5 effective tips to conduct an actionable customer feedback analysis
Customer feedback has the power and potential to grow your business, or run it straight into the ground if you fail to act on it in a timely manner. After all, it’s an interconnected business world out there where the barrier between the brand and the consumer no longer exists – instead, the customers dictate the trends in the market and hold the fate of every business in their hands. Particularly, they will define your future with their words, their comments, and their feedback in general.
This begs the need of business leaders to monitor customer feedback on a regular basis, and most importantly, collate their findings into actionable data that will allow them to improve on their success and address crucial pain-points before they lose their customers. It’s a dog-eat-dog business world out there, and analyzing feedback might just be the only advantage you have against your competitors.
Put the feedback into corresponding categories
When managing feedback from multiple sources, there is a lot of room for error. What’s more, there is plenty of room for certain information to slip through the cracks and avoid your attention, effectively preventing you from creating an all-encompassing improvement strategy as a result. And in the competitive modern market, you can’t afford to let anything pass you by unnoticed.
This is why categorizing feedback should be your first priority. Focus on creating a comprehensive plan for this purpose by defining the main feedback categories according to brand performance in certain areas, such as:
- Effectiveness of customer service
- Product or service feedback
- Brand awareness and reputation feedback
- Price vs quality
- Online and offline availability and communication
Gather feedback from offline and online sources
A good feedback analysis strategy should encompass data from both the online and offline realm. After all, some people are more inclined to answer an SMS survey, for example, rather than having to open an email in their already-cluttered inbox to answer your questions. Remember, simplicity and brevity are your allies here, but also direct messaging across a variety of platforms that will allow you to gather feedback from all customer types.
This is why you should combine an SMS customer satisfaction survey with online tools and information gathered through comments, shares, Google reviews, likes, and other KPIs that will give you a comprehensive overview of your entire feedback profile. This will allow you to discover unique problems from all customer types, and thus craft an effective improvement strategy.
Identify patterns and pain-points
When it comes to acting on feedback effectively and efficiently (without wasting extraneous resources), the key is to sub-categorize all reviews, comments, stars, and SMS responses into distinct feedback groups: such as common questions and problems you can address with one all-encompassing approach. This will allow you to differentiate between problems that require you to improve branding, marketing, customer service, or some other aspect of your business.
By identifying unique patterns in customer feedback, you can effectively work to improve the efforts of a single department, for example, and devise improvement strategies that are tailor-made to resolve the problems of that specific group of customers. This level of attention to detail will separate you from the competition and help you optimize your entire online and offline presence.
Act on the good as well as the bad
Just because the feedback will vary between the good, the bad, and the neutral, doesn’t mean that you should only focus on improving the negative reviews. Of course, negative feedback should hold top priority, but you mustn’t forget that you can also use positive feedback to discover new alleyways of success down the road. Likewise, keep in mind that neutral comments and reviews have the potential to negatively influence potential customers, as they usually have negative connotations.
With that in mind, be sure to prioritize your feedback according to the opportunities and dangers associated with your findings. Strive to turn negative feedback around first and bring up neutral reviews in the process, and then focus on analyzing positive reviews and engagement in general to create actionable improvement strategies. Remember, if you’re not improving over time, you will undoubtedly fall behind the competition.
Manage high feedback volumes with AI
On a final note, do take advantage of modern software-driven marketing tools to analyze large volumes of data quickly and reduce extraneous expenses. Processing data manually is tedious work, but more importantly, it requires resources you could put to better use. With AI-driven software at your disposal, you can funnel your feedback and categorize it accordingly, and even derive actionable conclusions that will allow you to act immediately.
You can use machine learning to your advantage and teach the software to extract certain keywords from your feedback pool, categorize it for a streamlined workflow, and perform other crucial tasks that will make the lives of your employees that much easier.
In conclusion
The modern business world is dominated and driven by feedback and reviews. People will make sure to research your brand before making the decision to buy, so improving your feedback over time should be your no.1 priority. Use these tips to analyze the data efficiently and effectively, and craft unique strategies that will improve your standing in the competitive industry.