Feedback Strategy
Think Wow Feedback Strategy Experts
Putting in place a customer feedback strategy, or voice of the customer programme doesn’t need to be complicated or costly. Often the biggest win a business can make when it comes to driving increased customer satisfaction comes from simply making a deliberate move towards listening to its customers.
At Think Wow we know that nothing happens by accident. We know that your customers have so much valuable information they can share with you to help you improve, and we also know that your employees will often be given that information informally, but without a clear and defined process that forms part of your wider customer feedback strategy, that information is often lost in transit. That’s where we come in.
We help businesses to gather customer insights, create a clear and consistent plan for what to do with those insights, and help you to harness the full potential of both your unhappy, and more satisfied customers.
Did you know that on average 91% of unhappy customers will leave a brand without ever telling them why?
That’s a huge amount of actionable feedback that’s being lost. Our feedback strategy helps you collect more feedback, easily report on it and analyse key trends. Having a consistent and easy to follow feedback strategy ultimately helps set you up to better understand your customers, win more new customers, and grow your business by increasing the volume of returning customers and reducing customer churn.
If you’re considering how you collect and use customer feedback, we’d love to help!
Still on the fence?
Let’s take a deeper look into customer feedback. You can start to passively collect feedback that comes into your business organically. You can be sure this is happening, but are you currently doing anything with that feedback?.
You can also aim to proactively collect customer feedback by utilising tools like customer satisfaction surveys, customer effort score, and net promoter score to collect customer sentiment. Then it’s a matter of what you do next. The leading businesses don’t just ask the question, they take action.
You can analyse that data to identify patterns, look for negative comments to help spot customer issues brewing before they turn into a complaint, and use that insight to design a more rewarding and consistent customer journey.
You can even use customer feedback to improve your marketing and reach on social media. By passing positive feedback to your marketing teams or even your sales team, they have all the content they need to shout about how much your business cares about customer success, customer loyalty and ultimately customer happiness.
Did you know 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.
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So why is it important to put a formal customer feedback strategy in place?
You might have heard the phrase ‘to assume makes an ass of u and me’, yet often in business, that’s exactly what we do. We assume. We assume that no news is good news (remember that 91% of unhappy customers just leave so that’s not the case…). We assume that we know what our customers want, and we often assume that our employees are delivering a great customer experience.
A voice of the customer programme takes away room for incorrect assumptions. By deliberately collecting customer feedback, using social media monitoring, analyzing customer feedback and starting to measure customer satisfaction, you put the customer’s expectations and feelings at the heart of decisions and remove the need for any guesswork. Not only will you know how your customers feel, but you’ll know what they want, what their expectations are of your business and what you need to do to drive increased customer loyalty.
Still need convincing? Okay, here goes!
Statistics show that a more engaged, loyal customer is more likely to spend more money with you, more likely to refer you to others, more likely not to look at competitors as an alternative, and more likely to leave a positive review. All of those aspects add up to create business success, and will underpin any growth you’re aiming for. Leading companies don’t leave that to chance, they set out to deliberately understand how well they are doing by seeking customer feedback.
But it’s not just about collecting that feedback. The difference between a good business and a great one often lies with what they do next. What happens with all that feedback data? Does it sit in a drawer somewhere collecting dust, or does it get examined, understood and shared? Does it feed into a customer steering group to inform improvements across the business? Does the great feedback get passed to the marketing team to use on social media?
A well thought out and structured customer feedback strategy will think of all of these things and more – it will cover not just what needs to be done, but how it will happen and who will own it over what time frame, leaving you free to get on with – well, whatever you want! Your feedback strategy will be fully taken care of by our team of experts here at Think Wow.
What happens once you’re ready to start creating a feedback strategy?
First, we start with your business goals and wider customer experience strategy. It’s crucial that we know what we are trying to achieve, and what information we can gather from your customers to help us achieve those goals.
Once the end goal has been established, we look at the measurements that will help us know how successful our customer strategy is, and we can then design a customer feedback strategy that will help us collect the social media comments, informal remarks and more formal submissions all in one place. Where ever possible we’ll work with you to enable customers to leave feedback in a way that’s as convenient to them as possible – this is essential to maximise response rates and learn from loyal customers.
We’ll then work with you to create and communicate a clear and easy to follow customer feedback strategy that bring the voice of the customer into the heart of your business and drives change based on the incredible feedback received. Keeping customers happy is forefront of our design approach, whilst at the same time getting you the business insights you need to create a service or product roadmap that leads you towards long term success and business growth.
Still have questions? Check out our FAQs:
What is a customer satisfaction score?
Customer satisfaction score is a way to translate customer feedback into a trackable score, to easily compare any progress at a glance, or where you sit in relation to competitors.
To calculate your score, take the number of satisfied customers (those who rated you 4 or 5), and divide by the total number of responses. For example, if 50 of your 100 responses have a rating of 4 or 5, your score would be 50
In terms of what makes a good customer satisfaction score, you generally want to aim for a positive number above 0, and the higher the better. Generally a good satisfaction score is between 30 and 70 with scores over 70 indicating very high levels of loyalty in your customer base.
What does NPS stand for?
Net Promoter Score or NPS is a metric often used to predict the level of customer advocacy a brand can expect from its customers. You ask your customer how likely they are to recommend your business to others based on their experience with you. They then provide a score ranging from 0 to 10 with 0 being extremely unlikely, and ten being very likely.
The theory is that a customer who scores you 6 or less is likely to be a brand detractor, out there negatively talking about your brand and not someone who is likely to recommend you to others.
7-8 they are considered passives. They don’t feel strongly enough about their experience either way to even talk about you.
9 and 10 means that they are promoters. They were so pleased with their experience with you that they will be out there telling everyone they meet just how great you are, and drumming up business for you based on their customer service feedback.
You need to make sure that as many key team members as possible are empowered to help with the project, that they see the value in any culture change, and that they know how important they are to the success of the overall transformation. Bringing your team along and involving them in the process is a tried and tested way to drive engagement and you can’t do that with a team who are disengaged or feeling undervalued. That’s why we recommend the cultural assessment is one of the first stages to the project.
For some, you might need to present a business case for the project, for others having a clear vision of what great cx looks like will be enough to guide them.
What is a customer effort score?
A customer effort score is a loyalty metric based on how easy it was for a customer to achieve a particular action with your business. It could be an overall assessment of their entire experience, such as “How easy was it for you to achieve what you wanted with our business today?” or it could provide detail on one aspect of the service experience, such as how easy it was order online.
You ask your customer to rate the ease of their experience on a seven point scale as below with the questions formed as a statement the customer has to rate.
Eg: The company made it easy for me to place an online order…
- = Strongly Disagree
- = Disagree
- = Somewhat Disagree
- = Undecided
- = Somewhat Agree
- = Agree
- = Strongly Agree
You then calculate your effort score using the below formula.
CES = Sum of all Customer Effort Scores ÷ Total number of respondents.
What is a customer listening session or focus groups?
What's the best way to categorise customer feedback?
Is there such thing as nonsense feedback?
How important is communicating the customer feedback strategy to the business?
What are the best customer feedback surveys to use to gather customer feedback?
What is meant by the term customer feedback loop?
What's the role of the customer service team in the customer feedback strategy?
What is Net promoter score NPS, and why is it not a good measurement of a customer's satisfaction on it's own?
How can I use feedback to attract more customers and grow the business?
Dealing with feature requests and minor product bugs
What you don’t want is to have your support team ties up with lots of little requests. If you operate a web based business you might find that you frequently receive requests for new product features, or customers submitting major product bugs. These will often be feedback that needs to be actioned immediately or handled in an agile way in the next development sprint. These should therefore not normally be included in the feedback strategy but should have a separate mechanism for reporting straight to your technical development team or devs.
Product feedback and bug reporting might still be relevant to your support team or the customer success department if they’ve impacted a lot of customers, so as with any aspect of customer experience management, it’s recommended that the owner of the customer feedback strategy keeps in close contact with the development lead as mutual key stakeholders.
