Did you know that customer feedback is one of the best ways to increase customer satisfaction? Of course, you did!

Everyone knows that a satisfied customer is the best salesperson you can have. But do you know that feedback from your users is one of the best ways to improve retention?

You don’t need to worry about a satisfied customer returning to you in the future. Instead, they’ll be loyal to you and your business.

In this article, we've covered the importance of collecting feedback, and why it is crucial to harness it to improve customer satisfaction.

To start, let's see what we mean by customer feedback.

What Is Customer Feedback?

It is information that your buyers share with your customer service team that can be used as a basis for improvement. It is the most authentic form of consumer data that can be used to analyse your brand perception.

Types of customer feedback

There are several different types of user feedback. All of them are either qualitative or quantitative:

• Support tickets
• Customer surveys
• Reviews
• Products or services feedback
• Complaints
• Product requests
• Success feedback
• Returns

Is Customer feedback important for the entire company?

Definitely. User feedback is beneficial to the entire company. Let's take the example of Apple.

Apple uses NPS surveys to track customer satisfaction. I know, that's not new, every company does that.

But let me add another facet to this: Apple uses customer satisfaction surveys to generate over $25 million in additional revenue.‍

Shocked?

Let me elaborate.

Apple collects insights through retail feedback NPS surveys to find detractors and improve its retail store experience. It thoroughly analyses NPS survey comments daily and follows up with buyers who score them 6 or lower.

It conducts daily meetings to review the NPS feedback to see how it can improve the overall experience. When it began this practice, Apple found that detractors they contacted became bigger buyers than promoters. This simple follow-up generated over $25 million in additional revenue in a year.

Do you see the point? 

Getting a buyer’s opinion is one of the most effective ways you can assess their journey, learn about their experience, and discover improvement areas. Most times, these improvement areas aren't even difficult to rectify. But you do need to know what to improve.  That’s why when your users share concerns, it’s crucial to listen, synthesise that feedback, and act on it.

This, in turn, assists in the overall business. 

You also find out what's working and what's not. It helps you see where you're going full speed and where you're hitting speed breakers to save you from a massive loss in the long run. 

This leads us to the key benefits of feedback in improving customer satisfaction.

What are the 5 major benefits of customer feedback?

When customers share product feedback with your customer service teams, they are essentially sharing information about themselves.

What do they like about your product or dislike? What they love, have a problem with, are in love with and so on.

With each touchpoint, users help you build a factory of data on themselves. The kind of data companies can move mountains to get.

These data points, if utilised properly, can help you bridge the gap between your company and customer-centricity. And also help you balance your product promise and capability to provide the perfect experience. As a result, improve the overall customer satisfaction.

1. It guides you in product growth

Does your product team feel lost in all the new trends and technologies?

Have they been trying to find the right way to improve your product?

If so, you need to start looking at customer feedback. One of the biggest benefits of getting feedback is the fact that you can improve your product by looking at the benefits and problems that consumers mentioned.

For example, you might be adding a new product feature that’s supposed to help people lose weight. But, do you know this is working?  You see, most companies take an active interest in their consumers. They do a lot of market research before the product launch.

But is that enough? The short answer is- no.

The companies that become giants and unicorns take this process one step deeper. They continuously monitor feedback and evolve with user needs.

How exactly do they do that?

By democratising data access. If your product team can self-serve insights and automatically receive reports, it becomes easier for them to understand important growth areas. Things like which features are working, or not working, how are users feeling about a new feature, and so on.

This way, your company can ensure that you get closer to meeting buyer expectations and keeping them satisfied.

2. It builds trust, brand loyalty and reputation

Feedbacks are a crucial source of information not just for your company, it can be a powerful buying decision factor as well.  

When someone is looking to invest their money and be associated with your company, they almost always check online reviews. Reviews can, therefore, serve as a way to build trust among your prospects.

Additionally, it can also help build customer loyalty and brand reputation. And as a result, can amplify this trust through word of mouth and referrals. That’s because loyal users are much more likely to tell their friends and family about your business.

We all know mistakes are inevitable because we all make them. Humans do, machines do. And deep down, consumers know it.

But what matters most is how you listen to the users and try to solve their problems. As a customer support team leader, I'm sure you already know a thing or two about this. So you also understand how a bad experience handled efficiently can turn unhappy customers into satisfied ones.

Listening to what consumers have to say is, therefore, a key facet of this. And once customers feel like a part of a company's community , their loyalty and satisfaction increase.

That's why many brands today are creating voice of the customer (VoC) programs to understand their views better and uncover their unmet needs.

3. It helps build strong customer relationships

What's the best way to make your users feel seen and heard?

By asking their opinion.

An important benefit of getting customer feedback is that it can help you build and maintain strong relationships with your customers. When they share their feedback, they feel invested in the company. And if you can build upon that connection, they will celebrate your wins and feel disappointed in your failure.

They’ll also be much more likely to return to you in the future. Listen to the voice of the customer. Most buyers who feel actively involved with a company, tend to stick around for longer.

4. It helps build consistency across your customer journey

In today’s day and age, customer service has become the ultimate differentiator, especially in a crowded market.

That’s because it shows you how to create a distinct buying experience that users love. When this happens, they will be much more likely to return to you over and over again.

As HubSpot puts it, people no longer want to be sold to, they want to be helped pre, during, and post buying your product. But how do you help them if you don't know their journey?

Your marketing may have some idea. But the best way to understand, to truly understand your buyers' journey is to hear it from the horse's mouth.

Ask your buyers for feedback, what did they choose you, what did they like in your product, how were their first 3 months, etc. Many may not answer, but some will. But that feedback will give you extreme clarity on your customers' buying journey.

And if you can improve that, customers will be happier, satisfied, and much more likely to recommend your business to others as well. 

5. It enables you to track and measure customer satisfaction

We know you work extra hard on your customer satisfaction score - all those extra miles you walk to achieve customer-centricity. But is there a way to make the process more efficient?

You see, when you measure something, you can find ways to improve it. Take NPS for example - a major feedback mechanism.‍

NPS or Net Promoter Score is really simple to understand, it's just a recommendation score out of 10. Scores are gathered through surveys and the total NPS score is calculated by subtracting % promoters - % detractors (there are a number of ways to determine what a good NPS score actual is—that's where it gets a little complicated).

But it is easy to get hung up on quantitative scores like NPS or even CSAT. While they are important, they can be quite non-insightful, especially without understanding the drivers behind them.

And it brings us to a key question, once you measure NPS or CSAT, how do we improve it?

By analysing the feedback data. Understanding the good, the bad, and the ugly. And passing on that information across the company.

So am I saying getting feedback isn't enough?

Yes, exactly.

Feedback isn’t enough, actionable insights are what you need

I can almost hear you - "What? You spoke about the benefits of feedback only to conclude that it isn't enough?"

Yes, but hear me out, please? :)

Feedback is essential, it is the foundation. But the foundation isn't enough. What you need is a solid building of customer experience. One that is built on the pillars of actionable insights.

Feedback can be vague, and often not useful. What makes it useful is data analysis. And the best way to extract value from it is through NLP based data analysis that can interpret the customer sentiments behind the words.

"That's great!" - can be both positive, and sarcastic. It all depends on the tone, topic, and sentiment.

Finally, evaluate these two statements about 

'Our CSAT score is low'

'Our CSAT score is low mainly because users are facing frequent payment failure'

Out of these, which one gives you a direction to work on improving your CSAT score?

We both know the answers to the question. That's why only feedback is not enough. You need objective, granular, accurate insights.

By understanding what’s driving these scores and what are the real customer pain points, you can objectively prioritise what to improve and take appropriate actions.

How to extract meaningful insights from feedback?

One of the biggest challenges of data analysis is separating meaningful insights from surface-level ones. This is especially true for customer feedback data.

Conversations taking place on live chats, calls, social media, and emails are haphazard. That’s why leveraging these data points are difficult and often underutilised. But it is also one of the most powerful sources of insight.

These insights can direct you to the real customer pain points. Your company can then act in the short term to eliminate these. While in the longer run, you can look at recurring complaint trends and recommendations to boost retention and reduce churn.

Customer support tickets can be your competitive advantage if you try to get the most value out of them. "Customer support is the only pure route to what's going on with the customer," says Alice Godfrey, founder of Bloomic.

Another way of getting valuable insights is through multi-level data tagging. Hierarchical tagging of customer tickets, feedback and reviews will allow you to start at a high level and then dig deeper into the root cause of problems.

An automated tagging engine for qualitative feedback like live chat logs, reviews, and free-text survey fields is crucial for understanding customer service data.

Instead of just storing qualitative feedback, we recommend you turn them into strategically significant insights via data tagging based on topics and sentiment. 

Closing thoughts

I hope you're convinced that customer feedback plays a crucial role in your business. It is one of the best ways to increase customer satisfaction. 

Feedback data makes it easier for your product team to improve your product. And in turn, this also increases revenue through retention and loyalty. It also makes it easier for your business to maintain strong customer relationships and also helps you provide consistent experiences.

And finally, feedback helps you improve your overall NPS and CSAT scores. But as mentioned before, that's just the tip of the iceberg. How you utilise the feedback data plays an even more important role in the whole process.

Hence it’s important to analyse your customer feedback at scale through innovative models like automated tagging.