Five Tips to Help Put Customer Feedback at the Center of your Enterprise

If you were a visitor at last years Online-Marketing Rockstar Festival, you had the chance to listen to the story of Zalando’s success. Robert Gentz’s words carry significant weight in this industry. When he explains that the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a vital statistic for Zalando, then others follow suit - and there are plenty of good reasons for doing so, as Gentz’s ideas are backed up by a lot of sense.

"If you are doing a very good job in the area of customer experience - better than others - then you have to do relatively little in marketing" ( OMR Festival 2018).

Those who take customer feedback seriously and use it to change their processes can quickly see positive effects. The customer churn rate sinks and there is a corresponding rise in customer lifetime value. In the highly competitive world of e-commerce, you can stand out from the competition with a professional NPS strategy and reduce your customer acquisition costs.

Most online organizations now recognize that customer feedback is of elementary significance. But only a few master dealing with this data with as much ease as Zalando. Of course using a professional customer experience management platform such as zenloop helps a lot. But here are some additional, and simple tips how online retailers can place their customers at the core of father activities and professionalize their feedback management:

1. Make Customer Feedback Visible in Every Corner of your Office!

To successfully manage customer feedback, it must first of all be made visible. It brings benefits for the company as a whole if customer comments are not only seen by select individuals, but are present everywhere. During our time at Flaconi we installed monitors in the office, showing live customer feedback. It was important to place them not only close to customer support, sales and marketing, but completely transparently from the staff kitchen to the Managing Director’s office so that the current customer experience could be seen at any time.

2. Accelerate your Response to Customer Feedback!

Customer feedback is now more time critical than ever. If you wish to enter into customer dialog or make important company decisions, you need to respond quickly. This is only possible when the tools and methods used to collect feedback also fit in with the working style of the whole company. For example, 30% of zenloop customers use team-specific Slack channels into which feedback is fed live. This speeds up response times and makes teams more agile. When selecting your feedback management tools use methods which are compatible with the preferred tools of your teams.

3. Let your Customers Drive Change!

Very happy or particularly critical customers often leave - if you ask them - comments with concrete proposals for change. It is therefore important to look not only at a numbers like the NPS value, but to analyze individual feedback. With increasing number of customers, the amount of collected feedback also grows proportionally and keeping up with the flood of opinions, ideas and proposals is not easy. It is therefore important to break down feedback for automatic semantic analysis. The information gained should then be shared with the responsible team.

4. Bring Customer Feedback to the Boss!

Customer feedback affects every single employee - even management. All too often it is only discussed at the customer service level. Therefore, I recommend that every company puts the issue of customer satisfaction on the agenda of management meetings. Ten minutes per week should be no problem for the busy manager, and can also give the right impulse for important change or decisions. Only when customer feedback is seen by management is the voice of the customer actually heard.

5. Treat Yourself to Some Praise!

Many companies view feedback management as the collecting of and responding to criticism. But customer praise is also an important factor: Positive comments motivate not only your own team, but help to identify and reinforce your strengths, allowing you to better profile yourself in the marketplace. In addition, it is often your faithful and loyal customers who you know better than anyone else. Find out from this praise what is truly important to these supporters, and transfer this knowledge to other customers.