How to Collect Feedback and Improve Customer Experience

How to Collect Actionable Feedback and Improve Customer Experience

September 23, 2021

How to Collect Actionable Feedback and Improve Customer Experience

September 23, 2021

All companies collect customer feedback in one way or another. How can you turn all this data into operational insights, that can be used to improve the overall customer experience?

Let’s look at some best practices.

Optimizing your Surveys

First, the survey. Think of surveys as part of the customer journey. Answering a survey should be a pleasant experience. You should design it to be as easy as possible for the customer.

5 Customer Survey Best Practices

• Short: your customers receive a lot of emails and various surveys every day. To ensure the best response rate, make sure your survey is as short as possible (only a few questions). If you have more than 3 or 4 questions, your survey should be displayed on 2-3 pages.
• Responsive: check that your survey can be answered easily on any type of screen, so that the experience is as smooth as possible, regardless the device.
• Attractive: your survey should look nice, with great visuals that highlight your brand, as well as a modern design.
• Connected to the point of contact: make sure the customer understands why he is being asked to answer a survey. Customize the survey with information about the point of contact. For example, if you sent out a survey after an in-store purchase, make sure to clearly mention the date and location of the store, either directly in the email or in the survey itself.

• Don’t overwhelm your customers: set up rules in your survey tool, so that your customers don’t receive a survey every time they interact with you. For an in-store purchase, one survey per quarter is enough. If you send more, you risk annoying your customers. Even if they respond, you won’t get any new insights compared to the previous survey, as the customer won’t have anything new to say.

By following these best practices, you will optimize your response rate, and thus collect more feedback.

Collecting Useful Insights

The second step is to make sure the feedback you collect is full of interesting insights for your business.

You may have various objectives regarding your Voice of the Customer program: increasing sales, building loyalty, improving processes, products or services, working on pain points, standing out from the competition, etc.

Depending on your objective, the survey should be sent at different points of contact along your customer journey. If you need insights about the shopping experience in your physical store, you should send a survey directly after a purchase or at the very latest the day after, while the experience is still fresh in the customer’s mind.

However, if you wish to receive a detailed review of your product, wait 1 or 2 weeks before sending the survey. This gives the customer enough time to make full use of your product and give you precise insights.

Customer journeys are becoming increasingly complex, mainly due to the Covid crisis. The spread of digital customer journeys has accelerated, as well as hybrid journeys, which are part physical and part digital.

To collect actionable feedback, you should study all your customer journeys, from beginning to end. Depending on your objectives, select the most appropriate contact points.Furthermore, you also have to select the right channel for the right point of contact. Which channel will be the most effective to reach your customers and get a response? Depending on the customer journey, there are various channels suited to sending a survey: email, text message, pop-ups, on-page surveys, phone surveys, chatbots, etc.

Choosing the right channel will also depend on your database. How many emails and phone numbers do you have? Should you enrich your database (by expanding your customer loyalty program for example) before launching a large-scale campaign?

Lastly, you should also take into consideration the type of customer you are speaking to. Are they senior customers, or millennial customers? This will impact your choice of channel, as you should always use the most appropriate channel for your customers.

From Feedback to Action Plans

An efficient survey, sent at the right time, on the right channel, will provide you with customer comments containing a lot of precious information, based on your needs.

But how can you transform all these reviews and feedback into actionable insights?

A customer-centric strategy enables you to centralize and analyze all your customer feedback, synthesize it and turn it into action plans.

Skeepers offers a wide-range of analysis features, namely an automatic and semi-automatic semantic analysis. By analyzing customer comments, you can identify your strengths and weaknesses and prioritize your action plans by determining what pain points cause the most dissatisfaction.

Let’s say that in your network of stores, 10% of your customers think the waiting time is too long. If, in a specific store, 20% of customers think that the waiting time is too long, it becomes clear that fixing this waiting time is a priority, and the store manager can immediately implement an action plan.

This information can be found easily on the Skeepers platform in just a few clicks. Thus, in the whole network, at every level, every member of the company can act to improve the customer experience, as is also true at the C-level.

Analyzing customer feedback allows you to detect trends and weak signals and improve your products and services. Action plans to address these issues have to be coordinated at a regional or national level, and the Skeepers CX platform also offers global analysis to help you make the right decisions.

To transform customer feedback into actionable insights, you should also design a strategy to share the information with your teams in the field and share the Voice of the Customer throughout the company. By sharing the right level of information with the right person at the right time, your teams will be able to act immediately to improve the customer experience.

Lastly, make sure you have all the tools to engage your teams around your CX platforms. Share customer culture throughout your company, and make the customer experience a priority for everyone.

For example, setting up customized dashboards for your teams, showcasing custom information (VoC KPIs, customer comments etc…) for their specific needs, is a great way to engage employees and put the customer at the heart of their daily work.

Conclusion

Implementing the best practices mentioned above, is the first step to a customer-centric strategy. They will enable you to collect actionable feedback and improve your customer experience. However, this is just the beginning of an overall customer feedback management strategy, as improving customer satisfaction will be your main asset to boost sales and ROI.

Want to start leveraging your customer feedback? Contact us!