You need to analyze customer feedback. How can you do it quickly and effectively?
Customer feedback is essential for any business that wants to improve its products, services, and customer satisfaction. However, collecting, organizing, and analyzing feedback can be a daunting and time-consuming task, especially if you have a large and diverse customer base. How can you do it quickly and effectively? Here are some tips and tools that can help you with your community outreach efforts.
Before you start analyzing customer feedback, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and how you will measure it. Do you want to increase customer retention, loyalty, or referrals? Do you want to identify and solve common problems or pain points? Do you want to discover new opportunities or ideas for innovation? Depending on your goals, you will need to focus on different types of feedback, such as ratings, reviews, surveys, testimonials, suggestions, or complaints.
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Rajeshpal (Raj) Singh
LinkedIn Top Voice | Director, Digital Trust @ Mastercard | Helping Governments | Community Leader | Autism Dad | Music Producer | Honorary Fellow
It all starts with the business goal. Ask yourself these questions: 1. How is doing this function contributing to my organisation's mission? 2. If we do a great job at this, what exactly happens to benefit the organisation? Think in terms of higher level metrics (eg revenue, donors , membership) 3. If we perform poorly at this, what happens to the organisation? (Eg lose donors, members , lose relevance)
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Tural Huseynov
Chief Human Resources Officer @ North West Construction |
a. Understand Customer Sentiments: Determine whether the feedback is positive, negative, or neutral. Identify specific aspects that customers appreciate or find challenging. b. Pinpoint Key Issues: Identify recurring themes or issues mentioned by multiple customers. Prioritize issues based on their impact on customer satisfaction. c. Gather Actionable Insights: Aim to extract actionable insights that can drive improvements. Look for specific suggestions or requests from customers.
There are many software tools that can help you track and manage customer feedback, but not all of them are suitable for your needs and budget. You need to choose the ones that can integrate with your existing platforms, such as your website, email, social media, or CRM. You also need to choose the ones that can automate and simplify the feedback collection and analysis process, such as by sending surveys, generating reports, or applying sentiment analysis. Some examples of popular tools are SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Zendesk, or HubSpot.
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Tural Huseynov
Chief Human Resources Officer @ North West Construction |
Text Analytics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) Tools: MonkeyLearn: MonkeyLearn provides NLP tools for text analysis, sentiment analysis, and text classification. It can help you categorize feedback and identify sentiments. IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding: This tool by IBM uses NLP to analyze text, extracting insights such as sentiment, entities, and concepts. Survey and Feedback Collection Platforms: SurveyMonkey: A popular survey tool that allows you to collect structured feedback through surveys. It offers analytics features for easy interpretation of responses. Qualtrics: Qualtrics is a comprehensive experience management platform that includes survey tools and analytics to gather and analyze customer feedback.
One of the challenges of analyzing customer feedback is that not all customers are the same. They may have different preferences, expectations, needs, or behaviors. Therefore, you need to segment your customers into meaningful groups based on criteria such as demographics, location, purchase history, engagement level, or feedback type. This way, you can tailor your analysis and communication to each segment and understand their specific feedback better.
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Rajeshpal (Raj) Singh
LinkedIn Top Voice | Director, Digital Trust @ Mastercard | Helping Governments | Community Leader | Autism Dad | Music Producer | Honorary Fellow
Segmenting is important as it also helps you identify the starting point of your customer's journey. For example, a particular segment may be totally clueless what your organisation does so their feedback will be different compared to a customer who takes time to read reviews and does their homework. For such exercises i find developing customer personas useful.
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Tural Huseynov
Chief Human Resources Officer @ North West Construction |
1. Define Customer Segments: Identify relevant criteria for segmentation, such as demographics, purchase behavior, location, or customer lifecycle stage. Understand the goals of your analysis, and ensure that the chosen criteria align with those objectives. 2. Gather Customer Feedback: Collect feedback from various sources, including surveys, social media, customer support interactions, and reviews. Ensure that the feedback includes identifiers for the segmentation criteria chosen. 3. Use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems: Leverage CRM systems to gather and organize customer data, making it easier to identify and analyze specific segments. CRM tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Zoho CRM can help manage customer information.
Once you have collected and segmented your feedback, you need to look for patterns and trends that can reveal insights and action points. For example, you can look for the most frequent or urgent issues, the most positive or negative sentiments, the most common or unique suggestions, or the most influential or loyal customers. You can use tools such as charts, graphs, dashboards, or word clouds to visualize and summarize your data and make it easier to interpret and compare.
The last and most important step is to act on your feedback and show your customers that you value their opinions and care about their satisfaction. You need to prioritize and implement the changes or improvements that can have the most impact on your business goals and customer experience. You also need to communicate your actions and results to your customers and thank them for their feedback. You can use tools such as email, social media, or newsletters to keep them updated and engaged.
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Rajeshpal (Raj) Singh
LinkedIn Top Voice | Director, Digital Trust @ Mastercard | Helping Governments | Community Leader | Autism Dad | Music Producer | Honorary Fellow
Acting on feedback is great. However there will come a point for some customers where you realise that there is nothing much you can do to win them back. This may be due to a number of reasons which are not in your control. It is also important to know at which point engagement would yield diminishing returns and thus disengagement may be the best action for that point of time. Time is also a key resource so know where to invest it.
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Kumar Gangadharan
Attended Madurai Kamaraj University
WINNING BACK A LOST CUSTOMER IS DIFFICULT.HOWEVEVER PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE INDIVIZUALLY WITH ACCEPTENCE OF FEEDBACK AND CHANGE IN POLICY AFTERWARDS MAY HOLD A POTENTIAL CUSTOMER IN MANY CASES.FINANCIAL BENEFITS IN THE FORM OF PRICE RENEGOTIATION WILL ALSO HELP.
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