Using Feedback to Enhance Customer Experience

Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. After all, without customers, you wouldn’t even have a business! Although keeping customers happy should be a primary goal for any company, it can sometimes be difficult to know whether customers are, in fact, happy.

While you can look at your revenue and sales figures to understand how healthy your business is, these numbers don’t always tell the whole story. While your business may be cruising, you may not realize that trouble is brewing behind the scenes.

Why Understanding Customer Sentiment is Critical

Negative reviews online, word-of-mouth getting around about bad experiences, products or services that fail to deliver – All of these are issues that can hurt your success in the long run if you aren’t in tune with your customers.

The good news is that you can confront these challenges early and improve the customer experience by seeking customer feedback. Hearing feedback directly from your customers about their thoughts and experiences with brand interactions can help you:

• Address areas that need improvement
• Stave off negative reviews.
• Innovate to meet customer needs.
• Improve processes for efficiency.

If you’re interested in enhancing your operations while improving your brand’s image, both online and off, below are some tips on how to use customer feedback for improvements:

Survey Your Customers

Possibly, the easiest way to get customer feedback about products or services and the customer service experience is simply to ask them. Surveying customers, whether in person, through email, or via a form on your company’s website, is a direct way to receive feedback from the source.

As an added benefit, asking for feedback may increase customer loyalty. It shows that your company cares about the customer experience, which can have a long-term positive impact on buyer affinity and may improve word-of-mouth marketing.

Offer an Anonymous Option

While some customers are happy to provide feedback with their identities attached, others may not feel as comfortable. Whether it’s because they don’t want public exposure or they’re concerned about having to discuss potentially uncomfortable opinions, a customer who doesn’t want to provide identifiable feedback may be less than forthcoming.

When this happens, any feedback you receive from such a customer will likely be tainted and unreliable. Instead, offer anonymous methods for submitting both positive and negative feedback.

For instance, you can collect feedback via an anonymous email survey in which the respondent does not need to provide their name or contact information. A third-party company may best handle this task to assure anonymity and trust. While you can simply put an anonymous survey via web form on your website, this can open your survey up to trolls, and there’s no way to prove that a respondent is a customer.

Sending out an anonymous survey through a third-party email service means you can at least know that the people responding to your questions are customers since you can collect email addresses at the point of sale. Collecting customer feedback in this manner also means you’re more likely to receive honest answers, and this is exactly what you need if you want to use feedback to improve.

Create and Implement a Privacy Policy

Identity theft, phishing, and hacking are all threats in the modern era, and consumers are very aware of the dangers posed by providing unsecured data on the web. Before you can collect data to learn how to use customer feedback for improvements, you first need to earn customer trust.

One way to do this is to create and implement a privacy policy that is prominently displayed anywhere you gather customer feedback. Whether you ask for feedback via email, on your company’s website, at a point of sale, or anywhere in between, let customers know that you can be trusted with any data they provide.

How to Incorporate Customer Feedback

After you’ve developed the most effective methods for your company to gather customer feedback, it’s time to incorporate the valuable insights you’ve obtained to better the customer experience. Whether you’re interested in addressing a specific customer pain point or incorporating feedback into your product development cycle, knowing how to use customer feedback for improvements is just as important as obtaining it.

Organize Your Customer Feedback

Before you can act on customer feedback, you need to organize and analyze it. This is where customer relationship management (CRM) software can be handy.

CRM software empowers your company to track customer relationships, notate accounts, share experiences with teams, and more. Many CRM solutions also utilize AI technology to analyze and sort customer qualities and detect sentiment in customer feedback. These tools can make sorting through feedback and taking action faster and more efficient.

Set Goals Based on Customer Feedback

After you’ve analyzed and organized customer feedback, set reasonable goals for your company. Pleasing everyone isn’t a realistic goal, but improving delivery times might be. When setting goals, you will also want to devise methods to measure results.

It’s one thing to say your goal is to improve customer service, but it’s another to define what that means, both for customers and your company. For example, you could aim to cut complaint resolution times by 15%, and then track resolution times monthly to ensure accountability.

Create Action Plans to Take Advantage of Customer Feedback

When it comes to tips to increase revenue using customer feedback, possibly the most crucial element is taking action. After all, collecting customer experiences won’t do any good in the long run if you don’t make improvements based on customer feedback.

To do this efficiently, gather feedback regularly, review it with relevant department heads, and create action plans to address key concerns. While all customer feedback is important, this doesn’t mean you must act on every suggestion. Instead, look for recurring themes across points in the customer journey. If you notice specific concerns about how customers feel, this can indicate a problem that requires an action plan.

Update Your Training

After you’ve identified pain points based on customer feedback and created action plans, the next step is to educate and inform your team. Everyone needs to understand the feedback your company has received along with the changes you’re implementing to address the feedback.

This typically means evaluating your training assets and methods to ensure they align with the changes you plan to institute. From your live chat support to your backend administrative staff, everyone needs to be on board about using customer feedback for improvements. If even one team member is not up to date regarding changes to address negative feedback, you risk repeating the same mistakes that caused negative feedback in the first place.

Advertise the Steps You Take to Improve After Negative Feedback

In some situations, it may make sense to advertise the steps your company takes to implement customer feedback. This can be the case when you have a public relations crisis, or your company’s reputation has suffered due to poor customer experiences.

Advertising that your company has heard customer feedback and is taking steps to address concerns shows that you’re listening. It also allows your brand to take control of a bad situation and turn it into something positive, which can be a net benefit for your business and your customers.

If you take this approach, you need to be sincere. Today’s savvy consumers can see through fake apologies and empty promises. You might consider creating a marketing campaign out of your efforts that details the work your company is putting in to incorporate customer feedback.

For example, if you’ve received much feedback about slow response times from your company, create a video series in which you document team members answering phones faster. In the video, you can talk about how you’ve heard your customers’ concerns and you’re implementing steps to improve response times through technology upgrades and revamped training.

Follow Up on Customer Feedback

Whenever you receive feedback from customers, follow up on it to show that you appreciate the valuable insights. Whether positive or negative, feedback from a customer is an asset. Show appreciation for the time a customer took to provide feedback by addressing it.

If the feedback relates to a negative experience, reaching out to try to make things right can do wonders for your brand and may even win a customer back. If a customer has had a positive experience, reach out to thank the customer for sharing their feedback. In either case, you strengthen the connection between your company and customers.

Don’t Forget About the Positive Feedback

Although negative feedback tends to get all the attention when making changes based on customer experiences, don’t forget about the positive feedback. When your company receives praise, shout it from the rooftops!

In much the same way as using negative feedback to show how you’re making changes, showcase positive feedback to demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction. If possible, collect testimonials from customers who have had great experiences. Create marketing assets around these experiences and let everyone know about them.

Customer Feedback Can Drive Growth and Innovation

When you seek out customer feedback and adapt to it, your business can experience real growth. It’s far too easy to get stuck in a rut doing the same thing over and over, and sometimes, customer feedback can be the thing a brand needs to kickstart innovation and spark meaningful change.

Whether you start small with feedback from a handful of customers or you send out a mass survey to your company's entire customer base, getting the truth from the source can give you the tools you need to experience stronger customer relationships that last.

Contact E-Marketing Associates to Learn How We Can Streamline the Customer Experience

At E-Marketing Associates, we help businesses streamline the customer experience through digital marketing, web design and development, advanced software solutions, and more. Contact our team today to schedule a consultation and discover how we can enhance your customer engagement strategy using cutting-edge technology.

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