In the present day marketplace where the competition is very high and the customers are very demanding it is crucial to focus on customer loyalty. The loyal customers can generate the business which no other marketing campaign can does. That is why it is crucial to foster a customer-centric culture and offer a satisfactory experience. Business in Dubai and all around the UAE knows that very well, that is the reason the customer feedback campaigns have become a regular business process.
The customer feedback is the most convenient and easiest method to acquire the knowledge and insight of the factors that matters the most for your customers and your business. Collecting customer feedbacks on regular basis will ensure you will always remain on track and provide what your customers and targeted audience needs and expect from your brand. However, collecting customer feedback is not as that easy and effectively utilizing the customer feedback data to make an impact on the organizational level is even more difficult and complicated.
See Also: Key Features of a Customer Feedback System
The customer experience managers or business leaders can easily get overwhelmed by the sheer number of possibilities to tap into the customer feedback. There are simply so many channels and mediums which your audience and customer groups might use, that is why integrating a multi-channel digital feedback system is essential. In this blog we will enlist the best practices of collecting customer feedback data and utilizing it to make informed decisions and to align your business with your customers and audience.
See Also: 5 Types of Customer Feedback
What is Customer Feedback Management (CFM)?
Businesses often confuse customer feedback data collection and customer feedback management. However, the customer feedback management is much more than just the data collection. The customer feedback management is not just only involve collecting customer feedback data, but it also includes, processing the data into actionable reports and integrating it in important decision making processes. Furthermore the customer feedback management also include following up with your customers and informing them about what actions have been taken to address their concerns or to meet their needs and desires.
This whole process is called the customer feedback management or CFM. Usually businesses have a dedicated customer experience (CX) manager whose core responsibilities are to plan, monitor and execute the process. Obviously the manual customer feedback forms are not capable of supporting the modern customer feedback management processes, therefore business use digital customer feedback systems which are software-based solutions and can greatly improve the efficiency and efficacy.
See Also: 8 Proven Practices for Successful Customer Feedback Management
Best Practices of Collecting Customer Feedback
Customer Feedback System is the ideal solution to effectively collect customer feedback and close the feedback loop. Closing feedback loop is important for any customer feedback management campaign. Furthermore the digital customer feedback system also help analyzing and processing the data with in-built tools and help quickly sharing it with the stakeholders. In the present day fast-paced markets where the customer demands and trends are continuously evolving, it is impossible to achieve your goals with the traditional manual customer feedback methods. Here are the best practices to effectively collect and leverage the customer feedback data with the help of a digital customer feedback system:
See Also: What is Multichannel Customer Feedback and Why it is so Important?
Customer Feedback Best Practices: Set Goals and Objectives
Most of the time businesses failed to create a significant impact with their feedback campaign due to lack of planning and clear goals of the campaign. When you aimlessly collect customer feedback data, you try to collect as much data as possible, you try to utilize as many channels as possible, and so on. This maximize your efforts, and at the end you will fail to achieve any impactful objective. That is why it is crucial to set goals and define clear objectives of your customer feedback campaign before executing it. When you have a clear goal and set objectives as per your needs, you can collect precise data.
Targeted campaigns always tend to produce more positive impact. For example, if you want to evaluate the customer experience then your feedback campaign’s objective is clear, even you can narrow down to a specific touch point in the customer journey and understand your customer perspective on it. If you are developing new products you need specific questions to ask, and so on. Such objectives will not only amplify the impact of the campaign but will also significantly reduce your efforts and expense. You can target different objectives for different audience group and maximize your insight in similar fashion.
See Also: Leveraging Customer Feedback System for Business Growth
Customer Feedback Best Practices: Customize the Process as Per the Objectives
It is important to customize the process according to your needs. There are different types of customer feedback each is used to collect a different type of data, furthermore sometime the feedback should come from a particular user/customer group and so on. Therefore it is important to customize your customer feedback process according to your objectives. Here are some common customer feedback types:
- NPS Survey: The NPS or Net Promoter Score surveys are one of the most common metrics used to understand if your customer is satisfied enough to recommend your brand or products/services to others or not.
- CSAT Survey: The CSAT or Customer Satisfaction surveys are used to understand what percentage of your customers are satisfied. It is a fragmented approach and usually used for specific processes, touchpoints or aspects of the customer experience.
- CES Survey: CES or Customer Effort Score surveys are used to understand how easy or difficult it is for the customers to get something done. It is used to evaluate customer journey, internal processes, service mechanisms and various other processes.
- Long Surveys: The long surveys are usually used to get detailed insight and to acquire in-depth knowledge on a particular subject. The long surveys usually can have up to 30 questions or even more and it is a great tool to get comprehensive details and customer opinion.
You should choose the right process to collect the right data. That is the key to success of your customer feedback management activities. The modern customer feedback systems provide intuitive tools to easily and quickly create multiple surveys and push them through multiple channels. You can even schedule the surveys and you can also set triggers, such as you can send post-sale satisfaction survey via email as soon as someone make a purchase or visit your service center, etc. That is why it is important that the customer feedback process you chose should be able to server the purpose.
See Also: 7 Benefits of Customer Feedback System
Customer Feedback Best Practices: Integrate Multiple Channels
Integrating multiple customer feedback channels is also crucial for getting the desired results. For any customer feedback campaign there are two major aspects, one is the quality of the feedback data and the other is the quantity of the feedback data. Your questionnaire, the language of your survey, the timing and several other factors will determine the quality of the feedback. However, the quantity of the feedback largely depends on asking the question at the right time and through the right channel. Your customers would be divided into various groups based on the products/services they purchase, their demographics and also their location.
Different audience group would prefer different communication channels and the customer feedback survey type will also impact on the channel you would use. For example, if you have a 30 question long survey, you might not want to put it on in-premises touch screens or tablets, because 30 questions might take 10 to 12 minutes and no customer would want to spend that much time after getting the service, for such surveys, the emails and online links are the best. That is why you should integrate multiple channels such as emails, SMS, touchscreens/tablets, website forms, mobile applications, QR codes, social media, etc. Multiple channels will boost the quality and quantity of the data.
See Also: The Role of Customer Feedback in Personalizing User Experience
Customer Feedback Best Practices: Close the Feedback Loop
A multichannel customer feedback collection campaign can produce a wealth of valuable business intelligence data. But it doesn’t have any value unless it is utilized effectively. In order to get the full benefit of customer feedback data you should analyze it, share it with relevant leaders and stakeholders, take actions on the bases of conclusions you made and then follow up with the customers to let them know what is done regarding their concern, suggestion, complaint or feedback. This is what is called a closed loop customer feedback campaign. It is important to classify your feedback data on the bases of various factors, such as the priority, urgency, volume, etc.
This categorization and classification will help you to incorporate the conclusions and reports of the feedback data in planning and decision making processes. The customer feedback data should be shared with relevant managers, business leaders and any other stakeholders to increase its positive impact. Once the actions are taken or plans are set, a follow up with the customers could further help you gain customers’ trust. The customers took time to share their thought, suggestions and opinion, so it is important to respond back to them by telling them that their voice is heard and some actions been taken, this will also strengthen their relationship with the brand. That is why closing the loop is important for any customer feedback management campaign.
See Also: Overcoming Challenges in Customer Feedback Collection and Management
Customer Feedback Best Practices: Make it a Continuous Process
Here in Dubai and all around the UAE the most common mistake businesses made is to execute a customer feedback data collection campaign for a definite period of time and then stopped it. The service sector is much better in this regard, the service-based businesses usually collect customer feedback on regular bases, and especially in the service center they deploy permanent touch screens or tablets, to continuously collect customer feedback data.
However, that is not enough, you need a strategy for continuous customer feedback drive. The customer feedback is a crucial business process hence should be treated the same. The regular customer feedbacks will help you increase customer engagements and will also keep you informed about the latest updates in the markets and continuously evolving market trends. Regular email based surveys are proven to be very effective.
Furthermore the businesses can utilize their corporate website, social media, SMS, mobile application and dedicated customer feedback forms along with their important campaigns. This will help you establish a strong connection with your customers and it will tell them that their voice will always be heard. A digital customer feedback system is a great tool for the modern day customer feedback management it allow scheduling regular and time-based campaigns and also allow businesses to execute special or occasional campaigns as per their needs.
See Also: Why Your Business Needs a Customer Feedback System?
Conclusion
The customer feedback have become a crucial business process in the modern fast-paced and rapidly evolving markets. Businesses needs to cover their blind spots, sometimes guessing work and market research is not enough, you must have to ask your customers about their linking, disliking, their preference, their needs, their desires and their expectations. The customer feedback management will provide you a framework to streamline and organize your customer feedback campaigns. A digital customer feedback system is a very powerful tool, it help maximizing the outcome and impact of a customer feedback campaign and it greatly help businesses in reducing the resources, expense and efforts to conduct a customer feedback drive.
The customer feedback provide you innovative ideas which you can use in product development processes. It will help you highlight the areas of improvement and will provide you a better evaluation of you internal and external processes. In the present day the customer feedback can be used to evaluate and improve anything from communication to product features and even the employee behavior, everything can be improved if you have accurate and in-depth insight.
In this blog we have listed the best practices to conduct a customer feedback campaign and to improve your customer feedback management process. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you want our help to implement a modern highly effective and tailor-made customer feedback management system for your business, 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.
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