Planning for 2024: Customer Feedback Needs a Strategy

THE SITUATION:

75% of CEOs believe that customer insights gathered from customer feedback analysis are crucial for business growth.

But nearly half of consumers feel businesses are ignoring their feedback, and 17% feel they aren’t being heard at all.

(Source1: AIMultiple, 2023)

(Source2: TIDIO, 2022)

THE OPPORTUNITY:

Customers don’t want to be told their feedback matters. They want to see, feel, and know their voices are making a difference. As seen in The Situation, there’s a disconnect between the actual and perceived importance of feedback within most organizations. Where business leaders say it’s crucial, consumers feel they’re being ignored. This is an issue. But it’s also an opportunity.

Ensuring customers know their feedback matters is an effective way to stand out from competitors, strengthen relationships, and capture market share. The key is communicating that message in authentic and meaningful ways. Atop the list of ways is simply taking action based on customer feedback. When feedback has a tangible impact and produces experiential change, then its level of importance is undeniable.

For brands that are currently prioritizing feedback, there’s a clear opportunity to optimize when, where, and how it’s applied toward business decisions. For brands that are not currently prioritizing feedback, the opportunity is to – well – start prioritizing feedback. Customers want to be heard, they deserve to be heard, and applying the resulting insights are a big part of how successful brands stay successful long-term.

THE CHALLENGE:

Conceptually, leveraging customer feedback to guide business decisions is easy to grasp. But its practice and implementation aren’t always as easy. Even the most ambitious, well-intentioned, and well-equipped brands can fall short of converting feedback into meaningful action. This is because it’s not a matter of intent, capacity, or resources – it’s a matter of strategy.

Effectively and efficiently applying feedback in real-world business situations requires actionable insights, not just interesting observations. One key challenge is separating the actionable from the observational, which typically happens before any feedback is even collected. There are also the challenges associated with establishing clearly defined goals, desired outcomes, internal alignment, and implementation plans. These things also should be happening before feedback is gathered – but that’s often not the case.

In our modern tech-driven world, gathering customer feedback is easier than ever. Anyone can build and launch a feedback survey within a matter of minutes. So it’s the challenges that exist around the feedback collection process – those mentioned above – that require the most attention.

THE SOLUTION:

As I previously mentioned, effectively and efficiently leveraging customer feedback is a matter of strategy. By developing a holistic customer feedback strategy, brands will be addressing challenges before they surface. They’ll be positioning themselves for long-term data-driven success. Perhaps most importantly, they’ll be preparing to show customers how much their feedback matters through action, not words.

Stepping back a bit, I’d like to quash the notion that feedback strategies need to be complex to be impactful. This is not the case. In fact, many times it’s through simplicity that desired outcomes are achieved. Ultimately, success will require collective buy-in, teamwork, consistency, and follow through. When feedback strategies are too complicated for people to understand, they tend to be brushed aside or fall apart. Especially in the early stages of strategic development, less can be more. Keep it focused, digestible, and easy for broad internal audiences to understand. You can always build in complexity as you go, but moving too fast too soon can do more harm than good.

As we move closer to 2024, now is a great time to start building – or strengthen an existing – customer feedback strategy. Here are a few tips and suggestions to help with that process.

1. Know your goals before asking questions.

Before launching any surveys, it’s important to clarify and define what you’re looking to accomplish – and why feedback is important to begin with. Are you looking to better understand your customers’ wants, needs and expectations? Are you looking to refine your customer experience and journey maps? Are you looking to establish your competitive positioning to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities?

Each of those objectives will require a different survey approach to capture relevant feedback. Outlining your goals upfront will create a framework for ensuing projects and keep your collective eyes on the prize. Doing this before asking customers questions will ensure their time and energy is spent on meaningful topics with actionable intent.

2. Itemize your feedback topics.

Having outlined your goals and objectives, start to consider which feedback topics are most relevant and applicable. For understanding customer wants and needs, a “Getting to Know You” feedback survey focused on lifestyle preferences, psychographics, and other human-centric topics would be a good fit. For experience and journey mapping, capture insights on satisfaction, product/service usage, purchase behaviors and decision drivers. For competitive positioning, a brand awareness and perception study will do the trick.

Itemizing feedback topics in this way will offer a high-level overview of which types of surveys you’ll need to capture the needed insights. Then, you can move into project planning and scheduling with a strategic mindset.

3. Ask the right people the right questions at the right time.

The more focused your goals and objectives, the clearer it becomes that audience segmentation is an important factor. Not all customers will have actionable feedback on every survey topic. So, it comes down to asking the right people the right questions at the right time to produce meaningful insights.

Furthermore, being tactful with survey timing is just as important as the audience. For example, gathering feedback on the purchase experience is best suited for new customers – not a customer whose last purchase was years ago. Timing can shape the nature of the questions as well. For a product/service usage study, long-time customers can be asked more detailed and specific questions than new customers because they’ve had more time and experience with your brand. So, being strategic in who receives which surveys will increase confidence in the results and overall relevance of the insights.

4. Spread projects throughout the year.

This is a key piece of the overall feedback strategy. Rather than trying to fit all feedback topics into one survey, you can plan and schedule a series of surveys throughout the year. The itemized list of survey topics will help you determine an appropriate project order, where each survey can build upon the last and lay a foundation for what comes next. Without that itemized list, projects end up being conducted sporadically without defined reasons, which ultimately leaves value on the table and can produce more questions than answers.

An added benefit of this long-term schedule approach is customer engagement and relationship building. By having multiple touchpoints and asking for feedback periodically throughout the year, it becomes part who your brand is, not just something your brand does. Earlier I mentioned how customers want to feel heard. By spreading out these efforts rather than conducting an annual or bi-annual survey, you will convey and reinforce the importance customer feedback has within your business throughout the year.

MY ADVICE:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, customer feedback strategies don’t need to be complicated. It’s simply an organized and tactful approach to capturing varied insights over time. The alternative is sporadically conducting surveys on a need-to-know basis, which leads to missed opportunities and decreased value. Or, cramming every topic into one survey, which is a burden for respondents and overwhelming for your internal teams. Through a strategic approach, you’ll be connecting dots and opening channels for a steady flow of deeper insights in goal-oriented and actionable ways.

HOW WE CAN HELP:

For over 35 years, we’ve been empowering brands with the customer insights and data-driven strategies needed to be relevant and stay relevant long-term. By implementing a strategic and goal-oriented approach to leveraging customer feedback, our partner brands gain clarity, knowledge, and wisdom for confident decision making.

Whether you’re looking for ground-level tactical support or high-level strategic guidance, we have a solution for you!

YOUR TURN:

I’d love to see your comments and thoughts about customer feedback strategies. Do you have examples of how a strategic approach benefited your brand? Are there any lessons you’ve learned that can help other readers strengthen their efforts? Did any of the topics discussed spark ideas or inspiration?

By sharing your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions, we’ll foster a collaborative community where actionable insights are the foundation and collective success is the outcome.

Do you have a stat, trend, or topic you’d like me to write about? Send me a message or share it in the comments.

I’ll add it to my list of future newsletter topics!