What To Do With Customer Feedback Once You Have It

Collecting customer feedback without acting on it is like collecting bank cheques and not cashing them in – you’re not really gaining anything. So what actions should you take to drive the most significant improvements to your customer experience? There are four, must-do steps. 

Share it 

Step one is to get as many eyeballs as possible on your customer feedback, particularly from customer-facing teams. Far too often, the people responsible for delivering the customer experience are left out of seeing exactly what customers are saying. How can we expect frontline teams to deliver consistently awesome experiences if they don’t know what awesome means to their customers? 

So, funnel your feedback straight to frontline teams and make it accessible on the job (e.g straight to their mobile phones if they work out-of-office, up on a TV in the break room etc.) This way, each employee has a firm grasp on what they’re doing well and what they could do more of to improve the customer experience every day. Over time, your teams will get to know your customers better than ever and your customer experience will hit the mark every time. 

Dashboard it 

Take a good look at your customer feedback and start analyzing the trends. What are the most common themes of your promoters and detractors? What do customers rate the highest and lowest about their experience? Which branches, teams and individuals are nailing it, and which clearly need some help to reach your service standards? Your ability to track trends in real-time customer feedback is a game changer and will help you identify what matters most to your customers, and most importantly how you can tailor your experience around that. The trends provide evidence for taking action. If one customer leaves negative feedback because of speed of service, maybe it’s a one-off that doesn’t require action, but if 30 customers are saying the same thing, you know it’s an issue that needs to be addressed. 

Follow up on it

Where you can, follow up on feedback. This will help you turn both unhappy and happy customers into brand advocates who sing your praises far and wide. 

If you receive positive feedback, follow up and ask the customer for an online review or for a referral. You may be thinking, “but I don’t have time to follow up with every happy customer”, first of all that’s great (we love lots of happy customers), but second of all, you don’t have to – you can let tech do the work for you. You can (and should) use an automated trigger that sends out an online review or referral request to customers who leave positive feedback (e.g a trigger that goes out to all NPS scores over 85). 

If you receive negative feedback, follow up with that customer so that you can understand what went wrong and most importantly make it right. Again, you can use technology to alert your team when a customer submits negative feedback (e.g a trigger for all NPS scores below 30). It’s within this window that you have the opportunity to make things right for the customer and secure them as a loyal fan. Without follow up, you may lose them for good. 

Use it 

There are many ways you can “use” your customer feedback in a meaningful way, but here are the two most impactful: 

Coach 

Trends in your customer feedback bring forth the most useful coaching conversation starters. Instead of training your team using generic, high level CX programs, coach them for small improvements based on actual customer sentiment. Extract some key trends and coach through 1:1 conversations, group workshops and team experiences. 

Recognize 

Customer feedback can also be used to celebrate and recognize frontline teams for great work when it happens. If a customer raves about how epic their experience was, the person who delivered that experience should see the fruits of their labor! Not only does it make employees feel good, but it motivates them to keep achieving. 

It’s time to cash those cheques. Share your feedback, analyze it, act on it and use it to coach and recognize frontline teams. You’ll be surprised just how much of an impact it will have on your customer experience, repeat business and referrals. Spoiler alert: it’s colossal. 

Up next: Timing is Everything. When's the Best Time to Ask for Customer Feedback?