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Robert Gonye
If you do not know what is right, you cannot do more of it. If you don’t know what’s wrong, you can’t do less of it. Without customer feedback, we are destined to fail.
In continuation from our last discussion, it is important to know why we stand to benefit from customer feedback when gathered correctly. Loyal customers grow a business faster than sales or marketing. However, if we never ask for customer feedback, we’ll never understand what drives the customer satisfaction. If we don’t know what drives satisfied customers, it will be impossible to create customer loyalty. Interesting enough, the facts which spell out that
1. It costs 5x to 25x more money to acquire a new customer than keep existing ones happy.
2. The #1 most common source of new leads are referrals.
3. Highly-engaged customers buy 90 percent more often and spend 60 percent more per transaction.
Returning customers, or customer loyalty, is what grows a business. Not a 30-second radio jingle costing $5 000.
The process of gathering and implementing customer feedback hence is achieved through the The A.C.A.F. Customer Feedback Loop. The loop addresses four areas which are:
1. Ask for customer feedback
2. Categorise the feedback
3. Act on the feedback
4. Follow-up with customers who shared feedback.
The type of questions we should ask are then determined by our goals and can include
Do we need to understand overall trends in our customer satisfaction over time?
Do we need to identify customer service issues that frustrate customers?
Do we need to uncover product issues to improve our product?
Categorising customer feedback
When it comes to organising your customer feedback, there are a typically three main categories you can bucket customer feedback into:
1. Product feedback
2. Customer service feedback
3. Marketing & sales feedback
You can also break down each macro category into different subcategories which we will touch on. It is quickly worth noting you save time by using customer feedback software to help with organising your feedback — versus compiling data into spreadsheets and running time-consuming PivotTables to dissect trends.
1. Product feedback
After you ask for product feedback (the first step in the A.C.A.F. Customer Feedback Loop), you’ll get a massive spreadsheet of information.
However, you’ll want to bucket that into different subcategories. Here are a few of the most common ones:
Major product concerns: These are extremely urgent issues that prevent users from getting the core value out of your product. For example, if you have an instant messaging product and users cannot send a message.
Minor product concerns: These are minor issues that don’t distract from the core product value. For example, using the same hypothetical messaging product, this would be if your users could not insert a specific emoji into their message.
An easier way is leveraging a customer feedback tool that helps you categorise the feedback by assigning smart tags and placing everything into categories automatically.
2. Customer service feedback
The next main category is getting feedback about your customer service. The three most common places to ask for feedback are:
Live chat
Knowledge base articles
Email follow-up (after support case is closed)
When you end a live chat you will often see a survey:
Regardless of how the feedback survey is sent, all the data will get aggregated into a central place to analyse your customer feedback.
This makes it easy to identify patterns in your reporting to find answers to these common questions:
“What are the most commonly asked questions?”
“What knowledge base articles don’t give users the answers they’re looking for?”
“What is our average response time in live chat?”
“During what stage in the customer journey do people get stuck?”
Building a sustainable system for analysing customer service is vital for our business growth. If we don’t know where people are frustrated, we can’t improve our customer service. If we can’t improve our service, our customers will leave for another company who will.
3. Marketing & sales feedback
The final category of organising customer feedback is focused on marketing and sales.
Assuming one of your sales reps mistakenly promised a feature that wasn’t ready for the next six months. After a customer signs a contract, or submits their first monthly payment, that will likely elicit a negative customer response, our customer success team is now destined to get practice on dealing with angry customers. They were promised something by sales that didn’t deliver.
The same can happen with marketing. For example, assume your marketing team mistakenly writes that your product is compatible with Microsoft Outlook on the website. A customer purchases your product, because it’s supposedly compatible with Microsoft Outlook, which they later learn is not true. That will cause massive headaches for your Support team later down the road.
If you have a tight customer feedback loop for your marketing and sales teams, these headaches will be entirely avoided.
Another strategy for categorising customer feedback comes from the use of Post It Notes to visually categorise different buckets of feedback.
Regardless of what type of feedback we share with a company, we simply desire two things:
1. That it’s easy for us to give feedback.
2. That we feel like our voice is being heard.
The first can be solved with customer feedback software. The second is a little tougher.
What’s the core problem? People don’t share feedback with companies because they feel like they are talking to a wall. According to research from gnatt publication they found that 43 percent of customers don’t leave feedback because they don’t think the business cares.
That is irrational!
If we don’t make our customers feel appreciated for their feedback, both positive and negative, they simply won’t give feedback. If we don’t get customer feedback we risk our business failing. If we don’t routinely follow-up with customers, we risk losing trust with them.
What makes our customers feel like their being heard?
First, they desire a prompt response time. In fact, 81 percent of customers say they would be willing to leave feedback if they knew they would get a fast response. We can improve this by:
Publishing a report with our customer feedback so far and how we’ve implemented it.
Using a public feature request Troll board.
Mailing thank you letters to people who gave you incredible feedback.
Personalising an email response (beyond a canned template) genuinely thanking them for taking time out of their busy schedules to give feedback.
When we feel like our voice is being heard — and that something will be done about it — we aren’t afraid to share our opinions. It’s our responsibility as a business to follow up with customers who share feedback. If we don’t, they won’t share feedback later on, and we run a higher risk of business failure because we’re not capturing the good and bad feedback from our customers.
The views given herein are solely for information purposes; they are guidelines and suggestions and are not guaranteed to work in any particular way.
Robert Gonye is a Business Growth Expert and Influencer. He writes in his personal capacity. Comments and views: [email protected] twitter@robert_gonye
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