Top Tips for Making the Most of Customer Feedback

Collecting customer feedback is essential for any contact center leader looking to improve their operations, but it can be difficult to know where to start. There are a variety of methods for collecting feedback, each with its own set of benefits and challenges. Once you have the data, how do you effectively analyze it? What are the best practices for determining which feedback is most actionable? And finally, how do you implement changes and improvements based on that feedback within your organization? In this blog post, we will explore those questions and provide tips for making the most of customer feedback.

Customer Feedback Is Everywhere

Contact center leaders have a plethora of options when it comes to collecting customer feedback. One great method is the use of online surveys, which provide a quick and easy way for customers to submit their opinions. Voice recordings from inbound calls can also amplify customer sentiment to aid in understanding how interactions went. Additionally, modern AI-enabled technologies — such as chatbots and automated call evaluation systems — are becoming increasingly popular, as they allow companies to track the quality of service and gauge customer satisfaction without having to wait for customers to interact with an agent. Last but not least, collecting customer feedback through social media can help contact center leaders be aware of what their customers think about them — since most customers often take to Twitter or Facebook pages after interacting with a company.

Capturing customer feedback across a variety of channels can be tricky. Channels such as email and social media can be challenging to manage due to the ever-growing pile of surveys and comments rates. Contact centers may also struggle with post-call surveys that require customers to opt-in and complete a survey; if they choose not to, the input from customers will be incomplete or lack accuracy. Additionally, gathering feedback from speech analytics also has its own set of challenges because it requires teams to consistently review outcomes on an ongoing basis and uncover meaningful insights. Despite these issues, contact center leaders continue to search for reliable ways to capture customer feedback to provide better experiences and serve their customers better.

Establish a Strategy for Customer Feedback

Capturing customer feedback is essential for gauging how satisfied customers are with your contact center. To do this, it’s important to establish a clear plan by mapping out key steps and goals. Start by defining what you want each survey or feedback form to accomplish — such as understanding if your customers were satisfied with the service they received — and develop questions accordingly. Defining your goals for each survey or feedback form is a basic yet often overlooked step when planning customer research.

Before developing your questions, think about the reason why you are collecting data – what exactly do you want to understand from your customers? Are you hoping to evaluate customer satisfaction with a product or service? Are you looking for insights into the effectiveness of marketing campaigns? Take some time to be clear on this point and form an actionable hypothesis to guide your efforts. Once these goals are established, you'll need to construct questions that capture the information that will help prove/disprove them. Questions should be designed in a way that allows customers to easily supply meaningful answers without feeling overly prompted or having bias unintentionally introduced. By taking this approach, you set yourself up for success in more accurately isolating meaningful insights from your surveys and feedback forms.

Capture Customer Feedback Consistently

Next, identify how frequently you should collect feedback and make sure that you’re regularly measuring performance against these KPIs. Understanding the importance of measuring the performance of your contact center against key performance indicators (KPIs) doesn't mean much without identifying how often to collect customer feedback. Regularly considering customer insights will provide invaluable, real-time data that can help inform future decisions related to improving business operations and processes. How often you evaluate your KPIs is ultimately up to you, but it’s important to establish a cadence for collecting feedback and benchmarking at minimum, quarterly or semi-annually. This way you can identify both short-term wins and long-term successes.

Additionally, consider leveraging customer experience surveys throughout the year as part of your feedback collection strategy. These surveys will give you qualitative data while offering customers a means to express their feelings about their interactions with your company in specific detail. Employing such feedback strategies can help ensure your contact center continues running efficiently and effectively while meeting the expectations of its customers.

Take Action on Customer Feedback

And lastly, make sure to turn customer insights into actionable tasks that can improve your contact center’s operations and ensure customers have the best possible experience working with your organization. Leveraging customer insights to improve your contact center operations is a strategic step in ensuring a positive experience for customers. The key to success is making sure the insights are turned into actionable tasks and processes that can be implemented efficiently with minimal disruption. It's important to prioritize improvements that have the greatest potential to help customers quickly and easily find the right contacts, access helpful information, resolve their issues quickly, and get back to their lives.

Developing high-value contacts with an emphasis on personalization and proactively delivering customer service excellence should be top priorities when integrating customer insights into contact center operations. When it comes to improving how your customers interact with your organization, it pays off to stay ahead of customer needs and continuously improve based on their feedback.

Take Your First Step

Launching a customer feedback program can be intimidating for contact center leaders. However, the rewards of increased customer satisfaction and loyalty make it well worth the effort. An effective first step would be to identify key stakeholders who need to be on board with the project, such as decision-makers and IT personnel. Next, establish a plan of action that outlines goals, timelines, and desired outcomes. Finally, develop an easy-to-use platform or method to collect customer feedback on an ongoing basis so that it can make a real impact on your organization's success. By taking these important steps early on, contact center leaders can ensure that their customer feedback programs will become long-term successes.

Interested in learning how UJET can help you to better capture and act on customer feedback? Click here to see UJET in action for yourself.