The companies I work with care deeply about their customers, and it shows. That’s especially true when I’m updating the UX of a site or overhauling knowledge base content. However, customer feedback management is often lacking.
Companies either think they know their customers so well that they don’t need to formalize the feedback loop, or they’re collecting a lot of feedback and have no way to understand the data. That’s why a structured approach to managing feedback from customers is essential.
Below, I’ll discuss the approach I recommend for recording and acting on customer feedback. I’ll also share helpful channels to keep and eye on, as well as best practices.
Table of Contents
- What is Customer Feedback Management?
- How to Implement Customer Feedback Management
- Customer Feedback Management Software
- 5 Customer Feedback Management Best Practices
- 3 Examples of Customer Feedback Management
- Get Started with Customer Feedback Management
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What is Customer Feedback Management?
Customer feedback management (CFM) is the process of sourcing feedback from customers via multiple channels to guide company decisions and improve the customer experience.
At its core, CFM is a customer-centered approach to doing business that uses customer feedback as a means to deliver a better service experience and product. It’s helpful to visualize customer feedback management as a loop that includes the following steps:
- Ask — solicit customer feedback.
- Categorize — sort feedback into separate groups.
- Act — share feedback with relevant parties and develop solutions.
- Follow-up — Follow up with customers to gauge the effectiveness of your efforts.
You can use customer feedback software at each stage of the loop. This can be really useful if you have a large amount of data.
Now you know how customer feedback management works, let’s talk about the types of feedback. There are two distinct categories I think about — direct feedback and indirect feedback — which I’ll discuss below.
Types of Customer Feedback
Direct customer feedback comes from explicit requests that you send to customers. For example, I might ask customers to complete surveys post-purchase or leave reviews. Indirect feedback is given but not asked for, like social media posts, comments, or even product returns.
Other types of customer feedback include:
- Product or service sales.
- Support tickets.
- Technical issues and bug reports.
- Requests for product or service walkthroughs.
- Customer complaints.
- Suggestions.
With the feedback gathered from CFM, I can work cross-departmentally to identify key customers, streamline improvements, and increase revenue.
Customer feedback management is not just about finding ways to keep customers satisfied. It’s also about turning negative experiences into opportunities for positive engagement. After all, to a different brand after just one negative experience.
The Difference Between a Customer Complaint and Customer Feedback
Before I move on, let’s look at the differences between a customer complaint and customer feedback. This distinction makes a difference when you go to put your customer feedback strategy together.
A complaint is delivered after a customer experience and is — by definition — negative. Meanwhile, feedback can be solicited before, during, or after a customer experience. This information could be bad, good, or neutral.
Customer complaints are mostly due to product or service issues, a lack of empathy in interactions with support staff, and inadequate responses to reviews or appeals for assistance. On the other hand, customer feedback can include praise, suggestions for product improvements, or comments on the effectiveness of a customer service interaction.
Companies need to be sensitive to the power of customer complaints, as rage-filled customers are more vocal than satisfied ones. In fact, — they just quietly switch to another brand without so much as a “goodbye.”
The sad truth is that most customer complaints never get reported, which means that complaints aired publicly are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s part of the reason I advocate strongly for structured feedback requests in any company — you don’t know what you don’t know.
Why is Customer Feedback Management Important?
Customer feedback management benefits include:
- Reduced churn.
- Increased revenue.
- Improved products and services.
- Stronger customer relationships.
- Data about key customer groups.
I’m all about growth, and I’d be the last person to deny there is value in acquiring new customers. But there is even more value in retaining existing customers. A found that ecommerce brands lose $29 for every customer they acquire — a 222% increase in just eight years.
Customer feedback management is also critical to letting customers know that you care about their satisfaction. People leave companies for many reasons. However, who feel a brand cares about their emotions will likely turn into repeat customers.
Customer Feedback Management Channels
No matter what you sell or how customers buy, there are many avenues to gather customer insight. Here are some of the most common customer feedback management channels:
- Focus groups.
- Customer interviews.
- Surveys.
- NSA.
- Third-party reviews.
- Email.
- Live chat.
- Text.
- Social media.
- In-product requests.
In the past, focus groups and customer interviews formed the backbone of most CFM efforts. I think they still have their place, especially for gathering qualitative information about a specific product or aspect of your company.
But these days, things are mostly digital. CFM is no exception. I find more and more companies are hyper-focused on digital channels because they cost less to analyze, and the data is easier to synthesize at scale.
For example, net promoter score (NPS) surveys make it easy and affordable for companies to automate CFM. They help businesses understand how customers feel overall about their brand. Although different software score their results differently, all NPS surveys measure customers' loyalty to a brand.
Live chat, text, and email are the most direct customer feedback management tools. With the increasing digitalization of customer service experiences, people want to be able to communicate with businesses quickly and efficiently when a problem arises.
Let’s not forget third-party reviews and social media sites. Here, people air their grievances and discuss their favorite brands. I love how organic these channels are. You can see what people say without any solicitation. So, if you’re a beginner to CFM, I recommend starting with review sites and social media to gauge customer sentiment.
How to Implement Customer Feedback Management
Good customer feedback is important for everyone from sales and marketing to product and customer success. This information can help inform everything from day-to-day operational changes, right up the chain to strategic financial decisions.
With the whole organization clamoring for customer feedback data, it’s easy to go overboard. So, before you implement a customer feedback management strategy, I recommend taking a step back and ensuring you plan a structured approach. Here’s how.
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1. Set clear objectives.
It sounds like an obvious step, but I’m always amazed at how many teams jump straight into data collection. This is how I’ve ended up sifting through disparate customer feedback for hours. In these scenarios, I’m looking at information from multiple channels, trying to make sense of it.
Basically, if you don’t have objectives, it’s more difficult to make your customer feedback actionable.
I recommend defining what you want to know and why. This could be broader business objectives or relate to something highly specific. For example, you might want to:
- Improve the features of your product.
- Understand whether your brand resonates with the target market.
- See if your pricing is too high or too low.
- Validate a new product line or feature before launch.
- Optimize the user experience.
- Get an overall sense of how happy your customers are with the company.
You might already see how these objectives might then feed into my next step.
2. Select your feedback channels.
Some feedback channels, like social media and review sites, are always worth keeping an eye on. I sometimes use social listening or sentiment analysis tools designed to automate data synthesis on these sites.
Other channels need a bit more consideration. Some objectives, like validating a new product, might be best met with a focus group. Others are broader and better suited for one-off mass surveys.
The other item I recommend thinking about here is frequency. How often should you gather fresh data? It depends on what you’re gathering. For example, some SaaS brands I’ve worked with send quarterly surveys to gauge their NPS. Other channels, like a “how did we do” email, can be sent continuously to new customers.
3. Use automation.
There are lots of methods and tools you can use to automate the collection of customer feedback.
Let’s say I’m looking at a site with an ecommerce store. I might recommend implementing a drip email sequence so customers receive a purchase confirmation and a couple of follow-ups asking how they like the product. Each of these emails can include links to surveys, opportunities to leave a review or quick star-rating apps. Now, customer feedback management is fully automated.
Other areas I recommend you consider for automation include:
- Chabots on your website to ask people about their experience (like ).
- In-app surveys if you’re working with a software product.
- Requesting reviews on platforms like Google or Trustpilot.
Remember to automate when to request feedback. Right after purchase is one obvious trigger. However, there are plenty of other interactions worthy of feedback. For example, if a new feature is released on a SaaS platform, I recommend triggering a request for feedback when a user first interacts with the feature.
4. Set a schedule for focus groups.
I think focus groups still have their place in CFM, regardless of industry. They don’t have to be formal affairs conducted through two-way mirrors. I’ve run focus groups over video calls that provided tons of really valuable, qualitative feedback.
But here’s the thing: Your customer’s time is valuable. Finding available participants who represent your target personas can be difficult. If you run them too often, you might run out of worthwhile customers to interview, particularly if you work with a smaller customer base.
Instead, I recommend planning focus groups that are in line with your overall strategic planning. They should coincide with significant events in the calendar, like a new feature release or the launch of a new service portal.
5. Centralize and categorize the data.
Where you have control over the questions you ask your customers, try to keep them consistent. Let’s say you have a website chatbot and a post-purchase survey email. They should both direct customers to the same survey with the same set of questions and response options.
I’ve seen companies collecting simple star ratings from one platform while using detailed questions in surveys elsewhere. It’s all good data, but it makes analysis to get to the heart of your customer sentiment extremely difficult.
There are also tools available, like or , that use AI to help you synthesize sentiment and survey data from multiple channels in one place.
Either way, make sure you can compile your data. But remember that, without insights, data is just words and numbers on a page. Try to align how you categorize and organize the feedback closely with the objectives I spoke about earlier.
6. Make a plan for implementation.
When I get to a place where I can take objective-focused insights from feedback, the time comes to transition to decision-making. This often means compiling and passing reports to other departments that use the feedback in their own strategic decision-making processes.
During this phase of customer feedback management, you’ll uncover room for improvement. Internal stakeholders might request more information moving forward or deeper insights into a particular area. In those cases, I recommend revisiting the structure of a survey or seeing if a focus group or one-off survey is worthwhile.
Customer Feedback Management Software
Customer feedback management software helps you automate feedback collection, aggregate data, and analyze metrics to form actionable decision-making. Here are a few high-quality software tools I recommend beginners check out.
1. Service Hub
探花精选’s Service Hub features a that helps you truly understand customer perception and uncover areas of opportunity for taking action to satisfy your audience.
Service Hub also allows you to automate customer surveys, making it easier for users to gather feedback after every interaction. Being able to define clear survey triggers allows me to gauge how customers feel at key moments in the customer journey. Beyond that, sentiment analysis tools have helped me find feedback patterns I may have otherwise missed.
What I find most helpful? Service Hub helps teams see what feedback looks like in context. I can see other products a customer has purchased and other feedback we received from that buyer before
2. Survicate
helps you reach customers where they are most engaged, allowing you to deploy surveys on desktop, mobile, in-app, or via email. With multiple touch points, you’ll have visibility into the experience at every step of the customer journey.
However, what I like the most about Survicate is its real-time feedback dashboard. I can see how customer sentiment is changing at any time. So, if there’s ever a dip, I can more easily investigate what happened in our ecosystem that caused the shift. There’s even a visualization tool that makes seeing this information even easier.
Beyond that, this platform seamlessly integrated into my tech stack. Actionable customer feedback automatically synchs with our CRM and ticketing system. I can then make sure a member of our feedback team can follow up, ensuring a better service experience.
3. SurveyMonkey
You’ve probably interacted with at least once before. It’s one of the most common surveying tools. In the world of customer success, SurveyMonkey can help you create surveys for different areas of your business (products, customer loyalty, service interactions, etc.), allowing you to gather information about the customer experience.
My favorite thing about SurveyMonkey is the interface’s simplicity. I can create a survey in a matter of minutes intuitively. I just choose what type of question I want to ask and how I want to elicit a response (open-ended, sliding scale, multiple choice).
When results come in, I can filter by demographic information or customer segment. SurveyMonkey also offers sentiment analysis and a word cloud feature, making information easy to understand.
5 Customer Feedback Management Best Practices
1. You need both quantitative and qualitative data.
Quantitative data typically tells me the “what,” but qualitative data backs that up with a “why” that makes feedback from customers actionable.
Net Promoter Score is a good example. A three out of ten rating is concerning, but not knowing why a customer feels that way makes it almost useless information. It’s best practice to leave space for customer comments along with the rating request to get more context. I’ve uncovered issues with user experience this way, where the data revealed customers just didn’t understand how to use certain features optimally.
Essentially, quantitative data gives you something to investigate. Qualitative data helps you solve the case.
2. Make it easy for your customers.
Time is precious for everyone, and your customers are no different. Plus, the more people I get to fill out a survey, the more reliable the data. So, I recommend making feedback collection as simple as possible for your customers.
Written reviews take time, but a couple of multiple-choice questions with a short open text field for more details takes no time at all.
The best part of this strategy is you’re more likely to capture your middle-ground customers. Highly satisfied and highly unsatisfied customers are likely to leave a review. But what about people in the middle who find your product or service fine but have valuable insights about what to improve?
Easy feedback methods make it much easier to capture feedback from this segment.
3. Track patterns and trends.
Patterns or trends in your customer feedback data can provide really useful insights to pass along to other departments and improve business outcomes.
Maybe I notice that increased levels of customer dissatisfaction correlate with recent pricing increases, or customers who buy a product online have more negative (or positive) feedback than in person. A new competitor might be getting more mentions than before, causing customers to churn.
If you aggregate your data well, these types of trends can help you get ahead of those that can have pretty severe consequences for the business.
4. Keep customer data protected.
This is true of all interactions, of course. But if you’re collecting customer feedback, you’re often collecting personal or sensitive data along with it. When it comes to using this information, even internally, make sure you’re staying compliant. Include opt-ins for storing customer data.
5. Use A/B testing.
It can be difficult to compose feedback questions. I’ve often wrestled with deciding how many questions to include and at what point I’m asking too much.
Just like in marketing campaigns, you can A/B test certain aspects of your CFM strategy. Here are some things I would consider testing:
- Survey length (and question length).
- Timing and frequency of feedback requests.
- Format of surveys (multiple choice, open text, or star ratings).
- Delivery channels.
- Personalization.
Acting on the test results can greatly improve the quantity and quality of responses from your customers.
3 Examples of Customer Feedback Management
Let’s take a look at some customer feedback examples to see how global brands do it efficiently and effectively.
1. Uber
Ridesharing startup has made measurement-based customer feedback a core part of their CX design.
After each trip, users can use in-app surveys to rate their driver between 1 and 5 stars. They then choose from several preset categories to explain their rating. What I like best is that, if a driver goes above and beyond to deliver an exceptional customer experience, customers are encouraged to give a specific compliment.
It’s a quick and easy mechanism, but it allows Uber to quickly identify a problem driver and take corrective action. It also provides insights into what customers like when a driver performs well. This helps Uber maintain the quality of its driver base and reduce the likelihood of negative experiences.
2. Zappos
Ecommerce giant is well-known for responsive and helpful customer service. The online shoe retailer makes it easy to get in touch by offering 24/7 chat, text, and phone service. By keeping multiple lines of communication open both day and night, Zappos ensures that it can nip problems in the bud before they escalate into full-blown complaints.
But what I particularly like is the feedback options under “Help & Support.” Not only is customer service easy to access but there is also a “Give Us Feedback” link. Customers then get a detailed survey so the brand can collect all feedback, not just get ahead of complaints.
Zappos' commitment to free delivery and returns for 365 days demonstrates its willingness to innovate based on customer feedback. This, in turn, has ensured that the company enjoys a dedicated following, even in the crowded online retail marketplace.
3. Apple
Few companies took product and service innovation more seriously than . Over the years, the tech giant has built up a rabid fan base, largely because it knows what its customers want.
Apple consistently ranks highly in customer satisfaction surveys because of its reputation for continuously seeking and employing customer feedback. After every purchase, Apple sends the buyer an email to gather feedback related to the sale.
Apple also relies on NPS surveys to measure customer satisfaction related to products, services, and in-store or online shopping experiences. It then uses these scores to tailor features for new products to satisfy the widest number of consumers.
Get Started with Customer Feedback Management
I’m a big believer in using customer feedback management in a way that works best for your brand. If you’re a beginner to CFM, take a look at your existing channels, even if it’s just your social media or presence on review sites. Then, see how you can aggregate the data for worthwhile insights.
As you progress, I recommend exploring new channels and formal feedback mechanisms. Don’t forget to use software to automate your processes, too. You’ll be surprised how much time you can save and how having a formal strategy can work wonders for strategic decision-making.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in January 2022 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
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