Customer Feedback Strategy: A Result-Oriented Approach

Customer Feedback Strategy: A Result-Oriented Approach

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Customer Feedback Strategy: A Result-Oriented Approach

Customer Feedback Strategy

When you think about working on a customer feedback strategy, there are tons of possibilities by which you can easily get overwhelmed. With a large number of customers and different methods to connect with their feedback, it’s hard to find where to start with.

Getting feedback from customers has become one of the primary goals for long-term growth and profit. Organizations look for every opportunity to interact with their customers and learn more about them. Companies spend millions of dollars on various feedback channels such as feedback surveys, emails, website analytics, or reviews.

Choosing a proactive approach to collecting customer feedback ensures that you are not too far from satisfying the needs of those customers. Customer feedback is a powerful guide that gives your company a complete insight from product development to customer support.

Customers don’t necessarily tell the truth and don’t come up with significant aspects which impacted their buying journey. Hence, feedback is not always correct but the only way to overcome this problem is to read and analyze your customer feedback reports.

Before we dive deep into the article, let’s first understand what is customer feedback and its importance.

What do you mean by customer feedback?

Customer feedback is the totality of information provided by the customer in the form of opinions, comments, and suggestions related to a  particular product or service. Getting feedback from customers will provide scope for improvement to your marketing team in different areas such as product development, customer support, or customer success.


Collecting customer feedback can be done through interviewing customers, polling, surveying, or asking for reviews. Customer feedback can help to improve the overall customer experience and satisfaction and can also bring positive changes to your business. From a local book store to the largest company in the world, client feedback is a fuel that can lead to changes in the products and services that you offer.

What do you mean by customer feedback strategy?

A customer feedback strategy is a method of collecting customer feedback and performing its analysis to produce actionable reports and insights. Whether you are gathering feedback from social media responses, surveys, or even monitoring the actions performed on your website, you can always filter them by making them useful for your business.

Why collect feedback from customers?

Several reasons make the feedback of customers a key ingredient. Some of the importance of getting feedback from clients are:

  • It establishes an emotional connection with your customers and makes them feel part of their business. It allows you to establish communication with your team and give them a reason to raise their voices genuinely.
  • Customer feedback convince new leads as it is generally shared publicly. Before buying any products, people check the online reviews of previous buyers which convinces them to buy from your company, and as a result, it grows your customer base.
  • It improves the level of customer satisfaction. The more customers ask about your products, the more you learn about the demand and ways to improve your products, thus your customer satisfaction score increases.
  • You can understand your buyer’s persona in a better way. A buyer’s persona in a “real life” and “on paper” may not always match. However, a well-built survey of customer feedback can help you validate your quantitative-based personas.
  • You can always tailor your customer needs. The right questionnaire about customer feedback can give you an insight into what your customers are looking for so that you can work accordingly.
  • It generates loyalty among your customers and improves customer lifecycle management. Asking for feedback makes them want to come back to your business again as their voice is being heard.
  • It makes your website effective. Customer feedback questions are not just about products or services but they can also be about your website. When you ask them the right question, you can optimize your website for better conversions and user experience.
  • It also gives you a complete insight into your marketing channels. You just have to ask your customers which marketing channel did they find out about your business so that you can improve them for user satisfaction.

How to create a successful customer feedback strategy?

The process of creating a successful customer feedback strategy involves 4 main steps that help you to gain customer loyalty and track customer opinions so that you always stay on top of the current trends in ACAF Pool (Ask, Categorize, Act, and Follow up).

1. To ask / Collecting customer feedback

According to the research by Hubspot, it was found that 81% of customers would leave feedback if they get a faster response to it. Furthermore, UK researchers have come up with data that shows that 43% of people don’t want to leave feedback because they think that businesses do not care.

Different ways of getting feedback from customers are:

  • Email – It is the best way to follow up with your customers after a certain interaction. It allows your customers to form an opinion and it shows that you care about how they feel about your brand. It is also one of the most effective ways to communicate with your upset customers personally. 
  • Social Media – It is one of the passive methods of customer feedback strategy. Here, you can easily respond to urgent issues on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. 
  • Reviews – You can actively track the reviews of customers on your website and correct your negative trends. 
  • Surveys – You can conduct surveys by using a pop-up on your app or website and know how customers feel at that moment.

2. To categorize / Analyze feedback of customers

Once you have successfully collected customer feedback, you will be left with a bunch of raw data. Identify a place where all your feedback can be stored, organized, or shared in a CRM platform, through a ticketing system or handling data to a customer service outsourcing company.

This will help to aggregate all the data in one place and let you identify trends over time. You can also break down the data into subcategories to make it more digestible. It will give you an analysis of positive and negative feedback.

Different industry surveys such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) can track your outcome and identify the patterns.

3. Act / Take necessary actions

After you ask for feedback and then categorize them, now it’s time to take action. Customer feedback reports should be shared internally with your teams such as the product development team, customer support team, customer success team, sales or marketing team, or with internal stakeholders. You can provide them daily, weekly or monthly reports via Email. 

Once it is shared with all the departments, team members can further begin to act by utilizing those reports and form strategies and plans accordingly, and come up with effective customer feedback solutions. 

When a customer provides you feedback, you should always reply with a sweet and short response by thanking them and setting a proper expectation and this ultimately results in an improved customer experience.

4. Follow up / Let customers know that you are listening to them

This is the fourth and final step in ACAF Pool where you follow up with those customers who took out their time by sharing their opinions with you. This area is often overlooked and if customers are not being responded to on time, then your stream of feedback will dry up.

Your business will slowly see failure and you will also reduce your customer retention rate exponentially. You can also follow up with your clients by sending them a personalized thank you email, making a phone call, or sending a personalized thank you letter or card or a report which shows your plans that you will incorporate in the coming days.

Top 8 methods to obtain feedback from customers

1. Reviews by customers

People leave comments on your website or social media sites which provides you an important piece of information about your company in the form of feedback. Your customer success team should make sure that they consistently respond to the reviews and especially address the negative ones if they come in the way.

2. Interviews of customers

It is a direct method of collecting honest opinions from your customers. This type of customer feedback answers the “why” of all the information which you collected in quantitative research. Always plan and prepare to have an effective customer review through interviews.

3. Feedback surveys

It is the most efficient method to collect both qualitative and quantitative data. A feedback survey form can be posted on the website, sent via email, or can be taken through a phone call.

4. Feature requests by customers

If more customers are requesting a specific feature through feedback, then you should immediately identify and address them.

5. Community or social media feedback

Social media channels can be a great source of feedback through reviews and comments. You will easily know what people are saying about your brand on different platforms.

6. Generating feedback from website activity

Metrics such as bounce rate or average time spent by each person on your site tell a lot about visitors and their behavior patterns.

7. Feedback through suggestion boards

It allows different users to collaborate on ideas both with the company and other users. Suggestion boards let users create feedback posts that can also be commented on or upvoted. Aha.io is a wonderful tool that can be used to create suggestion boards.

8. Emails

When a user upgrades or exits a plan or got stuck in a process on your website, then you can immediately send them an email and collect their response.

7 Effective methods to improve customer feedback strategy

1. Conducting SMS surveys

It is one of the best customer feedback solutions where you should just ask one question per SMS or take their feedback on particular products. You can also send them an SMS via phone call by your representative.

2. Send follow-up emails regularly

A quick follow-up email could be an opportunity to interact with your customers once they purchased your product or just end up not buying it.

3. Review the transcript of the live chat

It helps to clearly understand the pain points or likes of customers. 

4. Record your sales call

Sales calls can be for different things apart from collecting feedback. However, by recording them, your team could improve and enhance the service and provide the best customer feedback solution by actually listening to your customers

5. Ask for feedback

Once the product has been delivered to customers, send them feedback links by SMS or email and ask them to provide a review of your products and services.

6. Make sure to use autoresponders

You can automate your task by using auto respondent such as setting up a welcome email that showcases your brand or setting a follow-up email in a sequence once a customer has purchased your product.

7. Check your social media platforms frequently

It is a way to let your customers comment and you respond to their queries and establish a relationship with them so that they can get converted into prospective customers.

Conclusion

Customer feedback and its analysis can be complicated but it’s not at all an impossible task. With the right mindset and by using an appropriate customer feedback strategy, getting feedback from customers and improving products and services could be easily done to achieve growth.

Hire a customer service outsourcing team that enhances your real-time customer support and makes your business customer-centric by listening to what people have to say and improving your performance for better results.