Customers in today’s landscape want to buy from companies who listen to their needs, understand their expectations, and act accordingly. According to reports, around 77% of consumers say they view brands more favourably when they seek out and respond to customer feedback.
Whether you’re serving business buyers or everyday consumers, implementing a customer feedback strategy ensures you can respond to the specific needs of your target audience. A customer feedback strategy assists with customer journey mapping, strengthening satisfaction scores, improving employee performance, and boosting brand reputation.
The challenge for today’s business leaders, is figuring out which vendor to turn to when collecting and using feedback to their advantage. Here are some important steps to consider when sorting through the available options in the current market.
Step 1: Set Goals for Using Customer Feedback
Having a strong set of targets in place for how to collect and leverage customer feedback is important for generating a good “ROI”, or return on investment. As mentioned above, customer feedback can assist business leaders in resolving a number of common problems. However, different vendors generally focus on different potential benefits.
Before starting to search for customer feedback technology, organisations should determine what their customer feedback strategy is going to look like. Common goals may include:
- Increasing customer satisfaction: Implementing customer feedback tools is one of the easiest ways for business leaders to listen to the “voice of the customer” and use what they learn to enhance the purchasing journey. Companies can use analytical tools, surveys, and testimonials to determine friction and pain points in customer interactions.
- Enhancing employee performance: As the customer service landscape continues to evolve, companies need to commit to regularly upskilling and reskilling their staff. With insights into customer experience to guide them, organizations can more effectively determine where training and support may be necessary for staff.
- Boosting brand reputation: Customer feedback tools designed to collect reviews, testimonials and ratings are fantastic for improving business reputation. These responses from consumers can act as a form of “social proof” enhancing sales and marketing efforts.
Knowing exactly what they want to accomplish with feedback tools should help business leaders to determine what sorts of essential features a feedback solution should offer.
Step 2: Connect Feedback to Your Full CX Strategy
Collecting and using customer feedback is a data-driven strategy for any business in search of enhanced CX results. Like most data-driven solutions, this methodology works best when its connected to other insights and information from throughout the business landscape. With this in mind, it’s essential for business leaders to link their feedback solutions to the rest of the tech stack.
Fortunately, many CCaaS and CRM leaders are already beginning to implement feedback solutions into their existing platforms. However, companies buying standalone tools for collecting reviews and testimonials may need to consider looking into integration and API options.
A good customer feedback solution should combine effectively with the contact centre, and all of the available channels business leaders use to interact with customers. It should also link to CRM and audience profiling tools, customer journey mapping solutions, and even AI analytics services.
In some cases, certain companies may want to connect feedback tools with workforce engagement services designed to keep employees motivated and focused. Providing real-time insights into customer sentiment and experience can help to ensure employees in a distributed environment are paying attention to essential metrics in their work.
Step 3: Look for Tools to Turn Data into Actionable Insights
Collecting customer feedback is only the first step in an effective strategy for leveraging the “voice of the customer” in the CX-focused landscape. Feedback can come in many forms, from ratings given on a scale, to written reviews, spoken testimonials, and even sentiment analysis. Converting this raw data into actionable insights is critical for achieving a good return on investment.
There are various tools for customer feedback in the CX environment today which come with capabilities to help organisations leverage the data they collect. AI-enhanced reporting and analytical tools can look for trends and patterns in feedback human beings would otherwise miss. They can also assist with combining data from different sources into one clear customer journey map.
Certain solutions for customer feedback will also come with automation elements built-in. Automated tools can assist with collecting information from clients at the end of a discussion or interaction, reducing the amount of after-call work for agents. Automation features can also send crucial information from clients directly to the CRM environment, where they can be combined with sentiment analysis and other insights for profiling.
In some situations, it’s even possible to set up alerts and notifications for leaders in the business when a system detects a pattern of negative reviews from a specific department, employee, or in relation to a particular product or service.
Step 4: Empower Employees
To get the most out of any customer feedback tool, companies should be ensuring their staff members can really make the most out of the system. The technology available needs to be easy to use for both staff members leveraging insights, and customers hoping to leave reviews.
Team members should have access to pre-made templates for creating surveys and feedback requests, so they can maintain a consistent voice for the business. It’s also worth looking into solutions which allow companies to build individual dashboards of crucial metrics for their staff members to keep track of. These dashboards can be particularly useful when engaging remote and hybrid staff.
Customer feedback tools also need to be pre-equipped with solutions which help businesses to maintain high levels of compliance when dealing with personal information and details about customers. As regulatory guidelines continue to evolve, many solutions are emerging to give business leaders control over which information is stored and redacted in each review.
Ensuring the right security and compliance strategies in place will empower employees to learn from feedback, without putting the company at risk.
