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Gaining customer feedback is a critical way of improving your business and staying on the leading edge. Customer feedback helps you to understand whether you’re delivering on promises, whether customers are satisfied with your product, and where you could better your offering.
While continual customer feedback is essential, without a practical and logical way of digesting those findings, it’s unlikely that feedback will lead to actionable changes.
That’s where analysis can help. Customer feedback analysis helps you turn raw customer feedback into a reliable source of knowledge covering paint points, satisfaction levels, usability, loyalty, and more.
A customer feedback analysis is a process by which to turn customer feedback into actionable insights. Completing a best practice analysis means you’re more likely to deeply understand what your customers want and need from your company. It can also help you attract new customers while retaining your current ones.
A customer feedback analysis typically operates in five main steps:
Paying attention to what your customers have to say is one of the most important ways to guarantee long-term business success. Customer feedback is a critical way to understand where issues and clunky aspects arise so that you get the chance to do better for your customers.
While receiving negative feedback can be tricky, in the words of Bill Gates, “[y]our most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
When customers do provide feedback, it’s essential to react to it and see how you can improve your offering. Doing so can have many positive effects, including:
While it’s a critical aspect of improving a business, analyzing customer feedback isn’t necessarily straightforward.
Feedback comes from a range of different sources—surveys, social media comments, call center conversations, and more. The broad range of sources means that feedback comes in various forms—written comments, conversational feedback, and scores through surveys. Categorizing, understanding, and acting upon that diverse feedback can be challenging.
The quality of feedback can impact the analysis too. Some people may use complex language when giving feedback. Others may have poor literacy making their point harder to decipher, leaving room for ambiguity or misunderstandings.
To uncover the most relevant and helpful insights, discernment is necessary.
That discernment means recognizing the difference between data that’s insightful––and therefore helpful to the business––and data that’s non-insightful––and therefore useless.
Non-insightful data is feedback that doesn’t tell you anything new or is irrelevant to your business––such as feedback written by internet trolls or feedback that tells you about an issue that’s already being fixed. What’s more, feedback from random people who are not part of your target audience might be completely useless.
Insightful data tells you something new or can add weight to a proposal to optimize or release a new feature.
If many customers, for example, are mentioning that the payment aspect of your website is challenging to use, that’s a great case for a more seamless payment feature. As each customer gives this feedback, it proves there’s a real need to prioritize this improvement. If not, your customers could soon drop off.
Insightful data can lead a company to:
Discerning whether data is useful or not can be tricky. These are some questions to ask when sorting data:
Paying attention to these questions as you sort feedback will help ensure you rely on the most insightful data.
Keep in mind that feedback will sometimes be something you may not want to hear. But it’s essential to pay attention to negative comments, as they can help drive business improvements.
Listening to feedback is one thing, but turning it into actionable insights for your business is another. That’s why we recommend these best practice steps to effectively gather, analyze, and act upon comments from customers.
Customer feedback can come from a variety of sources.
The most common sources of feedback include:
Surveys are one of the most common ways to collect customer responses. That’s because they’re a quick, cost-effective way to gather large amounts of data.
The NPS is a helpful way of discovering customer satisfaction across the business, not just in one area. The NPS asks participants to rank the likelihood that they would recommend your product or service to someone they know (a friend or colleague). In sum, the NPS provides macro-level insights about the current satisfaction of your customers with your business. To get an actionable insight about your score, you need to include an open-ended follow-up question asking why your customer gave a particular score.
Your Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.