How has your brand been handling your customer feedback program? Is it possible that you don’t have one in place? Today more than ever before, the customer is the king. Their powers to make or mar a business have increased tremendously. Here is the best way to make a customer feedback program for your brand.
Your customers have access to many social networks, and the competition has become more intense — now you are subjected to web-based ratings.
Due to the ease of accessing social media, a consumer can, with just ordinary clicks, post positive and negative feedback online, which can either make your brand soar or completely come crashing.
If you are unfortunate and don’t have an efficient customer feedback program that can be deployed to gather, analyze, and act upon the data, you are in the deep blue sea. On the other hand, if you have put in place a robust customer feedback program for your brand, you will avoid all manners of negative and detrimental reviews, with an assurance of a handsome return on investments (ROI).
Nemertes’ 2019-20 Intelligent Customer Engagement research study of 518 companies discovered that 66.7% of companies gather customer feedback. The feedback includes 43.6% use customer health scores to observe developments continuously.
The study also revealed that though about 50% make modifications frequently based on that feedback, 45.7% make adjustments periodically and believe they can do more than that.
The sad aspect of the discovery, however, is that 3.1% of those that gather customer feedback completely refuse to do anything with the information they have at their disposal.
After you have the gathered data — then what?
Once your data analyst has finished working on the gathered data using investments in survey and analytics tools, whatever changes that are recommended must be swiftly applied, which means that your brand’s C-suite must be aligned with the customer feedback program for prompt action.
Key players needed for the success of the program
Everybody who is part of the decision-making body in your organization must be involved in the program to guarantee expediency. However, there are some whose roles are very vital for successful customer feedback.
Some of these key players are as follows:
Chief customer officer (CUO)
In conjunction with the chief revenue officer, chief marketing officer, and maybe some others depending on the brand, should be solely responsible for the development of the business case. This should outrightly specify what relevant information they need from customers, how often this is needed, and which success metrics they will track.
The CUO is also responsible for analyzing the data, recommending change, and overseeing that customer service agents comply with new scripts or processes.
Chief information officer (CIO)
Your CIO should be responsible for selecting the tools you need for gathering and analyzing customer feedback. It’s also the CIO’s business to ensure that you have the best supporting network and server or cloud platforms.
The CIO must work with a team that oversees the training of AI data sets and data scientists, who develop the feedback programs and, in the end, give feedback to the CIO.
Chief marketing officer (CMO)
Your CMO is responsible for ensuring that you are getting positive ratings and curtailing negative feedback, using social media, guest posting, blog, and the web. Whenever you have any marketing program that is not aligned with your customer feedback, the marketing team ensures this is corrected.
Chief revenue officer
Your chief revenue officer oversees your sales strategy and SEO — and decides when to effect changes based on your customers’ feedback.
Mode of operation
For your customer feedback program to be effective, you need to follow the following steps:
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Collate your data
Your brand has its peculiarities; hence, your requirements must also be unique. It’s your business to determine the type of data you need and how to gather the data.
Metrics you can rely on to succeed in the collation include customer satisfaction (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), transactional net promoter score (TNPS), customer effort score, post-call surveys, or custom surveys.
You may not have enough workforce to do the collation; you can easily outsource this service to a third party. The basic procedure is to send survey requests to customers to gather this information regularly.
It’s not just all about gathering data but ensuring that you get comments that are qualitative and useful at the end. You should be able to deduce from their comments the reasons for rating you either high or low.
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Analysis
After you have gathered the data, the next thing is to make sense out of it and this requires analysis. You determine the analytics tools that are relevant to your brand, it should not be an a-one-fixes all sort of affair.
According to Answerrocket, you can even deploy AI-enabled analytics tools to carry out the task where it is necessary. The essence is to determine when comments are negative, positive, and mixed.
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Recommendations
The data analysis tools you use should be able to make recommendations for a strategic but non-urgent change or raise an urgent red flag. The change could be due to complaints from a customer who has a point to iron out.
You can also implement changes based on recommendations from your data analysts, who have discovered some anomaly in the way things are handled based on the data. This anomaly could be from your marketing strategies, advertising campaigns, or branding.
Examples of recommendations you may come across include:
Act on the findings
It’s of utmost importance that you act on the data you’ve got and other recommendations. You can’t expect any meaningful impact from your analysis if this is not done.
It’s annoying to realize that some organizations will put in serious efforts to gather and analyze data to haphazardly implement the recommendations. In this era of AI and machine learning, you can deploy both humans and technology to act upon customer feedback.
The recommendations may be based on feedback from an individual, a group of customers with similar circumstances, or all your customers. The action you take will depend on the situation at hand and what the process dictates.
Degree of success
If you have been able to resolve the issues raised by your customers, you mustn’t stop there. There is the need to maintain a good CX, and that warrants that you keep on gathering more information from them regularly to ensure you are on the same page.
If the action you took worked perfectly, that might be a signal for you to embark on bigger projects since you are in the good books of your customers. If, on the other hand, your action did not have the desired impact, you need to innovate.
Whatever may be your outcome, don’t stop measuring success. And finally, revise.
John Ejiofor
Digital Marketer, Content Writer
John Ejiofor is a Digital Marketer, SEO Specialist, and Freelance Content Writer. He’s the Founder of Nature Torch, a blog that discusses the impact of humans on nature. He can be reached via john@naturetorch.com
