Customer feedback is integral to company growth. It enables businesses to understand how their operations work, provides insight on employee performance and shares the overall impression businesses leave with the customer.
In addition, customer feedback is a tool that can help tailor the experience and assist businesses in recovering at-risk customers.
However, experiencing the benefits of customer feedback means collecting it, and managing it effectively.
In this blog post, we’re taking a look at 6 ways to manage customer feedback in a productive and meaningful way, so you can generate greater customer satisfaction.
Respond To Customers In Real-Time
It was once said by American investor and business tycoon, Warren Buffet that “it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
With real-time feedback, you can address any issue or comment in the moment, and recover those at risk. Not only does it help build loyalty and brand advocates, but it also deters customers from sharing negative sentiments with others. Furthermore, by responding in real-time you reduce customer wait times and provide immediate transparency, two qualities that lead to more satisfied customers.
Segment Customer Feedback
When it comes to managing feedback effectively, segmenting is critical to ensure operations run smoothly and the right team is addressing the comment or inquiry. Whether you segment requests based on employee role, overall department, trending topic, or channel, segmenting feedback reduces time to serve, provides more accurate information, and keeps teams organized.
That said, in order to segment efficiently while reducing uplift for your team, a customer experience management solution is highly encouraged. With it, the whole process becomes automated, messages are automatically tagged and forward to teams as soon as the customer writes in with a review. This creates a streamlined approach to responding and taking action.
For example, if you own a restaurant and a customer writes a review about food quality, a customer experience platform like Loop can use Natural Language Processing, to tag the kitchen and management, while pointing out common trends in the conversation. This ensures the kitchen can address the poor quality of food while management talks to the customer. In addition, using the common trends, management can determine if the meal is one that is consistently rated poorly and is worth keeping on the menu.
Navigate Customers Offline
If a customer provides negative feedback online, it’s important to acknowledge and engage them as soon as possible. However, what’s more imperative, is to navigate the customer offline into a private conversation.
Navigating a customer offline can assist you in deterring more unwanted negative feedback online, in addition, it provides you and the customer a space to communicate in an authentic and meaningful way. By navigating offline, customers can feel more comfortable sharing more information and you can also obtain detailed feedback of the experience that you may not want to be shared online.
Close The Loop And Follow Up
You’ve probably heard of the phrase “Closed Loop Feedback”, a customer experience term used to describe a portion of the feedback process. To put it simply, closed-loop feedback is when a business responds or takes action to feedback submitted by a customer through an online or offline survey. By “closing the loop” businesses respond to feedback in a timely and effective fashion, directly or indirectly addressing customer concerns or praises to secure a positive customer experience.
When managing feedback, it’s not only important to read and respond to the customer but to also take action on the feedback provided. If their service was subpar, talk to your employee about what went wrong and how they can improve. If a customer received the wrong order and wrote in to complain, apologize and offer a refund or provide a discount on their next order. Taking action shows you’ve listened and that you care about their loyalty.
With that, if you’re looking to go the extra mile with your customer, it’s also great to follow up with customers and ensure they’re happy with the action you’ve taken to improve the experience. This is the final connection to the customer and can really help in making a lasting impression.
Use Data To Encourage Repeat Visits
After you’ve collected responses from customers, closed the loop, and ensured they’re satisfied, there’s one final step. From the surveys gathered, you now have a plethora of information at your fingertips that you can use to consistently improve the experience.
Take a look at trending topics from feedback, employees that constantly get praise or locations with the most positive feedback. Using the data from customer feedback you can better understand where to allocate money, time, and resources, to improve the overall experience.
Manage Customer Feedback With a Customer Experience Solution
When it comes to managing customer feedback, leveraging a sophisticated customer experience solution, can go a long way. The Loop Experience Platform, for instance, is a fortified solution with a plethora of tools you can leverage for guaranteed success. Here we break down how.
Firstly, with the Loop Experience Platform, you can manage all customer inquiries, comments, and feedback from a single unified inbox, accessible by any department you choose. This means no message gets left behind, and all customer conversations are siloed effectively. What’s more, conversations can be collected from a range of channels, both online and offline that teams can toggle through seamlessly. Whether your customer prefers writing in via Facebook Messenger or email, Loop aggregates all customer conversations and makes them simple to read.
Secondly, with Loop, you can automate the feedback process by tagging departments and key phrases to streamline communication. If a customer has a comment about room service, the conversation is effortlessly forwarded to that department and tagged accordingly, so immediate action can be taken. This ensures all customer messages are read by the correct team for the most accurate answer.
