Customer Feedback Management 101: The Ultimate Guide

Listening to your customers is crucial for getting insights on how to keep them satisfied. To become all ears, your company must have a strong customer feedback management process in place. Collecting feedback lets you glean information about your customers’ needs and ensure they stay happy. After all, customers who are highly engaged tend to buy 90% more often.

To help your company build an effective process, let’s go through what customer feedback management is and best practices for achieving great insights. We’ll even look at a few key tools – such as Feedback Lane – to capture and analyze feedback.

Customer feedback management (CFM) is the formal process of listening to your customers and making improvements to your product based on their needs and suggestions. CFM is most successful when companies can collect, prioritize and analyze feedback across multiple channels from a single unified system.

The ultimate goal of CFM is to break down customer feedback reports into actionable insights, so that teams can plan for improvements that will keep customers happy in the long term. In this way, CFM directly informs product development and deepens customer relationships.

Effective CFM starts with leveraging the right tools. Feedback Lane simplifies customer feedback through an affordable, easy-to-use widget.

Customer feedback can be a pain to collect and manage, and it requires an investment in both people power and tools. So why bother to collect feedback at all?

In essence, collecting market feedback is all about keeping your customers happy and purchasing. If you don’t take the pulse on how customers feel and what they want, your company will struggle to satisfy them. Ultimately, this will lead to higher customer churn and poor product development.

Here are some top ways customer feedback management drives greater satisfaction:

1. Monitor customers’ ongoing needs

Managing customer feedback is hardly a one-time event. It’s essential that you monitor group feedback on a regular basis, so that you can adapt to new trends and customer needs. The product landscape is always shifting and customer feedback reports are a sure way of understanding what’s coming next.

2. Create a more targeted customer experience

With customer feedback management solutions, your team can get a better understanding of how to satisfy customers. From here, you can enhance the customer experience and ensure that they don’t defect to competitor products.

3. Prioritize high-impact product changes

Market feedback gives you an insider’s look into what would make your product better for real customers. Collecting suggestions, requests and issues that customers face will allow you to better your product and adapt it to resonate with more customers.

4. Avoid customer churn and build lasting relationships

Customers will look to other products if they’re not satisfied. In fact, 82% of customers will abandon a brand after just one bad service experience. Through customer feedback management solutions, you can work on the front lines to retain customers and build lasting relationships with them.

5. Boost overall revenue

Lastly, customer feedback management can elevate your efforts to increase revenue. When you incorporate insights to improve your product and enhance customer satisfaction, you’ll be more successful in converting sales.

It’s clear that customer feedback management is a vital step in building customer rapport. As you set up processes to share feedback and analyze it, you should keep in mind the following best practices. Every company should tailor their CFM according to the key requirements below.

1. Know your objectives

While your company should capture a range of customer metrics, don’t just collect to collect. Your team should have a defined set of objectives for what you would like to discover about your customers’ needs. For example, perhaps you want to discover why customers abandon their carts on your website, or what they’re hoping for in future product updates. From here, you can tailor your metric gathering accordingly.

2. Choose your tools and integrations wisely

Feedback often comes from multiple channels and in different formats. To create an efficient process, you should choose customer feedback management platforms that allow you to easily collect market feedback and analyze it within one system. Ideally, this system would also integrate with other tools so that everything is within one place.

Ready to easily capture feedback from your customers? Learn more about Feedback Lane’s user-friendly widget for collecting feedback.

3. Collect both reactive and proactive feedback

Your feedback matters – regardless of how it was collected. To get a full picture of your customer feedback, you should gather both proactive and reactive feedback:

• Proactive feedback involves insights actively collected by the company, such as in-app surveys, focus groups, interviews and usability testing. This feedback is useful for getting more information about a specific issue or need.
• Reactive feedback is any information users send on their own, such as a feature request or technical ticket. This type of feedback may occur on your social media channels, review sites or simply through your contact form.

Both types of feedback are important for understanding what your customers are currently dealing with and identifying suitable solutions for the future.

4. Segment your feedback for analysis

Customer feedback analysis is only fruitful if you can organize and segment your data. As you sort market feedback, be sure to prioritize items into like-buckets.

For example, if you receive a dozen requests for the same new feature, you can group this feedback into the same bucket to measure how much interest there is. Likewise, if a hundred customers give feedback about a bug, this would also become a feedback bucket.

When you group this feedback, you’ll have a clearer priority order – including feedback that affects VIP users, impacts a large portion of users or was submitted by a number of users.

5. Validate all feedback

Next, you should validate all feedback so that you don’t prioritize items that aren’t fully understood. For example, if several customers submit tickets that the payment page isn’t working properly, it makes sense that you would prioritize a fix. However, you should validate the fact that it isn’t working and why, so that you don’t prioritize a redesign of the payment pathway when it’s really a page load problem.

6. Get actionable insights and brainstorm improvements

Getting insights from your customer feedback turns suggestions into potential actions. It’s essential to perform customer feedback analysis so that you can look at the bigger picture and identify gaps in customer satisfaction.

As you examine market feedback, you can find patterns in what customers need and want. From there, you can glean insights into what would improve your product. Work closely with your product team to brainstorm how to enhance the customer journey moving forward.

Gleaning insights is only possible by effectively leveraging customer feedback management platforms. Join Feedback Lane to get customer feedback directly to your Notion or Slack channels.

7. Follow-up with customers

Though you may be working hard behind the scenes to manage and share feedback, it’s important to communicate with the customers who have submitted it. This way, they’ll feel like they’re being heard – instead of in the dark about whether their feedback was even read.

Be sure to have a follow-up procedure in place to communicate with customers after they give feedback, whether it’s to thank them or give them updates.

8. Repeat, repeat, repeat

Customer feedback management is never a one-and-done deal. To successfully leverage feedback and satisfy customers in the long run, your team needs to manage customer feedback on an ongoing basis. Keep repeating these best practices for feedback management and iterate your products so that they continue to wow customers.

Keeping your customers happy starts with effective customer feedback management solutions. As you set up your internal processes, don’t forget to choose the right tools to effectively capture feedback.

Feedback Lane is a super-easy feedback widget that lets customers quickly send over feedback without jumping through hoops. Take advantage of this tool in order to collect reactive feedback and get it right to your inbox, Notion or Slack channel.