Every business would like to know what their consumer base thinks about their products or services. After all, customer feedback is a goldmine of insights that can help companies improve their offerings and increase user loyalty. But how do you make sense of all those responses? This is where we focus on the role of customer feedback analytics. In this blog, we will discuss the role of Customer Feedback Analytics, its importance, and the different types of metrics used. We will also outline steps on how to implement it effectively, including setting goals, choosing the right mediums, collecting and analyzing feedback.
What is Customer Feedback Analytics?
Customer feedback is the summation of responses received via feedback forms, marketing surveys, survey questionnaires which contain the opinions and responses from consumers of products and services. These forms contain the various experiences they go through at certain user touchpoints and how they gather specific experiences from using a product. Organisations collect customer feedback via in-app surveys, social media portals, email surveys to name a few.
While survey questions bring in a variety of responses, analysis of this data can bring insights on their preferences, behaviours and pleasure or displeasure towards business offerings.
Why is Customer Feedback Analysis Important?
Understanding the importance of customer feedback analytics is crucial for a business to stay competitive and upgraded in the marketplace. With so many options available to consumers, it can be challenging to maintain customer loyalty and satisfaction. By analyzing received feedback, businesses can gain valuable insights into their customers’ preferences and behavior. This information can then be used to make informed decisions about product development, marketing strategies, and customer service (onboarding new customers or to closing a feedback loop).
Additionally, investing in customer feedback analytics can equip a marketing team on creating better user experience, building a strong support team, and understanding how customer retention works.
Types of Customer Feedback Analytics Metrics
These are some commonly used feedback analysis metrics that are used extensively in many organisations. Even though some metrics like NPS are quantitative in nature, they provide an open-ended feedback option that gives it a qualitative feedback outlook.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
One widely used metric for measuring satisfaction is the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). CSAT scores are typically obtained via feedback forms gathered via emails or in-app forms. It directly denotes how satisfied customers are with a company’s products or services. This metric measures the happiness meter of a user with a product. The scale seeks response based on the consumer’s emotion with relation to the product they used or a business-consumer interaction. The scale could demarcate the response from worst rated to best rated or could use emoticons to animate the survey.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net promoter score was first published in 2003 by Harvard Business Review. Ever since, NPS has been a standardized method of seeking user insights. NPS scale is extensively used to gather customer feedback via in-app formats, websites or emails. This scale seeks to know if a customer is willing to recommend a certain product or service on a scale from 0 to 10. The scale demarcates respondents into detractors (unhappy customers), passives (indifferent and have the potential to be a happy customer), promoters (happy or potential loyal customers).
Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES or the customer effort score simply means how much effort a patron puts into while they interact with your business or service offerings. Consumers could be looking for multiple potential solutions for their problems. To understand if a business could fill the gap, the CES scale is a good way to gauge and address a user’s pain points. Example, a brand could launch a feedback asking if they could solve a problem for a user. The user will rate it from scales of “strongly disagree to strongly agree.”
Customer Churn Rate
Customer churn rate denotes how many customers are letting go of a certain product or a service due to certain causes. This is calculated by number of consumers terminating a business within a timeframe / number of consumers to the start of the timeframe. The churn could be due to multiple unanswered negative feedback, cancellation of services or subscription, losing a long term user to a competitor or closure of an account.
Customer Retention Cost
Customer retention cost is the price a company will incur to improve a relationship with existing clients. This can be in the form of improving product upgrades, rolling out new features to make their journey seamless or improving your customer success team members. Businesses need to measure certain factors when measuring a CRC. This includes time spent in catering to a product feedback, service maintenance, time spent in calls/ meetings, pro bono hours of service or product returns and marketing costs.
How to Implement Response Feedback Analytics?
Prioritizing feedback based on its impact on business goals and objectives is essential for making data-driven decisions that improve the customer experience. Continuously monitoring and adjusting your approach to customer response analytics will ensure ongoing success in meeting customer needs and expectations.
Setting goals for customer response analysis
By setting specific, measurable goals that align with your overall business objectives, you can gain the most valuable insights from your data. For instance, if improving customer satisfaction is a priority for your business, you might set a goal to increase your CSAT score by a certain percentage within a specified timeframe. Certain businesses may want to improve on the onboarding process or strengthen their customer retention strategies.
Choosing the right tools for CX development
Surveys are a common method for collecting responses, providing quantitative and qualitative data that can be analyzed. However, social media monitoring (example brand-user conversations on Twitter, Facebook communities) offers unique insights into customer sentiment and behavior that cannot be obtained via surveys alone. Additionally, sentiment analysis software uses machine learning algorithms to analyze consumer feedback in real-time, providing real-time insights that can help you make data-driven decisions. Real time data is also important to close customer feedback loop.
Merren offers fast insight analysis and data gathering ability. Using this data, businesses can capture real time user insights, deploy interactive feedback surveys and gain every insight on the dashboard that can enhance their CX efforts.
Analyzing and acting on survey feedback
It is not merely enough to simply analyze various types of feedback and make a comprehensive report. It is imperative to act on negative feedback, understand why some consumers could be detractors, how to cross sell and upsell products and how an organisation can create a seamless roadmap for their target audience. Analysis of insight can also guide departments on how to approach a challenging marketing solution the right way. Data is a goldmine to create a customized communication strategy for your audience.
Best Practices for Customer Feedback Analysis
To ensure that you get the most out of customer feedback analytics, there are some best practices to follow. This can provide an overview of your customers’ opinions and experiences with your products or services.
Encourage honest feedback
Encouraging honest responses is a crucial aspect of customer feedback analytics. Without truthful insights from your customers, your analysis may be incomplete or misleading. Creating a safe space for customers to share their opinions without fear of judgement or negative repercussions is essential. Transparency about how their opinions will be used and what changes may result from it can also help build trust and encourage honesty. One effective way to obtain candid feedback is to use open-ended questions in surveys, allowing customers to express their thoughts in their own words. Additionally, offering incentives for respondents can help, providing anonymity for sensitive questions can show that you value their input and encourage continued participation.
Respond to feedback promptly and appropriately
Responding to customer feedback in a timely and professional manner is critical for maintaining a positive reputation and improving customer satisfaction. When customers take the time to provide feedback, it’s essential to acknowledge their effort and show appreciation for their input. Responding promptly can help prevent negative reviews from escalating into larger issues and provide an opportunity to address any concerns or issues raised.
It’s equally important to respond appropriately by addressing the specific concerns raised in the feedback. This can involve explaining company policies or procedures, offering solutions or resolutions to problems, or simply thanking customers for their loyalty and support. By responding appropriately companies can foster trust with their customers and build long-term relationships based on open communication and mutual respect.
Continuously monitor and analyze insights
With the help of automated tools and real-time insights, businesses can now stay up-to-date with their customers’ needs and preferences. This also involves offering automated live chat, offering chatbot surveys, social listening on social media platforms and responding to customer reviews on Google business listings.
Different platforms will collect feedback in different formats, namely images, short tweets, video format or plain text for testimonial websites. This multimedia data can bring rich insights that will help businesses gauge how each medium works and how to cater to each respondent differently. Hence, continuous monitoring and analyzing feedback data should be an integral part of any business strategy.
Integrate response analysis into your product development process
When a new product is launched, it undergoes multiple upgrades, get numerous feedback via beta testers and user responses. Any product roadmap is a long one and is beset with changes, improvements and bug fixes. To effectively integrate feedback analytics into your product development process, involve a cross-functional team that includes product managers, designers, developers, and customer support representatives. This ensures that everyone’s insights and perspectives are taken into account during the analysis process. This enables effective decision-making throughout the product development lifecycle.
Conclusion
While developing a customer feedback strategy, it is crucial to understand what metrics a business will use. Response analysis is needed to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace and continue having a standardized method of operation. Every insight is unique. Giving respondents a pathway to express themselves is as important as analyzing data. When both are synced hand in hand, getting rich data will not be difficult.
Merren offers an AI based survey generator and brings insights at superfast speed. To understand how our platform will elevate your business, opt for our 14 day free trial here. Supercharge your business today.