The customer feedback is one of the most valuable asset for any business. It is extremely important for a business to understand what customers are liking and what they are not liking or what is working for them or what is not working. Especially businesses who are operating in Dubai or anywhere in the UAE, the market is very competitive and the customer’s expectations and market trends are ever-changing. The customer feedback data not only provides a deeper insight to the customers’ minds but it also help businesses to identify the areas of improvement and help them in assessing their strategies and business processes.
For every customer-centric business the customer satisfaction is their top priority. The customer satisfaction and customer happiness lead to customer loyalty. A loyal customer stays with the businesses, keep on purchasing from the businesses, help promoting and building a good brand image and a loyal customer is nine to twelve time less-expensive to sell to than acquiring a new sale.
See Also: Why Your Business Needs a Customer Feedback System?
The customer feedback is collected through multiple channels and the results are of several different types and categories. Each customer feedback campaign could be different from the other. This makes it very complex to consolidate all the data coming from different customer feedback collection channels. That is why the customer feedback management is very difficult and critical. The customer feedback management enables a businesses to compile all different types and sources of customer feedback data into a single actionable report or format.
A modern digital customer feedback system help businesses dealing with many challenges. The customer feedback management enable a business to streamline their efforts and strategies according to the customer feedback to ensure maximum improvement in all relevant aspects of the customer journey and other related business processes. That is why in this blog we will discuss proven practices for successful customer feedback management:
1. Set Goals and Objectives
For any digital campaign or any other strategic move the business must set goals and objectives. For customer feedback campaign setting up goals and defining objectives is crucial. Without clear goals and objectives you will end up getting scattered data, it will be difficult to comb through different types and sources of the customer feedback data to understand patterns. That is why it is crucial to set up goals, such as understanding the customer journey, their experience with sales or support team, or for product development, etc. That is how the customer feedback campaign should be planned.
Once clear goals are set and campaign objectives are defined, the business can chose appropriate customer feedback survey types and channels to collect the required feedback data. This will improve the data accuracy and the quality. The customer feedback collection campaign cost both human resource and money and setting up realistic goals and clear objectives can save a lot of resources as well. This is where a digital customer feedback system steps in, it facilitate businesses implementing best practices for customer feedback data collection and analysis.
2. Setup a Customer Feedback Campaign and Surveys
Once the campaign goals and objectives are set, it is a lot easier to setup a customer feedback campaign. There are tons of tools available in the market. It is better to use a well-reputed customer feedback system such as RSI Customer Feedback System. The customer feedback system will allow you to automate several tasks and will help collecting data in simpler formats. Leveraging customer feedback system for business growth can be a game changer in rapidly evolving and dynamic markets such as in Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and broader UAE.
The customer feedback systems also have in-built analytical and statistical tools that enable businesses to compile various report formats and even allow them to link the customer feedback data to other systems such as CRM, ERP or central information center of the organization. On top of that a standard customer feedback system also allow multiple channels to conduct surveys and collect customer feedback and compile them all in customized reporting formats.
There are several customer feedback collection surveys and data types however, following are the most commonly used customer feedback types:
2.1. NPS Score or Net Promoter Score
The NPS Score (Net Promoter Score) is considered to be the overall ranking or rating of the customer satisfaction. Businesses use this customer feedback type all the time to collect feedback data from large group of targeted audience. Mainly the NPS Score is collected after the sale/service or interaction. The NPS Score is also collected on monthly, quarterly and annual bases. The NPS Score customer feedback survey have a basic questions like the following:
- Please rate on the scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you recommend us to your friends, family or coworkers?
The data collected is in the range of 0 to 10 and segregated in three sets. The response from 0 to 6 never recommend, the 7 to 8 rarely recommend and the 9 to 10 are most likely to recommend.
2.2. CES Score or Customer Effort Score
The customer effort score or CES Score is a very crucial piece of information. It provide precise understanding of the difficulties and problems your customers are facing during their customer journey. The data that is collected from CES Score surveys will provide you the deeper and most accurate understanding of the factors that are impacting your customer happiness and customer satisfaction. The questions are usually pointed towards a particular aspect or step of the customer journey. For example:
- How easy or difficult it was to make the payment from our self-service POS kiosk?
- How easy or difficult it was to get the solution of your problem [problem name or type]?
The data collected is well organized and can be very helpful in prioritizing the plan of action for future. It is very important to understand what to collect and when with your customer feedback system. Usually the answers are taken in the range from 1 to 7 where 1 to 3 is considered negative, the 4 is neutral and the 5 to 7 is taken as a positive feedback. Some modern customer feedback systems also allow collecting the data in the range of 1 to 5 where 1 to 3 is taken as negative and 4 to 5 are taken as positive customer feedbacks. However, for better accuracy the recommended range is 1 to 7.
2.3. CSAT Score or Customer Satisfaction Score
The customer satisfaction score or CSAT Score is a general satisfaction survey, it asks about a particular topic instead of the overall service or experience. The purpose of CSAT Score is to highlight the areas of improvement and to understand customers’ liking and disliking. Usually only a single question is asked but businesses can also add a follow up question or conditional question to cover more topics in a single survey. Here is a CSAT score’s question format:
- How satisfied are you with the new feature that we added in our product/service?
The answer is usually a smiley scale or happiness meter. General 5 star rating can be used, but happiness meter perform well in most of the cases. The answers’ value 4 and 5 or corresponding smiley emoticon is taken as positive and the remaining are taken as negative feedback. Upon a negative feedback the customers can be asked to provide additional details or suggestion or comment via a plain text box. A customized customer feedback system help you personalize the surveys as per your needs and goals.
2.4. Customized Surveys or Long Surveys
The customized customer feedback surveys are usually longer than other surveys or polls and contain at least 6 to 10 questions. The businesses can add more questions as well depending upon the need of the data. These surveys are designed to cover a variety of different topics and different aspects of the customer journey and help businesses make enhancements in customer experience based on their feedback. There are several different types of questions, such as multiple choice, single answer, rating scales, conditional logics, follow up questions, etc. These surveys are designed to extract very detailed data from the customers and the data analysis is also very complex.
For each question the businesses can establish a rating mechanisms as per the above mentioned types to segregate different feedbacks to quantify the results. Sometimes the results are not quantifiable, as there could be customized answers as well as textual feedback which requires manual analysis. These surveys used to get very precise data on certain subjects and can provide extremely valuable data which can be used to make improvements and to set future strategies.
3. Run Customer Feedback Campaigns across Multiple Channels
The success of any customer feedback campaign depends on the data quantity and quality. For that it is extremely important to use appropriate channel. For example if you are collecting customer feedback data and want to know about the performance of your sales staff then a touch screen or small tablet can be placed on the service counters where the customers can instantly provide their feedback.
Another example is for post-sale customer feedback, such as if the business is collecting customer feedback about the quality or the product or service after the sale, the best way is to send them email or SMS and ask them for the feedback via online customer feedback survey.
These all are different mediums or channels to conduct customer feedback surveys. Businesses should build their customer feedback strategy wisely to leverage these channels for growth and competitive advantage. The high internet penetration and higher usage of smartphone in UAE makes online surveys ideal to collect customer feedback data. Moreover businesses can use smartphone apps, online web-portals, corporate websites, social media platforms and other digital channels to run customer feedback campaigns.
4. Analyze and Categorize Customer Feedback Data
The data analysis, categorization and reporting is the crucial part of customer feedback management. There is no use of any customer feedback campaign if the data you have collected is not usable. The purpose of the customer feedback campaign is not only to show you customers that you value them and care about their opinion but the actual purpose of collecting customer feedback data is to compile it into actionable reports which can help the management to make informed decisions and setup future policies and build new strategies to improve customer relationship, product/service quality and to ensure long term growth by increasing customer loyalty and customer retention.
These days it is very easy to analyze the customer feedback data. The modern customer feedback system offer integration with various channels and systems which enable businesses to easily map and synchronize data as per their need and convenience.
The in-built analysis tools make analysis simpler and also help detecting patterns and trends. Here are a few example of the data categories that can be used to evaluate different aspects of the customer journey and customer interactions:
- Pre-sale Interaction: This data is collected by asking customers questions about the information or communication done prior to their conversion or during their pre-sale interaction with the business and its respective channels/staff.
- Customer Experience and Post-Sale Feedback: This data is usually about the customer experience about the product/service, staff or any other aspect of the customer journey such as general satisfaction and customer effort score.
- Customer Support Feedback: The customer support is considered to be the biggest differentiator in 2021 and 2022. Especially for the service based industries. There is no set standard or rule for the customer support, it is all about making continuous improvements and learning from the experience of the customers and the staff.
- Technical Feedback: The technical feedback is basically about the product development. It is mainly related to the features of the products and services. This data is very helpful in new product development and also provide insight of the ongoing market trends and customer’s expectations.
- Important Patterns and Trends: This is a kind of generic feedback, the data could be coming from several different sources/channels and also from multiple campaigns and surveys. The data is used to identify patterns and trends and is very helpful for future strategy building and new product development.
- General Feedback and Suggestions: These are the suggestion that customer provide mostly by comments and textual feedbacks and also by contacting directly to the businesses without asking them for the feedback. Most of the times the general suggestions are irrelevant but sometimes these suggestion can also indicate certain trends and patterns which are important.
- Low Priority Feedback: Mostly the customers who provide neutral answers or the inconclusive data which can impact the overall results should be discarded or marked as low priority feedback data. Such data is usually not included in the analysis as it can reduce the overall accuracy of the reports and results.
These are some of the most commonly used data categories. Obviously the businesses can also establish their own mechanisms to ensure the highest levels of data accuracy. But if the customer feedback data is categorized in the above mentioned categories, high quality and high accuracy of the reports and results can be achieved.
5. Distribute Customer Feedback Data
The primary role of a customer feedback system is to help businesses retaining their hard-earned customers. For a successful customer feedback management the customer feedback data should be categorized and distributed among the relevant departments, managers and teams. For example, if there is a technical feature of a product that customers are highlighting then it should be shared with the design and production team.
If the customers are complaining about the customer service, then that data should be shared with the customer service department and so on and so forth. It is extremely important that the customer feedback data is shared with the relevant department and personals. Only then the business would be able to take actions and make changes to fix any problem.
6. Take Actions and Close Feedback Loop
While taking actions or making changes several factors should be considered such as the financial aspects of the action, the urgency or importance of the actions and its effects on everything that is related to it. For example, if there is a technical defect or malfunction in a product and the customer are reporting it, then it should be fixed on the urgent bases and should be marked as of the highest priority. It is important to understand and evaluate the effects of the action, so feedback and consultation should be done from all relevant departments, managers and experts before taking any action.
Once actions are taken the business should inform its customers about them. This will give them a sense of importance and they will think that the business value their opinion and them as well. It improves customer relationship and increase customer loyalty as well. Informing customers about the actions taken on their feedback is called closing the feedback loop. A closed-loop customer feedback system is a great practice and it also help building a good brand image and reputation.
7. Analyze Customer Feedback System Stats to Improve Feedback Data
All modern customer feedback systems comes with in-built tools and system usage trackers. Such data is very helpful in improving the outcome of the customer feedback campaign. For example, there could be certain feedback channels that have higher conversion rate, there could be certain time and demographics which are producing more feedbacks. These statistics will help boosting the outcome of the customer feedback campaign.
Similarly the data quality can be analyzed, certain channels will produce high quality customer feedback data and some might not produce as that accurate data. These all things should be considered to schedule and run customer feedback campaigns to ensure maximum response rate with highest customer feedback data quality. These will help improving the customer feedback campaign and will also be very helpful in understanding certain patterns and trends.
8. Build Future Strategies and Innovate Ideas
Every customer have their own way of viewing things, hence everyone’s customer journey and experience is unique and so does their feedback. The customer feedback and their suggestions can be very helpful for brainstorming and businesses can innovate new ideas that can help them to improve their business processes, products/services, communications and much more. The businesses can completely transform their customer journey on the bases of the customer feedback data.
This will help businesses to build a customer-centric culture and make them more customer friendly. The customer feedback data also highlights the areas of improvements and provide a deeper understanding to customers’ needs, expectations and market trends. On the bases of that information business can setup their future strategies and make plans to be more customer centric and customer friendly.
See Also: Top 10 Self-Service Technologies for Business in UAE
Conclusion
The customer feedback management is not an easy feat unless you follow a plan and take certain precautions. The customer feedback management starts even before you start collecting customer feedback data. It starts with making a plan, setting up goals and defining objectives of the customer feedback campaign. The rest is dictated by the goals and objectives of the campaign. It is important to use suitable customer feedback channels and run customer feedback campaigns across multiple platforms. In this blog we have covered all important key point of customer feedback management starting from setting up goals till the analysis of the feedback data and taking actions.
If you will follow these steps you will surely be successful in your customer feedback campaigns. The key is to use an appropriate customer feedback collection tool which can help you manage the feedback more effectively. If you want to learn more about the subject or want to enquire about RSI Customer Feedback System please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
See Also: The Ultimate Guide to Execute a Customer Feedback Campaign