The Ultimate Customer Feedback Strategy Guide

What Is Customer Feedback?

Simply put, customer feedback represents the totality of customer comments, opinions, and suggestions. Collecting customer feedback is essential to the growth and development of any business. From the local bakery to the largest enterprises in the world, measuring customer satisfaction is the fuel behind most changes in the product or services being offered.

Creating a feedback strategy that works and continuously provides you with valuable customer insight isn’t an easy task. It’s not an impossible one either. We’ll show you exactly what consumer feedback is, its importance, and how to collect it correctly.

Let’s roll!

What is a Customer Feedback Strategy?

In short, a customer feedback strategy is the sum of all feedback tactics you plan to implement to collect and categorize customer feedback, as well as measure customer satisfaction in a healthy and growth-oriented way.

Every business will have different strategies for collecting customers’ feedback. However, some of the main ideas tend to be common to all successful businesses. In this piece, we will discuss the essentials of proper feedback, so you can grow your business by truly listening to your customers.

Why Collect Customer Feedback?

The aforementioned definition might seem dull, but there are very important reasons that make consumer feedback a key ingredient for success. Why should a business collect feedback?

• When you gather customer feedback from customers, it helps you improve your product or service. All the feedback you receive on your product or service can help you create better versions of it based on your customers’ opinions and issues.
• It connects you to your customers and makes them feel part of your story. Giving your customers a voice and, allowing them to communicate with you, having an emotional response to your business allows you to connect with your customers in a most genuine way.
• It helps you increase customer loyalty. Asking for feedback makes people want to come back to your business again and again, precisely because their voice is heard.
• Even when it’s negative, you can use it to put your business in a good light. If your customer feedback strategy involves responding to negative feedback quickly and in a way that opens a dialogue with an upset customer, you’ll put your brand in a good light.
• It helps you be more persuasive with new leads. Most people check for online reviews before they buy something, so publicly shared feedback and reviews help you convince them to buy from you.
• It helps you improve your website. Your customer feedback questions don’t have to be about the product or service you offer only! They can be about your website or app too. Asking the right questions will help you optimize your website for better user experience and conversions.
• It helps you create offers tailored for your customers’ needs. How could you know what people want if you don’t ask them? The right customer feedback questionnaire can provide you with insight into what kind of offers your customers are looking for, so that you can create them.
• It improves customer satisfaction. The more you ask your customers about your product, the more you learn, the more you improve your product, and the more you can boost the customer satisfaction score.
• It gives you a better understanding of which of your marketing channels works best. Simply asking your customers on which channels they found you can help you better understand which of your marketing channels are most successful for your business.
• It helps your content marketing strategy. Not sure if people are actually enjoying your content (or finding it useful)? Ask them! Together with the data you gather from Google Analytics and other tools, a customer survey on your content can completely overhaul your strategy and take you in the right direction.
• It helps you understand and validate your buyer personas. Creating buyer personas is essential for the success of every marketing campaign you run. However, buyer personas “on paper” and “real life” personas might not always match — and a well-built customer survey can help you better understand and validate your quantitative research-based personas.
• It helps you fine-tune your messaging. Once you understand who your users are and what they’re looking for, you can use customer feedback to create better messages for them.

How to Collect Customer Feedback

Collecting feedback can sometimes feel like a daunting task. How do you do it? Do you just go out and randomly ask people what they think about your business? How to get consumer feedback in a world that’s incredibly noisy — except when you actually want people to speak up?

Clearly, feedback surveys that go out without a clear customer feedback strategy don’t work out well. You need to plan this ahead and make sure that all your feedback collection efforts are properly put together.

It all starts with understanding the feedback loop, which we’ve described below. Once you understand the basics for building a customer feedback strategy that works, you should also dive into the main types of customer feedback. You should also learn more about the main feedback collection strategies, the most common feedback methods, and tools, as well as how to actually use customer feedback to grow your business.

The Customer Feedback Loop is a four-stage feedback system that helps you generate meaningful responses to the feedback you receive from your customers. You can also create surveys that help you from multiple points of view (such as improving customer loyalty and customer satisfaction, making adjustments to your product and pricing, and so on.)

The four stages of a Customer Feedback Loop are the following:

This Feedback Loop is also known as ACAF, for the initials of each stage in the cycle. Each of these stages comes with its own particularities.

OK, now that you know why consumer feedback is important and how to structure your feedback cycle, let’s take a look at some of the main types of customer feedback.

Types of Customer Feedback

Not all client feedback is created alike. Different types of customer feedback are used in different situations (and for different kinds of questions, goals, and target audiences). The most common types of such feedback include:

Customer Feedback Collection Strategies

Just as there are many types of feedback, there are also many types of feedback collection strategies you can use. Some of the most popular ones include:

• Sending follow-up emails. A quick follow-up email after a sales call or an interaction could be a good opportunity for you to ask for feedback from customers (or leads, if you want to learn why they didn’t end up buying, for example).
• Recording sales calls. Obviously, sales calls aim for different things other than feedback. However, if you can record them (i.e. if you have permission to do it), you might be able to draw some important tips from them.
• Sending SMS surveys. Sometimes, old-school SMS surveys are a very valid and efficient option. Of course, they have to be very short (limit yourself to one question per SMS), but they might work (for example, after a phone call with a Customer Care representative).
• Reviewing live chat transcripts. Again, the main purpose of live chat support is’t feedback in the proper sense of the word. However, reviewing the transcripts can help you better understand your customers’ pain points and likes.
• Asking for feedback once a product has been delivered. If you run an eCommerce business, you can ask customers for feedback once the product has been delivered (e.g. you can ask them if the service was satisfactory via a quick email).
• Offering an incentive. People tend to be reserved when it comes to spending time on feedback surveys and questionnaires. However, if you offer them an incentive (such as a giveaway or a discount), they’ll be more willing to do it.
• Conducting customer interviews. Asking questions in a form or survey is one thing. Meeting your customers face-to-face (or over the phone/ video calls) is a completely different thing. Customer interviews tend to be one of the greatest sources of information when you want to better understand why there might be a general tendency in your customers to believe something about your product.
• Using Social Media listening tools. The beauty of the internet is that people use it to talk about, well, stuff. And that “stuff” might also be your product (or service). Social Media listening tools allow you to track when your brand is mentioned and “eavesdrop” into public conversations people are having about it. Consequently, this will enable you to learn more about how your product is perceived “out there”.
• Ask for a rating in a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. An NPS survey is very useful when it comes to identifying your brand’s promoters and detractors. To learn more about it, kindly check out this extensive piece we wrote on the Net Promoter Score.
• Use on-page pop-up surveys. OK, nobody likes pop-ups interrupting their experience. However, they can sometimes be quite useful, especially if timed correctly.
• Set up end of Customer Support interaction surveys. Quick surveys (of one-two questions) prompted at the end of all Customer Support interactions (via email or live chat) can help you learn more about the quality of your Customer Support services and the interactions people might have with it.

Customer Feedback Management Tools

There are a lot of feedback tools you can use, such as:

• A form builder (for surveys, questionnaires, complaint forms, and so on)
• A Social Media listening tool (to see what people say about you on Social Media)
• A chatbot (which you can trigger to send automatic quick surveys at the end of Customer Support interactions)
• An email automation tool (which you can integrate with your forms and send out scheduled surveys to your customers)

How to Use Customer Feedback

Collecting customer feedback is one thing — acting on it is a different thing.

It’s clearly not enough to simply collect survey answers and opinions. No matter how many of them you have, they don’t mean much if you don’t act on the matters pointed out as well. This is exactly why the aforementioned feedback cycle is so important. If you adhere to it and you set up processes when it comes to fixing issues, customer feedback will prove to be simply priceless.

Implementing feedback is just as crucial as collecting it. Make sure your customer feedback strategy doesn’t revolve just around how you measure customer feedback and how customers feel about your product. Take all your customer feedback as the foundation of an actionable strategy where addressing customer issues (particularly from the most unhappy customers) is at the core of your efforts.

Implementing feedback is just as crucial as collecting it. Make sure your customer feedback strategy doesn’t revolve just around how you measure customer feedback and how customers feel about your product. Take all your customer feedback as the foundation of an actionable strategy where addressing customer issues (particularly from the most unhappy customers) is at the core of your efforts.

Yes, a high customer effort score or high overall customer satisfaction levels can be very satisfying. But you’re only as good as you treat your most unhappy customers — so encourage people to leave you actionable feedback that fuels your growth.

Customer Feedback Collection Tips

Aside from everything mentioned in this piece, there are also some feedback collection tips you might want to keep in mind. Of course, entire books could be written about this — but the following tips are some of the most important you should use:

• Use the best possible methods of collecting feedback. As we mentioned above, there are many types of feedback you can collect. Of course, each and every one of them has its own pros and cons. Thus, it’s crucial for you to weigh all the options before making a decision (and determine which ones should be used in which circumstances).
• Look for hidden meaning in your customers’ feedback. Customer feedback is just that — customer feedback. It comes from your customers’ perspective. Consequently, the messages you receive should be interpreted with that in mind (and not with any other kind of emphasis or interpretation).
• Know your customers. In order to interpret and act upon feedback, you need to know who those customers are. After all, two people can have different reasons to provide negative feedback about the same aspect of your product or service.
• Connect everything together. As you collect feedback, you’ll find out that there’s no such thing as “good” or “bad” feedback — there’s only “factual” and “hypothetical”. Therefore, it’s crucial for you to connect everything together (and make it work for your business).
• Be wise about your surveys. The survey questions you use, the way you order them, and how many of them you include in a survey are all essential factors to consider. Make sure you create surveys that are short, sweet, and to the point — anything longer than a few questions will only irritate customers (and make you miss the mark in terms of what you want to learn from the survey). If you’re looking for customer survey questions you could include in your forms, check out this piece, as it includes no less than one hundred survey questions you can use.
• Great design goes a long way. When it comes to surveys and how customers interact with your brand, great design can help you make your forms and questionnaires a lot more attractive and “friendly” for your users.
• Be sure to let customers know their data and their opinions are well-protected and listened to. Abiding by GDPR and other regulations isn’t only a matter of legislation, but also a matter of smoothing out the connection between you and your clients.
• Always address and respond to negative feedback as soon as possible. This will increase people’s trust in your brand and it’ll show your business as a transparent one that’s willing to fix issues, rather than sweep them under the carpet.

Customer feedback can be a complicated affair, but, as mentioned in the beginning, it’s not one that’s impossible to manage. With the right processes in place and a mindset focused on customers, getting feedback from customers can be your best ally when it comes to growth.

Listen carefully to what people have to say, improve, and make your business a truly customer-centric one — it’s one of the best ways to ensure success regardless of your industry or business’ size.

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