When talking about feedback, things like online reviews and answers to surveys immediately come to mind. While those are valid sources, there are other places where you can discover useful insights about your customers’ expectations and experiences. In this article we want to help make you aware of different types of feedback, where you can find them and what to keep in mind when working with them.
Customer feedback is an essential aspect of becoming a customer-centric organisation. If you want to meet (or even better, exceed) your customers’ expectations, the first step is to fully understand them. This requires listening to your customers and figuring out how they experience every step of the customer journey. This is where customer feedback comes in. But with the amount of feedback channels available, how do you gather and use this valuable information effectively? Gathering feedback might seem like a daunting task, especially for small teams or companies who are just getting started with the process.
Indirect Feedback
With indirect feedback, customers give unsolicited feedback. You can find this type of feedback on many different platforms: from social media, to Google reviews or specific websites such as Trustpilot, Tripadvisor or Capterra. Keep in mind though that these channels usually contain feedback about the most extreme experiences. Customers are more likely to write an online review after a very bad or extremely good experience with your brand. This means that a large majority of customers whose expectations were met but not exceeded are not represented in this feedback. So while indirect feedback can help give you insights into what can truly make or break an experience, it is not representative of most of your customers.
How you can use this type of feedback:
- Identify the platform(s) your customers are most active on and focus on tracking those channels. Alternatively, registering your business on popular review websites within your industry can help centralize where customers share their opinion.
- In most of these cases, the feedback is accompanied with a rating. The ratings give you a general overview of customer satisfaction. Analysing the written text too, provides extra context and allows you to pinpoint the aspects your customers pay the most attention to.
Direct Feedback
With direct feedback, you actively ask your customers for their opinions. This can be done in many different ways, ranging from sending (automated) surveys after an interaction, feedback boxes on online touchpoints to customer interviews. This way, you also reach that large majority of your customers who don’t share their opinion in online reviews or on social media.
How you can use this type of feedback:
- Define a clear goal of why you want to gather feedback, then choose the right channel. Do you want to gauge overall customer satisfaction or loyalty? Then surveys and Net Promotor Scores are the best way to go. Looking for specific product feedback? Then a focus group or dedicated feedback boxes might be a better solution.
- When you ask for feedback, try to create a combination of questions that result in both quantitative and qualitative data. Similarly to indirect feedback, scores provide first insights but you need the context to properly interpret them and get actionable insights.
- Avoid constantly asking feedback from all of your customers at each point in the customer journey, though. Consumers are willing to make the effort every now and then, but not for each interaction they have with your brand.
Customer Service Interactions
Customers usually reach out to your customer service department with questions or complaints. Whether this is via chat, email or your contact form, the messages contain feedback that you can use to improve future customer interactions.
How you can use this type of feedback:
- Classifying tickets into categories can help you pinpoint recurring issues or questions. This information helps you in defining priorities on which improvements to tackle first.
- Of course (manually) labeling on ticket level provides some insights, but it is possible that customers mention more than one aspect of their experience in their email or chat message. This can also include positive feedback. By automatically analysing the entire text, you don’t miss any information.
- Finally, looking at the underlying sentiment or even the emotions provides more insights into how much of a priority this topic should be. If certain issues are consistently raised with strong negative emotions, this means that they might have a high impact on customer satisfaction.
Analytics of Digital Platforms
Customer centricity is as important face-to-face as online. That is why you should also fully understand how your customers interact with your online platforms, whether that is your website, webshop or mobile app. Asking for feedback about these interactions is one way of gathering insights, but in this case it can be useful to go beyond text and also look at (website) analytics. Tracking and analysing user behaviour can be useful on several levels.
How you can use this type of feedback:
- Find out which features are used the most or which pages your customers visit most often. This way, you can understand what truly resonates with your customers.
- Discover user experience issues. If your users always leave your website or app at a specific point, it might be because of a technical issue.
- Use this information as the basis for asking additional feedback from your customers. This way, you receive more context around their behaviour. You can adjust survey questions to specific user interactions or add the option to give feedback on pages where most users bounce.
Taking it One Step Further
Gathering feedback from all those sources is a good start, but of course the actual value comes from the analysis. Combining quantitative and qualitative data gives you the highest advantage to truly understand your customer. Scores are important and give you an overall overview of customer satisfaction. By understanding what your customers are writing, you can make informed decisions about new features, product updates or even marketing campaigns. As a result, the score will increase too.
AlfaSent can help you analyse written feedback and provide insights into topics, sentiments and emotions. Doing this automatically, will save your team a lot of time so they can focus on what really matters: responding to customer feedback and turning the insights into actions!