Making sense of customer feedback — Journey of text to insights

The customer is the King!

This is not merely a saying, but the reality of today’s market scenario. Your marketing efforts can help you attract the customer for the first time, but a repeated relation with the customer can be developed only by ensuring that they are happy and satisfied with your product or service and have a good customer experience dealing with your firm.

Customer feedback is a medium for you to connect with your customers and know what they liked and disliked about you. But the information from your customer feedback can only be helpful in deriving insights if you know the art of Customer Feedback Analysis.

Importance of Customer Feedback

Customer Feedback is like a report card to ensure that your customers are your top priority. According to Huffspot, one happy customer can lead to nine referrals and one angry customer can lead to 26 other angry customers.

That being said, the importance of Customer Feedback can be summarised as follows:

• It can help you in analyzing the scope of improvement.
• It is a reliable tool to measure customer satisfaction.
• It creates a feeling that you care for your customers and that you are willing to listen to their opinions.
• Customer Feedback opens doors to suggestions from the customer themselves regarding what they actually want from the product. This enhances customer experience.
• Customer Feedback is an important link in the thread that ties the customer to your brand. It improves customer retention rates.
• Reviews of other customers become a reliable source of word of mouth publicity for your brand. As per Forbes, about 90% of customers read reviews before visiting a site.
• Insights derived from Customer Feedback Analysis can help you make better decisions for your business.

Types of Customer Feedback

Now that we know the importance of Customer Feedback, there are many types of Customer Feedback available that you can use to interact with your customers.

The types of Customer Feedback can be broadly divided into two: the Feedback you ask for and the Feedback you get without asking.

Feedback you ask for:

1. NPS Survey: NPS surveys help you know the willingness of customers to recommend your brand to others.
2. In-App ratings: You can ask your customers to rate their experience with the help of ratings from within your app with a comment on the same.
3. Customer Feedback survey: You can use mail campaigns as a medium for Customer Feedback survey to scrutinize their satisfaction using tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform.
4. Onboarding feedback: Onboarding is the process of helping the customer get acquainted with the product after purchase. Constant feedback at this stage increases customer experience.
5. Feedback after support interaction: You must also use feedback to get a review of your after-sales services in helping the customers redress their complaints.

Feedback you get without asking:

1. Feature Request: These are ideas customers suggest in order to improve their usability of your product.
2. Bug Reports: Bugs are the issues your customers might face while using a product or website. These reports help you correct the errors and provide a seamless Customer Experience.
3. Questions: Customers are bound to have doubts at every point of their journey with your product. These help potential customers know more about your product.
4. Reviews on Public Sites: Customers enjoy sharing their opinion with others. They may use review sites like Capterra, G2 Crowd, Siftery, Yelp, Amazon, and Google Play. You can use this info for your product improvement and judge product performance.
5. Praise: A happy customer may take out some time to appreciate your product on your website or social media handles. This can result in a positive brand image and attract potential customers.

How to Ask for Feedback from Customers?

From amongst the various types of Customer Feedback, for the ones you initiate, you must know how to ask for feedback from customers. Most of these feedbacks are derived from Customer Feedback surveys.

According to Outcry, an average person gets distracted in 8 seconds. And so, Customer Feedback surveys need to be designed in a way that they are easy to comprehend and doesn’t require much effort on the customer’s end.

Tips to Design a Customer Feedback Form

The first step in how to ask for feedback from customers is to design an interactive Customer Feedback form for your survey. Start with deciding the objective behind the Customer Feedback survey. Then target your customer feedback questions to the specific business areas.

Once your objective is clear, then use these tips to create your customer feedback from:

• Use the “What” questions: ask customers about their opinions in open-ended Customer Feedback questions which allow free flow of their thoughts. Do not restrict them with Yes/No questions.
• On-site Customer Feedback Form: You can use your website to ask opinions from customers whether the article/blog was helpful, why did they abandon the cart, etc.
• Follow up survey: You can track your customers and send them to follow up surveys after the purchase is executed. You can ask about how the product is working for them and if or not there are any issues.
• NPS Survey: You can target your regular customers and ask them Customer Feedback questions related to NPS. These questions need to be to the point and derived on a pointer scale.
• Social Media Polls: This new form of Customer Feedback questions is quite trending. You can use polls to get a public opinion from your customers about an upcoming feature or their favorite feature.
• Thank You emails: These emails are not technically a type of Customer Feedback questions, rather these help in building long term relationships with the customers. These add to customer delight beyond their satisfaction.

Customer Feedback Analysis

Collecting information from the customer via the customer feedback form is not sufficient. You need to know how to extract insights from data derived from the customer feedback survey. And that is what Customer Feedback Analysis helps you achieve.

Customer Feedback Analysis involves identifying the frustrations and disappointments of the customers with the help of Customer Feedback questions and use these pointers to bring improvement in the product to enhance customer satisfaction and reduce churn.

What you receive from your Customer Feedback Form is raw data containing customers’ opinions. Customer Feedback Analysis helps you in turning data into actionable insights and thereby use these in decision making. But, this process needs to be automated. Because this data from a variety of Customer Feedback Forms can be in thousands of entries and individually reading each and every response would become impossible.

So, how to extract insights from data? Here’s the answer…

How to Extract Insights from Data

Pulling insights from data requires a full-fledged process. For starters, you’ll need to collect quality customer feedback using your customer feedback form. This data would then be required to be sorted and organized using the feedback analysis tool.

Steps included in the process are:

1. Gather Customer Feedback: this step will build the foundation of our analysis. We have already discussed the various types of Customer Feedback and how to ask for feedback from customers. You need to choose the desired format, put in the appropriate customer feedback questions, choose a medium and send the survey to the customers.
2. Extract the Data at One Place: for Customer Feedback text analysis, different techniques need to be used:
3. NPS survey: for an NPS Survey, you can export or download the CSV or Excel file of the responses. You can also use tools like Zapier and Google Sheets for integration. Promoter.io also provides an intuitive interface for exporting feedback data. Other tools like Delighted also allow you to select a particular data range and export it as a CSV file.
4. Customer Surveys: the tools you use to create these surveys provide you with options for defining a target audience, downloading the data through Excel, and creating interactive charts for studying the data.
5. Public Reviews: you can use tools like web scraping, Dexi.io, ParseHub, and Import.io to import all the data from customer reviews on varied sites and extract them into downloadable files.
6. Social Media: customer feedback from social media can be extracted from the respective platforms. You can also use platforms like HubSpot to get cumulative data of all media combined.
7. Categorization: splitting the mass volumes of Customer Feedback into different categories makes it manageable. This makes pulling insights from data a lot easier. You need to define your objectives for the data, the department which will benefit from it, and then decide the tags at the most granular level for data categorization like feedback theme, type, code, etc.
8. Coding: assign codes to the different text feedbacks from the customers. For example, Email feedback can also be written as Email Bug or Email error by other customers, all meaning the same thing. Search and code such common feedback.
9. Use feedback analysis tools to analyze customer feedback and create a customer feedback analysis report format.

Best Feedback Analysis Tools

For turning data into actionable insights, you can use the following feedback analysis tools:

1. Feedback analysis tools for website:
2. InMoment: this cloud-based tool lets you connect and analyze different types of Customer Feedback like surveys, chars, call transcripts, and social media.
3. Fullstory: this records customer activities on your website and lets you filter sessions of users to focus on specific signs.
4. Clarabridge: this allows you to monitor all interactions with the customer across all platforms and creates dashboards with actionable insights.
5. Brandwatch: this tool is great for managing all social media platforms with easy to understand analytics.
6. UserVoice: this helps see which customer requests are trending, filter them by customer segment or product category, and estimate the ROI of customer requests.
7. Machine learning tools: Machine models like MonkeyLearn have been trained to detect opinion units that can help to analyze free-text responses in a much more precise manner.

Customer Feedback Analysis Report Format

The Customer Feedback analysis report format can be customized as per your needs. An ideal Customer Feedback analysis report format must include:

1. Graphs: graphical representation is extremely important for pulling insights from data. Responses on different customer feedback questions need to be aggregated via scales, trend graphs, and other diagrams to visualize the performance of the brand. This will give you averages and percentages from raw data to assist decision making.
2. Categories: the data must be refined as per gender, age, qualification, interests, etc. for granular details on the behavior of a category of customers.
3. Suggestive comments: the customer feedback analysis report format must provide additional comments highlighting the scope of improvement to assist the required departments.
4. Access to different departments: the data of the report must be shareable and accessible by the multiple departments requiring it to take action on the same.
5. Customer feedback text analysis: open-ended questions are most difficult to analyze. The report must incorporate customer feedback text analysis through easy codes and graphs making it comprehensible.
6. NPS score: the report must include aggregated insights on the NPS score and the trends that have occurred.

Not all customer feedback needs actions. Some feedback needs to be adapted to while some need a change in strategy. All of this depends on how the organization analyses the feedback and what aspects they prioritize.