“Customer” – One word that any service in the world is centered around because we all know happy customers mean good business, and super satisfied customers mean great business. From bad, good to excellent, service providers are dependent on customer feedback to better their services.
Theoretically, collecting feedback is a mandatory step in selling a service, but what to do with it can be a very daunting and intricate process. And, this is precisely why businesses need to focus on their customer feedback analysis process to utilize the data they receive from customers.
Customer Feedback Analysis
Custom feedback analysis is all about scouring the experiences and frustrations of the customers anywhere on your social media platforms and devising an analysis process to tackle in improving those experiences. It is also a great way to identify the loopholes in the current set up, be it staff-related or business practice-related, and so on.
More often, the process is an automatic one with the help of software assisting the business to skim through heaps of data received via varied channels regularly and then providing statistics around the parameters set.
How to Improve Customer Feedback Analysis?
So what is it that makes the whole customer experience go from “Oh god” to “Wow”? What is it that makes the entire experience vibe with your customers? How do you get a satisfied look on your customers’ faces? Finally, how do you grow your business based on what the customer has to say?
The answers to all these questions lie in the following tips to help you build a comprehensive customer feedback analysis infrastructure:
1. Identify Your Target Customer
While every customer counts for your business, the customers that are the regular ones are the primary pillars contributing to your success. Otherwise, some customers may just do business with you one time during the initial launch, during the discount seasons, or just to get a taste of what business flow you are into.
But the returning customers (ones involved in repetitive business interactions with you) are the ones whose voices you should be focusing on to help you improve your business.
Hence, there should be this need to design an analysis process that focuses on this group and hear their voices first.
2. Devise a Comprehensive Feedback System, One with Well-Defined Categories
First, define all segments of your business that you wish to garner feedback on, like cost/quality of products, customer service personnel, delivery quality, online presence, etc. Well defined categories will help cover your initial bases. Next, of course, is the need to set feedback categories. Generically, “positive,” “negative,” and “neutral” would do the trick.
An additional set of “sub-categories” will help dig deeper into each feedback. These should be based on specific minute details that you are targeting. This, in turn, will also help look at trends in the form of pie charts and other statistical tools that you deem fit for your business. For instance, one bad experience against all other good ones does not usually warrant immediate engagement. Still, with time, the repetition of such bad experiences need to be addressed to avoid more occurrences.
It is best advised to abstain from the urge or thought to compare unrelated data like comparing product service across different geographies because diverse demographics have different mindsets and hence may respond differently to one service.
Also, Read: How Customer Experience Software Impact Your Business Revenue
3. Go All Out to Search for Feedbacks
For instance, if two users leave a positive comment about your services on your website but one user leaves an unhappy one on any other social media platform, the chances are that the one “negative” comment can cost you a lot of revenue. That also means that you haven’t covered your bases well.
It is absolutely essential to skim through all channels and to read every comment out there, especially the ones that weren’t listed directly on your site. Because while your “well-designed survey” asks all the pertinent questions according to you, one unprompted feedback can point out an area of improvement that you never thought deserved any attention.
So, it is essential and crucial for your business not to leave any stone unturned while skimming through all channels – social media, texts, at the time of purchase, or any others.
You might also leave a blank space for your customers to fill out on what they liked the most and what could have been better.
4. Root Cause Analysis
So, you know what your customers have to say, and you have also spotted that those negative comments or feedback in the sea of the other good ones. Now, what do you do with all that? Simply, responding to negative feedback isn’t enough; you need to nip the bud from its roots.
A detailed root cause analysis of what went wrong during the customer experience substantiated with proper management tools like Customer Engagement Software to help identify and rectify the problem is absolutely essential.
For instance, one-in-a-hundred negative experience with your product could be just a statistical aberration if it doesn’t happen frequently. But, hundred negative reviews on the customer service received, definitely means room for improvement. In such a case, it is best advised to review the current customer service procedure and to re-train the resources, if required.
Regardless of the system, you could implement any root cause analysis tools such as 6-Sigma, TQM, Lean methodology, and others to achieve this aim. An excellent way to start would be to study up on various analysis methods like Fishbone Analysis, 5 Whys, etc. to start with the groundwork.
5. A Scalable and Robust Plan of Action
Once the feedback analysis system is in place, the next obvious step is to devise a procedure around what needs to be done to address these issues. It is time to lay down step-by-step instructions to improve the status quo. So, the things that work well in your current setup need to continue and those of them that need attention, need a process to improve.
Understand that the first step here is to collate all the bad experiences along with a proper root cause; this would pave the way to kick-off a thought process on ways first to prevent the occurrence of that instance in the future.
While you are at it, it would be a good idea to keep the concerned team members in the loop. Hence, all product managers need to be made aware of negative reviews that they receive in their respective products and be made a part of the discussion to better the process.
Similarly, the customer service team is the first one to face the brunt of an angry or unsatisfied customer. Hence, they must be apprised of the situation or a current issue so that they can communicate appropriately with the customers. Always remember that they are the first line of fire, so a competent customer service team can douse the fire before it gets aggravated.
Also, Read: How to Grow Your Business With A 360-Degree View of Customer
6. Automation Is the Key
Can you honestly go through all reviews manually or keep track of the trend analysis to look for continued issues? No, it is not possible and not advised. A specialized tool must be built to achieve this purpose, that too in a lesser amount of time and with better results. Hence, areas like text, sentiment analysis can all be collated based on specific (even tailor-made) algorithms making the categorization of data much faster.
These tools are powered with machine-learning that help you focus only on what’s necessary by providing the right trend analysis for your business.
David J. Greer very aptly puts it in his book, “Wind In Your Sails”:
“A customer talking about their experience with you is worth ten times that which you write or say about yourself.”
Need Any Technology Assistance? Call Pursho @ 0731-6725516
