The customer feedback is one of the most important and impactful aspect of customer relations. Businesses heavily rely on customer feedback for aligning their products and services with their targeted audience’s needs and expectations. The customer feedback providers a window to customers’ minds which is a great source of valuable insights. No one can deny the importance and impact of customer feedback in today’s world. However, most of the businesses found it very challenging and complicated. Businesses located in Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and broader UAE typically utilize a digital customer feedback system to collect and analyze customer feedback data. This digital customer feedback system offers a comprehensive solution to streamline customer feedback management processes. It can greatly improve efficiency and reduce cost for feedback collection as well.
A customer feedback system is a digital solution which comes with a very powerful and sophisticated software. Businesses can leverage customer feedback system to gather insight directly from the customers, which help them making informed and accurate decisions. UAE as a country have emerged as a very vibrant, dynamic and rapidly growing business hotspot in the region. This attracted various businesses and raised the market competition. In competitive markets, alignment with customer needs and expectations is crucial for long-term success and even for survival. The market conditions also contributed in rapid adaptation of modern digital customer feedback systems. However, when it comes to implementing a customer feedback system there are many challenges. In this blog we will discuss how businesses can implement an effective and efficient customer feedback system.
See Also: Leveraging Customer Feedback System for Business Growth
Overcoming Challenges in Implementing Customer Feedback Systems
Understanding the Basics of a Digital Customer Feedback System
Fundamentally a digital customer feedback system is a software-based solution which streamline data collection, analysis and insight generation. The insights are crucial for decision-making process, it is these decisions and actions that eventually improve everything. So, the customer feedback system help collecting, analyzing and integrating feedback data in essential business functions to help businesses improve their products, services and customer satisfaction. Here are the three main components of a customer feedback system:
- Data Collection Tools: A customer feedback offers multiple tools such as surveys, feedback forms, emails, touchscreens, mobile apps and multiple digital channels such as SMS, WhatsApp, etc. All these are communication channels, the customer feedback system utilize these channels and help businesses execute customized feedback campaigns with personalized questionnaires, short and long surveys, intuitive rating tools, scales, happiness meters, etc.
- Analytical Tools: Once the feedback data is collected, it then processed through smart AI-powered analytical tools. These analytical tools help identifying patterns, trends and hidden insights. These analytical tools interpret the raw feedback data into actionable reports. These reports help businesses identify their strengths and weaknesses. The customer feedback system also automate reporting process, and ensure every relevant personal or team gets instant updates.
- Decision-Making: Once the customer feedback data is materialized in actionable reports, now is the time to take action. This is the third and most important part of any feedback management process, this is where the real magic happens. Businesses utilize the feedback data and insights to make informed decision which results in improvement and alignment with customers. Integrating insights and analytical data also help making action plans for improvements.
Understanding the basics of a customer feedback system is crucial so businesses can decide which tools and strategies could be more beneficial for them. For example, if you are an online store, the emails and in-app feedback tools would be ideal for your audience. You can also use SMS and WhatsApp. However, if you are a bank or government service agency, then you must be needing on-premises touch-screen such as tablets or kiosk to collect feedback during or after the interaction with your service agents and so on.
That is why it is important to understand basics of a customer feedback system for better impact. The biggest advantage of implementing a customer feedback system is that it serves as bridge between customer expectations and business offerings. It also offers a continuous process and framework for systematic and continuous improvements which ensure a long-term success.
See Also: Overcoming Challenges in Customer Feedback Collection and Management
Understanding the Basics of a Digital Customer Feedback System
Most Common Challenges in Implementing a Customer Feedback System
Every industry has its own unique needs, and when it comes to individual business level, every business too has its own very unique needs. Every business evolves differently, that is what gives it competitive strength and differentiate it from others. Similarly when it comes to implement a customer feedback system, every business faces different challenges. However, there are some common aspects that every business can understand to minimize these challenges and to successfully resolve their problems. Here are a few most common challenges that every business could face during the implementation of a modern digital customer feedback system:
Lack of Clarity in Goals and Objectives
One of the most important and underrated aspect of customer feedback campaign is the determination of campaign goals and objectives. Businesses often doesn’t think much about setting up clear and realistic goals. Instead businesses tend to set vague goals and then create campaigns which most of the time fail to achieve those goals. Here are the two most common mistakes businesses do while collecting customer feedback data:
- Unfocused Strategy: Businesses often failed to determine what exactly they want to achieve or what aspect of customer journey they want to improve, instead businesses tend to set vague objectives, such as increasing the sales by 10-15%, etc.
- Overwhelming Amount of Data: Most of the time businesses collect large amount of feedback data, which overwhelmed them, and paralyze their analysis. This mostly caused in ineffective results and undermine the impact of the campaign.
When businesses fail to achieve their objectives their precious investments got wasted. Mostly businesses lack focus on the objectives which cause such issues. Businesses can easily avoid these problems by:
- Utilizing SMART Goals: The SMART Framework is very effective, it means Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound. This criteria help businesses set effective goals which are focused and help businesses generate actionable insights.
- Focus on Key Objectives: Another most important aspect to understand is to focus on only one or two key objectives. Instead of collecting feedback about 10 different subject matters, it is appropriate to focus only on two or three crucial areas.
When businesses have clear goals, and focused approach, they can leverage the full potential of each bit of feedback data collected. This will not only improve their feedback system but it will also help them reduce the cost and optimize the resources.
See Also: What is Multichannel Customer Feedback and Why it is so Important?
Lack of Clarity in Goals and Objectives
Low Customer Participation in Feedback Campaigns
There are two aspects of customer feedback data, the quantity and quality. Both heavily rely on the customer engagements. If your customer feedback system failed to engage your targeted audience, then you will never be able to collect the quantity of the data you require to ensure quality and impact of the insights. There could be many reasons that cause less interest and engagement in your campaigns:
- Too Many Requests: One of the biggest reason of low conversion is the frequent feedback requests. Since the digital customer feedback system enable businesses to send requests to customers without any effort, they made too many requests. Which results in survey fatigue, phenomenon determines low interest in feedback submission.
- Unclear Incentives: For any customer feedback campaign there is always an incentive offered customers to motivate them to submit their feedback. The time is money, the customers never invest their time in surveys until they clearly understand their importance. Therefore the purpose, objectives and consequent benefits should be clear to the customers.
Low participation or low conversion rate can greatly impact the feedback campaign’s results. It not only skew them but could also result in misinterpretation of customers’ sentiments. For example, let say you want to improve a particular feature of your product. For that you would be needing the feedback from as many customers as possible, to ensure you don’t remove or modify a feature which is already doing fine. In that particular case, let say only 5 or 10 percent of your customers share their opinion. Do you think it is wise to take action only on the bases of 5% opinions? That is why the quality and quantity both are equally important and crucial for the effectiveness of the customer feedback system.
See Also: 8 Proven Practices for Successful Customer Feedback Management
Here are a few tips to increase conversion rate or response rate for your feedback campaigns:
- Keep Your Questionnaire Short: It is always better to keep your surveys and questionnaires short, easy-to-understandable and focused only on a particular subject. Whenever you are creating a survey, think from customers’ perspective, keep your questions short, and use non-technical and easy-to-understandable language.
- Perform A/B Testing: The digital customer feedback system made it very easy to test multiple versions of your feedback questionnaires and surveys. You can test multiple versions of your surveys by sending them to a smaller sample and keep on improving it until you achieve the required response rate and then share it with a large audience.
- Offer Small Incentives: Offering small incentives could greatly increase the response rate. You can offer discount coupons, vouchers, loyalty points, or even free consultation, etc. to encourage your audience to submit their feedback. You can also communicate with your audience how important this survey is and how it could potentially improve their experience in future.
- Personalized Feedback Requests: Personalization always help increasing customers’ interest. By personalizing feedback requests you can easily increase the response rate to many folds. For example, sending personalized emails, mentioning customer’s name, details of their most recent interaction and other such details will make your customers feel more valued and connected.
Creating engaging feedback campaigns can greatly improve the effectiveness of the customer feedback system. The customer feedback management has become very complex over the time, it doesn’t only depend on the technical capabilities of your customer feedback system but it also depends on how you leverage and utilize these tools.
See Also: How to create Customer Feedback Surveys for Product Development?
Low Customer Participation in Feedback Campaigns
Data Management Challenges: Data Overload, Poor Data Categorization and Analysis
The digital customer feedback systems can integrate with multiple channels, and are capable of collecting feedback data from thousands upon thousands of customers in one day. Moreover with the rise of social media and several other digital channels the data influx makes data management a very challenging task. Although this abundance of feedback data can offer valuable insights, it is also very important to have right tools and strategy in place to fully leverage this large data influx. The large data influx also cause many challenges such as data categorization and data analysis. These challenges result in many inefficiencies and undermine the overall effectiveness of your customer feedback system. Here are a few challenges that are most common with large data influx:
- Handling Large Volume of Feedback Data: Thousands of Surveys, Online Reviews, Emails, Customer Calls, Feedbacks from Service Centers, Social Media feedbacks and many more. All these channels can quickly accumulate a large amount of feedback data.
- Identification of Actionable Insights: Managing structured data is very easy, however, managing and analyzing unstructured feedback data could be very challenging. Especially when the data is coming from multiple channels.
- Prioritizing Important Feedback: One of the biggest challenge with large feedback data influx is to prioritize the important and non-important feedbacks. Some issues and concerns need urgent actions and some doesn’t have huge impact that is why categorizing data is crucial.
- Inconsistent Data Types: The customer feedback data comes in various formats, types and languages. This make data categorization even more complex, and cause various issues such as duplicate efforts in addressing same subject, miscommunication, and delays in actions.
- Delayed Decision-Making: Poor data management results in inefficient data categorization, which obviously undermine the efficiency and results in delayed actions. Actually due to poor categorizations it is extremely difficult for different teams to access relevant data.
- Missed Insights and Poor Analysis: Without proper data categorization and effective data analysis business often missed out reoccurring issues, patterns and trends in the feedback data. Which is why businesses lost valuable opportunities to make improvements.
- Inefficient Resource Consumption: Manually managing large feedback data is not only difficult and time taking but it is also very expensive. Businesses need more human resource and labor to manually manage, categorize and analyze the feedback data.
The customer feedback management has emerged as one of the most powerful tool over the years. In today’s modern business landscape, businesses operating in Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and broader UAE knows the importance of customer alignment.
See Also: Importance of Customer Feedback Tool for Small Business Owners
Here are some tips that will help you overcoming the above mentioned challenges with feedback data management:
- Leveraging the AI and Smart Technologies: Dealing with unstructured data far bigger challenge than managing and analyzing the structured data. The AI (Artificial Intelligence) plays a crucial role in customer feedback management. The NLP (Natural Language Processing) models and ML (Machine Learning) can greatly simplify the process. The AI also have capability to analyze and gauge the sentiments form unstructured feedback data.
- Centralized Feedback Data Collection: The digital customer feedback system is built on smart software which has capabilities to centralize multiple feedback channels and consolidate data into a centralized data repository. This avoid siloed data storages which is a major cause of several inefficiencies and prevent different teams and management to access data. This also increase the efforts and resources to streamline the feedback data.
- Create a Standardized Taxonomy: It is crucial to develop a consistent and standardized framework and strategy to categorize the feedback data. This standard taxonomy should be implemented throughout the organizations and all relevant teams should adhere to these rules. This will help you organize the feedback data and when standardized rules are implemented the data analysis become very convenient.
- Leverage Automation for Data Categorization: One of the biggest advantage of the customer feedback system is that businesses can use its in-built tools to define and implement criteria. Businesses can utilize ML and NLP models to implement these policies automatically. The centralized feedback data repository coupled with automated categorization can greatly improve efficiency and reduce human efforts.
- Utilize Visual and Graphical Dashboards: Data categorization is one of the most important part of the customer feedback management. Digital customer feedback systems comes with in-built visual and graphical dashboard. These dashboard allow instant summary of the feedback data and help management quickly take actions and identify areas of improvements. The customized reporting and automated data sharing help integrating feedback data in decision-making process.
Feedback data categorization, analysis and diversity in data can become very challenging. The customer feedback data can be goldmine of insights that can greatly improve your competitive advantage and align you with your customers. However, this is only possible when you have an efficient customer feedback system and effective feedback management strategies in place.
See Also: 11 Customer Feedback Examples for Business Success
Data Management Challenges: Data Overload, Poor Data Categorization and Analysis
Balancing Personalization and Automation
Businesses have to understand that where the automation simplify everything and drive efficiency, it also lacks human touch. No matter how advance we get, the human touch still has its importance and impact. This is why when businesses are implementing a customer feedback system, they should understand the importance of human touch. This is where the personalization and automation overlap each other. Here are some challenges that need to be taken seriously to ensure higher impact and efficiency of a modern digital customer feedback system:
- Over-Reliance on Automation: The level of convenience and efficiency automation brought could easily distract businesses form adding adequate personalization or human touch in their communication and digital interactions.
- Poor Communication: When the businesses implement a customer feedback system they start running multiple campaigns, and usually end up having more frequent feedback campaigns. However, the customers are left wondering if any action is taken on their feedback or not.
The automation is always good but need mindful strategy. Implementing a customer feedback system is not just to reduce the resources or driving efficiency in relevant business processes, but it is a great strategic move which can greatly improve the customer relationships and satisfaction. Here are a few tips which can help businesses effectively implementing the customer feedback system:
- Use Automation Strategically: It is great to automate repetitive and lengthy tasks, which can greatly reduce cost. However, the communication should be personalized, the messaging and follow-ups should be personalized.
- Audience Segmentation: It is crucial to segment audience to improve personalization. When the follow-up and communications are directed and focused on the bases of demographics, customer category, and persona, it can greatly improve customer satisfaction.
- Close the Feedback Loop: A closed-loop customer feedback system have a standard practice of follow ups. When a customer submit a feedback and they receive a follow up email, message or call, they feel more valued and they know their opinion is taken seriously.
Combining the automation with personalization can greatly improve the customer satisfaction and consequently the impact of your customer feedback system. The primary purpose of a customer feedback system is to align businesses with customer needs, expectations and market trends. The digital customer feedback system and a mindful feedback management strategy can be a game changer.
See Also: The Ultimate Guide to Execute a Customer Feedback Campaign
Balancing Personalization and Automation
Conclusion
The customer feedback system is undeniably one of the most important factor for long-term business success. The customer feedback is the cornerstone of valuable insights, driving efficiency, fostering customer loyalty and gaining competitive advantage. However, businesses often doesn’t realize that the customer feedback is not only about collecting the data but it requires a mindful strategy and right feedback collection, analysis and management tool to effectively leverage the insights. The customer demands are rising day by day, the market landscape is evolving at a rapid pace and the competition is getting tougher. In such markets such as Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and broader UAE businesses are heavily relying on digital customer feedback system to acquire the most accurate insights.
The modern digital customer feedback systems enable businesses to collect valuable customer feedback data, analyze it and integrate insights into decision-making processes. These systems offer comprehensive solutions by leveraging smart software, integrated communication channels and AI (artificial intelligence). However, when it comes to implement an effective customer feedback system there are many challenges. Most of the time businesses doesn’t even realize those problems which results in several inefficiencies. An effective customer feedback system does a lot more than just simply collecting feedback data form multiple channels, but it provides a complete framework to systematically channel the insights in decision making processes.
In this blog we have discussed the most common challenges and how businesses can easily deal with them. By understanding and adopting to these simple tips and suggestions listed in this blog, you can greatly improve the efficiency and efficacy of your customer feedback system. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you want our help to implement an effective customized customer feedback system for your organization. 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: How to Develop a Customized Customer Feedback System to Ensure Success