Customer feedback is the lifeblood of any business that wants to touch the heights of success. It is the key to developing products and services based on customers’ requirements which is necessary to survive within the massively competitive ecosystem.
A lack of tools to track and analyze customer feedback can destroy your reputation; it is undoubtedly detrimental to your business. Your customer feedback cycle should be fortified and completely devoid of bugs that can cause harm to your business in the long run.
Before understanding how to resolve the issues and improve customer experience, let’s go through why you are facing problems with the process in the first place.
You are up for everything, ready to resolve customer complaints and analyze those to offer an enhanced customer experience. But, something is still not right; can’t put your finger on it? Here are a few points to help you out:
- Customer feedback pours in across so many channels that you find it increasingly challenging to keep track of each one and end up missing out on the essential details.
- Your customer feedback managing system is so clumsy that everything is messed up. Due to all the clumsiness, you have missed out on the insightful reviews hiding within the clutter.
- You are not asking pertinent questions to customers about product or service changes because you are worried that a competitor might analyze your question, understand its gravity, and copy it to stay ahead of the competition.
Let us now delve into the solutions on how to fix the issues in your customer feedback process:
- Utilize whatever you have to start with: You can fathom customer sentiment by implementing the Transactional Net Promoter Score, a survey that will help you fetch reliable and in-depth data about what the customers think about your services or products. Use a secured platform to manage your data. Although you use a CRM system, getting the sales team and others to keep the essential data up to date is challenging. Use a platform to dig deep into customer ratings and reviews because using a secured platform to manage all the data can be immensely helpful.
- Learn what to inform your customers: Collecting users’ responses and interactions can improve the quality of products and services. Consulting a group of users will help you in the long run. They will be helpful if you’re open and transparent with your customers. Know what and when to inform your customers. Be sure to respect the customers by paying attention to customer closed loop feedback because future marketing strategies, approaches and a lot more might be dependent on their feedback. Use tools that will help you have a face-to-face conversation with your customer and discuss a problem that they might be facing.
- Work as a team with your staff and address the problems: If a customer faces a problem with customer service, it is serious. Analyze the issue, discuss it with your staff but do not forget it. When you are absolutely transparent with your customer service rep about an issue, the solution will likely come out pretty fast. Striking a balance between prompt action, heartfelt empathy, and frequent follow-ups can help your brand go a long way.
- Take cross-functional collaborations seriously: A rock-solid governance process is required to be set up. The governance process will be incomplete without a process action team, a steering committee, and a system to bridge the gap between the teams and different departments across the organization. Ask your Net Promoter analyst to take a look at what is triggering customer disappointment, once you know the reason, talk to the operations team to fix the problem. All the teams in your organization can help improve customer experience.
- Ability to handle all situations: In some cases, you may find yourself in a tricky situation where the problem is challenging but that doesn’t mean you will get scared and shy away from frequent follow-ups with the customer only to avoid the situation. If you avoid it, things will become worse. They need to trust your brand completely and not regret their choice. Offer them options and better service (more acceptable deals, replacement options, free delivery service, etc). This will help them regain trust and they will support your endeavor.
Final Thoughts
Listen to your customers and pay attention to their preferences. This way you can conveniently fix the customer feedback process because turning customers into advisors allows you to transform your relationship with the customer. You become a reliable partner and not just any vendor.
