How to Gather and Analyze Customer Feedback and Use It to Grow
Your customer journey is one of the most important parts of your company’s operations. Mapping out this journey and ensuring that customers have a surprising and delightful experience at every step of their journey can be a challenging task. However, you can create a customer journey by analyzing numerous metrics and soliciting feedback from your customers.
So, we thought we would take a look at the various forms of feedback that you can gather from your customers. We unpacked how you can successfully analyze it and how you can use it to improve your company. Let’s get stuck straight in.
Use the Right Tools to Collect Feedback
You will want a tool that automates the whole CXM process from the ground up. You will want to listen to direct and indirect sources of customer feedback and act on them. By having complete visibility into key customer experience metrics, you are able to act on them every day and keep evolving your strategy to keep up with it. You will need a reliable CXM platform that provides operational and experiential data about what your customers want from your company and what they are saying about it.
This can help you integrate this data with the tools which allow you to collect, understand, and action customer feedback. Once you start getting this feedback and getting tangible results from feedback from your customers, you can start marking change points in your organization. You can identify what works, what doesn’t, and where you need to shift your attention.
Categorize the Feedback Into Useful Bundles
You will start to notice that you will be getting data from various touchpoints in the company. You will also be getting various different types of feedback. Some might be positive, some negative. Some will be useful, some will just be customer rants that you can or cannot ignore. The next step is to collate it, categorize it, and identify where it needs to be allocated for action or non-action.
Keep in mind that positive comments are just as valuable as complaints. Not only does it show you what is working and what excites your repeat customers, but it’s also great for staff morale. Positive feedback can encourage your employees, but it will go even further if you thank clients for their positive feedback. This will help you establish customer loyalty. Negative feedback is also valuable because it reveals areas in which your business needs to improve as well as the reasons why customers are leaving and not returning.
Pinpoint the Root Cause of the Problem
Make the analysis of root causes a priority for your organization. To do this, you will need to have a management system in place that will help sort through the reams of data. You will need to effectively qualify feedback and search through potentially large amounts of data to pick out what is relevant and what is not. In most cases, a large amount of data and information will point you in the direction of what is most urgent and what needs to be changed.
If you start seeing a repeated pattern of data, pay attention to it. In most cases, it will help you identify the root cause of a big problem. Sort this out before you tackle one of the smaller issues that data might reveal to you.
Use Data Outside of Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is not the only data and metrics you can gather for the customer experience journey. In fact, you have a plethora of information at your fingertips that give you more insight than just compliments and complaints about your company. Look at metrics coming from your social platforms, and your email tool and look at the data on your website itself. Google Analytics is a great tool that provides you with information about what is happening on your site and the traffic.
You can use GA to track how much traffic is coming into your site, where it is coming from, how it behaves, and where it either converts or drops off. This will tell you what campaigns are working, how much organic traffic is coming to your site, what is working in your sales funnel, and if there is something that needs to be altered. By combining this with data coming from your social tools and the metrics they provide you, you can understand what part of your marketing is working and what isn’t.
The Bottom Line
Gather as much feedback, data, information, and customer insights as you can. The more data you have, the more you can identify what is working in your company and what isn’t. You can map out future strategies and alter your customer strategy to cater to them.