then offer subjective feedback in positive or negative comments.

Given its subjective nature, skimming through the feedback to analyze it might be a cumbersome task. It reflects the customer’s psychographic dimension. It has many opportunities embedded in it, and thus, we recommend hiring experts to help you decipher the subtle messaging relevant to your segmentation and positioning.

3. Email Follow-up After Services / Product Delivered

Another easy and exciting way to get customer feedback is following up after selling a product or service. We recommend you drop a follow-up email to your customer and client to ask them about the customer journey experience and how the product or service has helped them attend to their pain point.

Customers also like such a personalized approach because they feel special that they have been taken care of even after making the purchase when the transaction has been completed in terms of monetary value.

4. Social Media (Reviews)

Social listening may provide you with access to a hitherto untapped source of genuine customer input. Explicit remarks or mentions on social networks aren’t the only options for your company to gather client input, as many platforms also include built-in polling capabilities, such as Instagram.

Social media also provides you with a direct and easy way to reach out to your customers using different messaging campaigns. It also works in completing the customer feedback loop and is considered in today’s times one of the most effective strategic tools for collecting customer feedback.

5. Review Sites

Sites like Trust Pilot, Power Reviews, etc., have changed the customer feedback game in recent times. These are customer reviews sharing websites that host thousands of businesses and have given access to their platforms to millions of customers worldwide.

Customers provide candid feedback on these different review sites that can be used as part of customer feedback analysis to improve customer experience and truly understand the customer’s needs.

What to Do With Customer Feedback?

Now that you have deployed relevant tools to get customer feedback, it is essential to know how to analyze it and what you should do with it.

Not all customer feedback is usable. We’re not talking about whether it’s positive or negative. We’re talking about whether we can derive some relevant insights from the customer feedback or not; otherwise, it is useless in terms of effectiveness.

Let’s consider the different factors you should consider when filtering through customer feedback and selecting what to use and discard to deliver a better customer value proposition and experience.            

1. Useful Feedback

You can categorize the feedback received as valuable if it addresses a specific pain point or issue. You also need to see that if the input will help you improve your external and internal processes, it is usable and should be used at all costs.

The features that you can use to identify helpful feedback are how thoughtful it is and how well the customer has pondered upon the issue and communicated it. Secondly, if it is just suggesting improvements instead of a real drastic change and displayed in a polite tone, then most definitely it’s is helpful feedback and should be made a part of the customer feedback analysis.

2. Useless Feedback

Useless feedback or feedback that you cannot use in further analysis or as a part of customer feedback examples has specific identifying characteristics. Such feedback does not usually discuss a primary pain point or issue and is usually more generic.

Sometimes you might also experience rude language and feel that the customer kept it short and did not put in the time and effort to communicate the thoughts. You might also realize that implementing such feedback will not only be an additional step to the process but will also not help improve the end customer experience.

Tips For Creating a Successful Customer Feedback Strategy

Let us look at top-rated tips that you can follow to create the most successful customer feedback strategy for your tech-based business. Always remember that not all these suggestions can be applied relevant to your company, and you should select the ones that are most appropriate in terms of your end goals and well-aligned with your internal mechanisms.

1. Timings Are Essential ( Try to Respond ASAP)

Always remember that time is a critical element in its essence. Once feedback is received from a customer, try your best to respond to it at the earliest to complete or move through the customer feedback loop and send out a message of importance and punctuality.

2. Improve Live Chat Support, Train Your CSR Staff

If you’re offering such live service, your customer services representatives and live chat support staff are the first points of interaction for a customer when they want to give out some feedback. Therefore, invest in your resources and help them improve performance. Invest in training to make their skills more polished.

3. Work On Regular Follow-Ups After-Sales

After-sales have been made, never hesitate to go back and follow up on the customer satisfaction levels and how well they are happy with the performance and satisfaction of the product. Regular follow-ups and aftersales feedback get you brownie points.

4. Use AI Bots for Auto Responses and Focus on Making Them Natural

with the presence of technology and artificial intelligence, it is recommended that you invest in bots for auto-generated responses to the most asked questions and concerns. But do ensure that these responses are natural and seem like a CSR representative is talking to the customer.

5. Offer Rewards to Encourage Reviews, Testimonials, and Survey Forms

Incentivize and reward your customer for providing testimonials, filling out survey forms, and providing reviews. It doesn’t matter whether these reviews are positive or negative. You want your customer to provide you with irrelevant helpful information that you can utilize to improve the customer experience.

6. Use Tools for Gathering Feedback Pop-Ups, Banners, Automate Email Sequences

Never hesitate to use technology when it comes to gathering customer feedback. Deploy feedback popups and even website banners and use automated email responses to help you gather customer feedback.

7. Use Positive Feedback as Social Proof

Continually advertise positive customer feedback as part of your customer feedback strategy. This encourages other customers to provide their comments and attracts more potential customers.

8. Build And Nurture Relationships with Your Clients / Customers

Customer relationship management is critical to your customer feedback strategy. Invest in customer relationship management software and train your team to stay in touch with clients to develop your relationship with them.

9. Use Analytics to Track Customer Journeys and Analyze Data to Know Where They’re Stuck or Opting Out

Usage of analytics and different analysis tools is critical to understanding the customer journey and knowing which pain points are bothering them during the process and where they might want to move out of the system.

10. Cater to Negative Feedback

Do not ever ignore your negative feedback. As part of an effective customer feedback strategy, you must take action on negative feedback to win back your customers and display the quality and efficiency of your customer care department.

11. Active On Communities (Review Sites, Forums, Facebook Groups)

Stay active on social communities and review sites as well as social media. Given today’s times, customers usually utilize these platforms the most to interact with the organizations.

12. Implement And Announce Improvements / Features Based on Feedback

It is essential to let your segment know that you have worked on the feedback and added improvements and features based on the customer’s input when utilizing customer feedback. Therefore, once you have completed the customer feedback loop, it is important to announce it to the segment and make them aware of your customer feedback strategy.

Conclusion

Customer feedback is a great opportunity and tool for any business to help them improve their product, service, and customer experience and add to their internal processes and systems.

Remember that a customer feedback strategy is not a one fit for all and should be developed and deployed, considering different factors such as your company’s strengths and weaknesses alongside the industry dynamics in mind.

Therefore, when developing a mechanism for your customer feedback, always look at it from a strategic point of view and consider it a part offer an overall business strategy.

NEWSLETTER SIGNUP