Honeypot of Customer Feedback!
Deepali Jagota
Top 100 Customer Success Strategist/Workforce Agility/Customer success enthusiast/Enterprise CSM/ Adoption driver/Enterprise Upskilling and reskilling/ Ed Tech Professional
Customer feedback is a honeypot —if we know how to get it and how to use it.
What is customer feedback?
Customer feedback is?the information provided by customers about their experience with our product or service. They tell us whether they are satisfied with our product or not. Customer tells us about the quality of our product, customer service or other processes at our company. It includes: opinions, reactions, preferences, suggestions and complaints about our products or services.
In fact, there is no more reliable source of information about our company than hearing it directly from our customers. It helps us to adjust our actions according to their needs.
Types of feedback:
There can be two main types of customer feedback :
Prompted – The feedback which is asked for explicitly. This is mostly collected with different kinds of surveys, emails or direct requests
Unprompted – The feedback which is collected by keeping a close eye on the opinions and reviews our clients post online.
Both types of feedback play an important role for a Customer Success Manager. They can generate valuable insights and plan their next steps based on these feedbacks.
Why is it important to get feedback from customers?
When we are building a product for our customers, our purpose is that the customers get the desired output or expected results from our product. We need to get a confirmation from the customers that the product is working good for them. In case, they want some other features or functionalities, we need to know these clearly so that our product team can work upon the expectations. Feedback?clarifies expectations, helps Customer Success Managers and product teams to work in sync with the customer needs.
The feedback?guides improvements of the customer experience and can empower positive change in any business, which in turn keeps the customers stick with our product.
?Here are few positive changes we can expect by working on the feedback provided by customers:
·??????Improves Business processes
·??????Improves Performance by all teams
·??????Improves products and services
·??????Measures customer satisfaction level
·??????Makes the customer feel valued
·??????Creates best customer experience
·??????Helps in customer retention
·??????Acts as an encouragement for other customers
·??????Helps in taking customer centered business decisions
·??????Encourages reselling
·??????Helps to acquire new customers
·??????Identifies unhappy customers and reduces churn
·??????Increases customer loyalty
·??????Helps to increase revenue
How do you obtain valuable feedback from customers?
Every Customer Success Manager understands that collecting feedback is an essential part of their role. When our customers feel that they are heard, this results in building strong relationships with them. When they share a complaint in their feedback, it gives the CSM an opportunity to resolve their complaint and come closer to them. When they share their expectation with the product UI/UX, it gives the CSM an opportunity to discuss with product team and get this added to the upcoming product sprint. This again helps them to get the status of the trusted advisor for their customer.
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It is important for the CSM to understand different ways to get customer feedback :
Feedback should be one time or constant?
Human needs and preferences change very frequently. This change can be due to , ever changing work environment, new inventions in technology areas, innovative products available in the market, emergence of new requirements, competitive marketplace. This means our products and services also need to emerge with the emerging technologies. We need to continuously check if our customers are satisfied with our product or not.
Collecting feedback is not a one time activity. Continuously asking for customer feedback helps to build a long term relationship with them. Our customers feel valued and encouraged to regularly share their honest opinion on our products and services, if they get a chance to share their opinion with us regularly. This helps to reduce churn which is the intention of every CSM.
?What is effective feedback?
Feedback is not collected to just know what our customer says or feels about us. Rather, it is collected to make sure that we are delivering the expected product and service to our customers. Effective Feedback is?Goal-Oriented. It must have an action plan ready to work on the pointed out areas of improvement.
Feedback collected from the customers must be able to impact our work culture and processes. It must result in a change which makes the customer feel valued and heard. The feedback loop needs to be closed by informing the customer about the action we took based on their feedback. This will result in customer loyalty and will make the feedback process effective.
In order to be effective, feedback must:
What can you do with positive customer feedback?
There are many ways we can use the positive feedback given by the customers:
What is the next step after collecting the feedback?
Collecting feedback is important, but it is equally important to understand the feedback clearly. If the feedback is shared by unsatisfied customers, it becomes even more important to understand it and let these customers know that we have heard them out. What can be done:
Best Practices of Collecting Customer Feedback?
We have understood all the details about collecting feedback and its importance, but we all know that it is not easy to collect feedback. We have many feedback mails and surveys lying in our inbox since long but we do not want to fill them. This is because, some of them are very lengthy, monotonous or repeated. ?
Let us follow some best practices to make sure that our customers are sharing their feedback without facing any difficulty.
o??Keep the feedback process very simple
o??Reach out to the customer directly?
o??Be open to help them in case of any doubts or queries
o??Value the time of your customer
o??Make sure to send thank-you note after they share the feedback
o??Reach out to the right people who use the product themselves
Conclusion
Even if we are not reaching out to the customer for collecting their feedback, customers will talk about the products and services they are using. They will keep on sharing their feedback in their posts, comments, interviews and various other channels of communication. So, it is always better to make a process for receiving this feedback and use it for keeping the customers loyal to our product.
Customer success managers are always looking for various ways to enhance the experience of their customers, to make the customers reach their goals using our products. Customer feedback is one sure shot way to enhance the customer experience an