How Business Must Capture, Analyze and Act On Customer Feedback
The best way to stay in touch with customer needs and wants is by gathering customer feedback that must be useable and actionable. Customers’ feedback has become important to everyone in all type of businesses and industries.
However, how do you know if you are heading in the right direction? How do you know if your customers are happy with the experiences they get from using your product or service?
Alternatively, what are their likes and dislikes? How can you make your customers satisfied with your offerings?
You can get answers to all these questions by following a series of steps which first tend to capture the feedbacks, proceeded to analyze it and then to take relative actions to improve your offerings.
1 – Obtaining Feedback:
Customers’ feedback can be eye-opening. It can change the way you think and can let you make improvements if you are lacking at some point in satisfying your customers.
The most initial step is to gather the feedbacks from various avenues which could also include direct approach of asking the customer or can follow another medium too which is,
Voice of Customer:
Direct listening to the customers is one of the best ways to address your customers’ queries, capture their feedback and respond to their voices which can be effectively practiced by Voice of the Customer programs.
The program is about knowing the experience your customers get by using your product or service and by setting up such programs, a company can get a deep insight into customer preferences, suggestions, and complaints.
Now, how can you start with the VoC program to capture feedback? You can comprehensively run this program by using multiple touch points that include a direct conversation with a customer, filling survey forms, online chats, online surveys, sites rating, reviews and many other channels.
Think of what best you can do to capture feedback. Are your customers likely to speak up and record their concerns or they are more interested in filling out a review form?
Keeping up a range of mediums to record feedback is likely to keep yourself more connected to your customers.
Don’t let your customers contact you for the feedback, you must proactively reach them to solicit feedback through a simple process, or they might ignore and probably will not show interest in providing feedback.
2 – Analyzing Feedback:
Companies are receiving feedbacks almost on a routine basis yet only a few feedbacks are deciphered into meanings. Analyzing customer feedback is a leading indicator that reveals whether your clients are likely to continue your brand, get themselves retained or will switch to any other brand.
If you do not analyze and act on customer feedbacks quickly, its value will lessen to almost nothing, so it depends on you that how well you use it to build trust.
Knowing the fact that the feedback has two extremes which are positive feedback and a negative feedback and your customer feedback would naturally be one of these two extremes.
Here comes of how well you analyze your customers’ responses as it is obvious that you need to deal with both. The positive responses assure that you are heading in the correct direction and you need to keep doing it to retain your customers.
On the other hand, the negative responses indicate that your customers are not happy with what you are doing which let you think of improving your processes, product lines, and services.
Negative responses do not sound good, but they help you identifying the gaps in your customer service on which you can act upon and improve it. How can you analyze the feedback is how you acquire feedback, which could be best done if you get into insights and monitor the behavior of your stakeholders like,
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What made the customers buy the products more often?
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Why are your goods and services still untouched?
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What complaints have you received so far and which are the standard ones?
Metrics are useful for finding out the traffic and clicks, but at times you need to get into behavioral sciences to grasp the hidden insights of your consumers’ behavior than just relying on numeric data.
The way how you analyze data will guide you towards closing the loops to resolve the issues and keep your brand stable and successful.
A brand is raised with consistent efforts starting from designing a professional logo, writing a good mission statement, creating brand’s persona, advertising it and letting it gain prominence and stability.
If the struggling time of a brand is not balanced with the post-sale experience, your brand will likely decline. So, you need to be putting in efforts at all the stages of your operations.
Moreover, keep thanking your positive customers for their positive feedbacks to make them feel acknowledged and retained. You are likely to get positive feedbacks if you provide quality products persistent to commitments made with the customers as it will help you in retaining your customers.
When you are studying customers’ results, there’s always going to be results that make you amaze, and you need to look for immediate actions with appropriate monitoring for a smooth flow of your operations.
3 – Acting on Feedback:
No doubt, customer feedbacks bring in a competitive advantage to your business but not by just collecting the data. It is how you act on the feedback makes a difference.
No matter, what you do and how you do, you always need an action plan to act accordingly, which must clearly identify the next steps of how to make improvements over a period.
Acting on feedback is quite a comprehensive level where you need to respond to all queries differently with an action plan. Your action plan should pinpoint improvements that need to be taken, along with a timeline.
As much as possible, anticipate the probable actions for each survey result before you start to implement them. It is all worthless if you do not act upon it and nothing fissures customer confidence more than identifying your customers’ concerns but keeping them unresolved.
For a strategic growth, you need to close the loops of all arising issues with an immediate and proper solution to pave the way for a profound brand reputation. Keep doing the steps that showed positive remarks and improve the shortfalls in your customer satisfaction level.
The more you improve, the more you get connected to your stakeholders.
Conclusion:
No one likes reading failure stories and negative comments about themselves. Listening is the cure for all, which not only addresses the concerns but also restores the customer’s trust and builds customer loyalty.
Building up a brand leads to another journey of delivering values and high satisfactory results for long which can only be done if we work for “OUR CUSTOMERS.”
Author Bio: Louis Martin is the Digital Marketing Strategist who has worked for several brands and helped them making their success stories. Being a marketing professional, his approach to the capacities to promote a brand is fantastic. Which makes him a valuable asset for all the organizations he has worked so far and might work in future. At his career start, he did freelance design projects and speedily made his way to the corporate world.