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Transforming Customer Feedback into Business Growth

 

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When you collect genuine customer feedback, you have access to a pool of information that has a direct impact on the success of your business.

However, collecting feedback is only part of the equation. The other part is analyzing that feedback and leveraging it to improve your customer service, products, services, and business. 

Harnessing the power of feedback requires efficient processes for analysis and creating an actionable plan, as well as a continuous commitment to gathering and leveraging customer feedback.

Be Intentional in Your Analysis of Customer Feedback

There’s a constant influx of data when you gather customer feedback in many ways, like through surveys, reviews, and market research groups. So, the first step is establishing a system for organizing and filtering data, and sending it to the right people on your team.  You can then analyze this data and be more intentional in your studies of customer feedback as a result.

The more intentional you are in your analysis of customer feedback, the easier it is to identify insights that you can turn into actionable plans. Continue reading for more on how to ensure your customer feedback analysis process is thorough.

What Do You Want To Learn?

Your use of customer feedback is much more effective when you know exactly what you want to learn from the feedback in front of you and why.

This is because you can infer a lot from customer feedback, whether about your brand, the products and services you offer, or your customer service. You probably wouldn’t be encouraged about moving forward with implementing what you’ve learned because it would be so much.

On the other hand, if you focused on one or two things you need to learn from your customer feedback that will help your business, coming up with an actionable plan will be easier.

It’s best practice to develop a set of questions you want answered or statements you want to understand further before you begin to collect customer feedback. At the very least, you should define what you want to learn before you dive into any analysis.

Once you write down your intentions with customer feedback, you can get into the data and concentrate on the insights that help you learn what you need to.

Rely on Technology To Help You Extract Insights

Human analysis of customer feedback is essential. However, relying on it alone can make the process tiresome and time-consuming.

Combining human analysis with tech tools that can extract insights from customer feedback data strengthens your ability to transform customer feedback into business growth. You can pull insights from your feedback faster.

In addition, these tools can execute analysis 24 hours a day, something human employees can’t do. So, your list of insights is ever-growing.

Which tools you use to help you analyze customer feedback depends on your budget and needs. But here are a few to get you started:   

• Text analytics: software that can interpret text data to help you identify the sentiment, tone, topics, keywords, emotions, preferences, and pain points behind the information left by customers.
• Data visualization: tools that use graphs, charts, maps, and other visual elements to present otherwise complex information in an understandable, engaging way.
• Qualitative data analysis solution: a tool that automatically organizes and structures visual or written customer feedback data into understandable insights.   

A human and technology-based approach to customer feedback analysis streamlines the process.

Summarize Your Vision for Implementing Feedback

Once you analyze customer feedback and determine what it’s telling you about how to improve, you need to illustrate what implementing the feedback would look like.

For example, let's say you get feedback about how your digital presence is lacking. Your website is slow, you aren’t engaging on social media, and your content lacks professionalism.

You audit your tech suite because of this feedback and realize you need to replace outdated hardware and software systems to support a more robust digital presence in the ever-evolving digital landscape. To ensure replacing outdated hardware and software systems is seamless, you need to address the impact the process may have on your business and mitigate it.

For example, there may be stoppages in your team’s work that cause unplanned downtime. What can you do to ensure you aren’t losing a whole lot of money because your team can’t work due to the upgrades? You can train your team on how to use the new systems before they go live so they’re ready to jump back in as soon as the process permits it. You can also make sure the systems work well in one area of your business before enacting widespread use.

Making these types of improvements can also directly improve your ability to serve your customers. For example, you can update your website host and development software to improve your site’s infrastructure so that it loads faster. As a result, customers will get the information they need faster, inspiring them to stay on your site and learn what they need.

You can also implement a content management and creation solution that helps you create quality social media and other marketing content. Your customers will be drawn to your higher-quality content and be inspired to engage with it.

Touching on your vision for implementing customer feedback in your analysis eases you into the next important step of making an actionable plan out of what you learn.

Turn the Feedback into an Actionable Plan

A vague vision for implementing customer feedback isn’t enough. You need a step-by-step plan to ensure your team can take real steps toward productive change.

First, you need to figure out what feedback you’re moving forward with as far as implementation. How often are you getting this same feedback? Will implementing it have a substantial impact on your business’s growth?

If you’ve gotten the feedback from multiple customers, and you can prove implementing it will make a difference in your business and customer satisfaction, it should be a top priority.

Then, turn the feedback into a SMART goal.

Turn Feedback Into Smart Goals To Inspire Action

SMART is an abbreviation for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. You’ll have a clear objective that’s relevant to your business and customer needs. You’ll also have specific ways to measure your progress and can keep your team accountable with a deadline.

If we stay with the example above, the customer feedback was that you need a stronger digital presence. You can turn this feedback into a SMART goal with something like this:

“We will strengthen our digital presence by updating our website to drive a five percent increase in organic traffic. To make this happen, our team will revamp our visual brand identity and the content on each website page, and promote the revamp across our digital marketing channels.”

The steps to achieve this goal are more straightforward, making it easier to create your actionable plan.

Taking feedback from a conversation to actual implementation is a detailed process. But with intention and technology, it’s a much more manageable one.