Why customer feedback natters

Customer feedback provides insights that are vital for any business. We use them at Flywheel to make sure our new features are as useful as we expect! Making customer feedback a priority can yield significant benefits:

• Drives product/service improvements - Customer feedback gives you direct input on what your customers like and dislike about your offerings. This allows you to iterate and improve your products and services to better meet customer needs.

• Increases customer satisfaction - By acting on customer feedback, you can fix pain points in the customer experience and delight customers by implementing requested features and enhancements. This improves overall customer satisfaction.

• Creates brand advocates - Customers who feel heard and understood become emotionally invested in your brand. When you use their feedback to improve, they are more likely to recommend you and become brand champions.

Soliciting and truly listening to customer feedback fosters loyalty and shows you care about your customers. This helps you retain existing customers, grow through word of mouth, and build a strong brand reputation.

Methods for collecting customer feedback

There are several methods companies can use to gather feedback from customers:

Surveys

• Email surveys - Send a survey directly to customers via email. Keep it short with multiple choice, rating, and open-ended questions. Emails often have high open rates.

• In-app surveys - Display a feedback survey to customers within your mobile app or website. These can provide feedback in the moment of using your product. Products like Flywheel help customers send these surveys to their users.

• Website surveys - Have a dedicated feedback form or survey on your website. Offer it in prominent places like the footer. Flywheel can also show surveys on marketing pages.

Social media

• Social listening - Monitor social channels for mentions of your brand. Pay attention to complaints and negative feedback. Social media can provide an unfiltered source of customer feedback.

Review sites

• Product/service review sites - Encourage customers to leave reviews on sites like Yelp, G2, and Trustpilot. Monitor what is said in reviews.

Direct customer interactions

• Interviews - Reach out to customers for a 15-30 minute interview. Prepare specific questions to probe about their experience.

• Focus groups - Gather 6-10 customers for an in-depth discussion about their experience and pain points. Focus groups allow you to get qualitative insights.

Next steps

Start collecting customer feedback through a combination of surveys, monitoring social channels, requesting reviews, and direct outreach through interviews and focus groups. Use the methods that fit best with your business goals and resources. Analyze the data to uncover trends, opportunities, and insights you can take action on.

Best practices for collecting customer feedback

Implementing a few key best practices can help ensure your customer feedback process is effective and provides maximum value. Here are some top best practices to follow:

Make it easy for customers to give feedback

• Offer feedback collection across all customer touchpoints - website, mobile app, email, in-store, etc.

• Use simple, one-click feedback options like thumbs up/down buttons or emojis.

• Send post-transaction surveys while the experience is still fresh.

• Make sure online feedback forms are mobile-friendly.

• Provide an option for customers to leave open-ended comments.

Close the feedback loop

• Let customers know you received their feedback.

• Share back how you used their feedback to drive improvements.

• Monitor if implemented changes improved customer satisfaction.

Integrate feedback into customer experience workflows

• Route feedback to the right teams and owners.

• Integrate feedback data into your CX tools and dashboards.

• Enable teams to analyze trends and collaborate.

• Connect feedback insights to initiatives and roadmaps.

By making the feedback process smooth, closing the loop, and routing insights to key stakeholders, you can maximize the value of customer feedback for your organization.

Optimizing your customer feedback strategy

To get the most value from customer feedback, you need to optimize how you collect, analyze, and act on the insights. Here are some best practices:

Use both qualitative and quantitative data

Quantitative data from surveys and scoring is crucial, but don't underestimate the value of qualitative feedback through reviews, interviews, and open-ended survey responses. Qualitative data provides the context behind the numbers and reveals deeper insights.

Connect insights to your product roadmap

Align insights from customer feedback to your product roadmap to prioritize development. Look for themes around problems that need solving or features customers are requesting. This ensures you are investing development resources into areas that will have the most customer impact.

Understand impact and urgency

As you analyze feedback, quantify the potential impact of addressing different issues based on factors like number of customers affected, revenue at risk, churn risk reduction, etc. This helps you focus on high-impact changes first. Also evaluate time sensitivity to prioritize urgent bugs or pain points.

Make incremental improvements fast

Don't wait for the next big product release to act on feedback. Find ways to make incremental improvements through minor bug fixes, optimization of help content, improving self-service options, etc. Small changes made quickly can delight customers.

By regularly optimizing your processes for leveraging customer insights, you'll be able to continually refine the customer experience and fuel innovation. Customer-centricity must be ingrained across the entire company, not just a single team.

Increasing response rates to your customer feedback surveys

Getting customer feedback is crucial, but low response rates can make the data unreliable. Here are some proven techniques to boost response rates:

• Offer incentives - Consider offering a coupon, discount, or free trial in exchange for completing the survey. Make sure the reward is valuable enough to motivate customers.

• Send reminders - Follow up and send several reminders about the survey via email or in-app notifications. Remind customers why their feedback matters.

• Make it short and easy - Keep your survey to less than 10 questions that can be answered quickly. Use rating scales instead of long text responses. Minimize the effort required.

• Explain why you need feedback - Be transparent about how you'll use the data to improve your product and their experience. Customers are more likely to respond when they understand the "why" behind the survey.

• Personalize the invitation - Use their name in the survey request and select them based on relevance, like their activity level. Targeted, personalized surveys tend to perform better.

• Test different subject lines - Try different subject lines and preview text to determine which ones have the highest open and response rates. Focus on value in the subject.

• Mobile optimize the survey - Make sure the survey looks and functions flawlessly on mobile. Mobile optimization can significantly lift response rates.

• Set a realistic timeline - Give customers adequate time to participate, between 10-14 days. Set expectations on how long the survey will be open.

• Gamify the experience - Consider adding elements of fun and games to the survey such as progress bars, feedback questions, and thank you messages.

With the right techniques, you can lift survey response rates substantially. Continually experiment with new tactics to incentivize your customers to provide feedback. Their input is invaluable.

Analyzing the data

Analyzing customer feedback data is crucial for identifying issues, uncovering opportunities, and tracking sentiment over time. Here are some tips for making sense of all that feedback:

• Look for trends and themes - Review feedback regularly to spot common topics, pain points, or requests. If multiple customers mention the same issue, that's a clear sign something needs attention. Grouping feedback into categories makes trends easier to spot.

• Track sentiment over time - Measure metrics like NPS and CSAT periodically to gauge whether sentiment is improving or declining. Plotting this data over time can reveal the impact of changes based on feedback.

• Identify areas for improvement - Look for low NPS scores, complaints, frustrations, and suggestions to find weak spots in your product or service. Feedback often directly points to opportunities to improve.

• Connect feedback to business goals - Relate feedback to metrics that matter for your business, like conversion rates, retention, revenue per customer, or acquisition costs. This shows the tangible impact of making changes customers ask for.

• Prioritize with a feedback roadmap - Develop a roadmap to guide which feedback to focus on based on impact vs. effort. Quick wins build goodwill while big projects go on the roadmap.

Regularly analyzing feedback gives you an essential voice of the customer perspective to drive continuous improvement. Acting on the insights creates valuable change.

Turning customers into promoters

Building a base of happy, loyal promoters can be a huge asset for any business. Promoters are customers who actively recommend your product or service to others based on their positive experience. They are your unpaid brand advocates who can amplify your marketing and help attract new customers. Turning satisfied customers into promoters should be a top priority.

Here are some strategies for creating an army of promoters:

Resolve Issues Quickly

Nothing turns a customer against your brand faster than an unresolved issue. Make sure you have fast and effective issue resolution processes in place. Empower your team to solve problems on the spot if possible. Follow up quickly on outstanding issues and keep customers updated on the status. Delight them by going above and beyond to make things right.

Deliver an Amazing Experience

Look at every customer touchpoint and interaction as an opportunity to wow them. From your website and product to your support and sales teams, ensure each element of the customer experience is polished, intuitive, and pleasing. Pay attention to the little details that make customers smile.

Ask for Reviews

Don't be afraid to ask happy customers directly for online reviews and testimonials. You can include links in follow up emails after purchases or interactions. Offer incentives like discounts for leaving reviews. Feature and showcase customer reviews and stories on your website and in marketing materials.

Reward and Recognize Promoters

Loyal repeat customers and vocal promoters deserve to be recognized for their advocacy. Send thank you notes or small gifts to show your appreciation. Spotlight them on social media or in your customer community. Offer special perks and discounts only for promoters. A little recognition can strengthen the emotional connection between customers and your brand.

Focusing on creating promoters should be an essential part of your customer experience strategy. When you transform satisfied customers into vocal advocates, they can help drive referrals, improve brand perception, and fuel growth.

Questions to ask in customer feedback surveys

Getting quality customer feedback starts with asking the right questions. Here are some of the most effective questions to include in your surveys:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a simple but powerful metric that measures customer satisfaction and loyalty. Asking respondents "On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?" is a straightforward way to gauge overall sentiment. Those who respond with a score of 9-10 are considered promoters, 7-8 are passives, and 0-6 are detractors. Subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters yields the Net Promoter Score. An NPS above 50 is excellent.

Overall satisfaction

Questions like "On a scale of 1-5, how satisfied are you with your overall experience with our company/product/service?" shed light on the broader customer experience. Follow up an overall satisfaction rating with open-ended questions asking what factors influenced their rating and how you can improve.

Identify pain points

Open-ended questions like "What is the biggest frustration or challenge you experience with our product/service?" and "If you could change one thing about our product/service what would it be?" provide qualitative insights into customer pain points and areas for improvement. Focus on problem areas and suggested solutions.

The right survey questions identify problem areas, surface actionable insights, and point to opportunities to better serve your customers. Analyzing feedback across these areas provides a holistic view of the customer experience.

Sharing feedback internally

Sharing customer feedback with internal teams is a critical step in leveraging insights to improve your product and customer experience. Once you've collected and analyzed customer feedback, it needs to be distributed to the relevant teams who can take action on it.

Share with product and engineering teams

Product and engineering teams need direct access to customer feedback so they can use it to inform decisions around new features, prioritize fixes for pain points, and make improvements aligned with what customers want. Set up a process to regularly share a summary of your feedback data with product and engineering leads. Highlight major themes, trends, feature requests, bugs, and areas of opportunity.

Share with marketing, sales and success teams

Customer feedback that provides insights into buying challenges, sales process issues, onboarding difficulties or upgrade barriers should be shared with marketing, sales and customer success staff. Their workflows directly impact adoption, retention and expansion so customer feedback can inform better approaches.

The key is identifying who needs to see the feedback to align their work streams with what your customers are saying. Set up feedback review meetings or send regular summary reports to open the lines of communication. The more teams have real customer feedback, the better they can serve your customers.

Closing the feedback loop

Collecting customer feedback is only the first step. To truly leverage feedback for growth, you need to close the loop by taking action and communicating with customers.

Here are some best practices for closing the feedback loop:

• Share feedback insights across your organization - Make sure all relevant teams and departments have access to the customer feedback data. Product, engineering, customer support, and other groups need to be aligned.

• Make improvements and changes - Don't just collect feedback for the sake of it. Use insights to make real improvements to your product, service, and customer experience. Prioritize and tackle issues uncovered in the feedback.

• Communicate changes to customers - When you make improvements based on feedback, let your customers know. This shows you value their voice and are working to address their needs.

• Measure impact - Track metrics to gauge the impact of changes driven by customer feedback. Look for improvements in customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score (NPS), churn, sales, etc.

• Continuously improve - Customer feedback should fuel an ongoing improvement loop. Set up regular check-ins to collect, analyze, and act on insights over time.

Closing the loop transforms customer feedback from opinions into real impact and business results. It demonstrates you are committed to listening to customers and using their input to improve. This builds trust and loyalty.