How to Collect Customer Feedback

Customer feedback matters more than ever to companies wishing to grow. It is the lifeblood by which organizations aiming to thrive across increasingly competitive marketplaces can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty while identifying growth areas.

Before now, collecting customer feedback involved manually filling out and analyzing surveys and questionnaires. However, more and more businesses are turning to advanced analytics tools, such as those offered by Lumoa, to gain deeper and more targeted actionable insights. In addition to boosting customer loyalty, advanced analytics uncover hidden patterns or trends that manual analysis processes might have overlooked.

So, how can you make the most of collecting customer feedback? Let’s find out.

Why Customer Feedback is Important

One happy customer will share their positive customer experience with 9 people. However,  unhappy customers are even more likely to share their experiences: on average, an unhappy customer shares their bad experience with 16 people.

Customer feedback holds significant value, with 83% of customers feeling loyal towards companies that listen to, respond to, and resolve their concerns and complaints. Moreover, 73% of customers now say that customer experience (CX) is the number one factor they consider when deciding whether to purchase from a company. This data underscores the importance of collecting customer feedback, not just for improving sales but also for safeguarding the organization’s reputation.

Traditional feedback methods regularly fail to provide businesses with the insight required to maintain customer satisfaction and grow. For example, common pitfalls include:

•         Asking closed questions
•         Poorly structured surveys that fail to capture the scope of customer sentiment
•         Manual analysis processes are time-consuming and at risk of human error

These issues hamper a business’s understanding of how customers feel about it. Either they fail to capture the full depth and scope of customer sentiment, resulting in flawed data that does not reflect customer opinion, or time-consuming and inefficient analysis methods fail to provide high-quality, actionable insights.

As it becomes apparent why customer feedback is crucial in maintaining customer loyalty and improving sales, it’s also essential to understand the substantial benefits on offer to complete the picture.

Integrating customer feedback into an overarching business strategy delivers a vision of what their customers want and need. There’s no better way to understand this than by getting it from the horse’s mouth rather than making assumptions and imposing ultimately useless solutions on them. This information helps identify common themes around what customers want and uncover potential issues. These insights can then be used to inform product development strategies, and when addressed proactively, businesses can troubleshoot problems before they escalate and mitigate any risk to the organization.

Modern Methods for Collecting Customer Feedback

Methods of collecting customer feedback have evolved enormously from the days of cold telephone calls or market surveys conducted using a clipboard and pen in a noisy shopping mall. Today, businesses increasingly use more agile, user-friendly, and intuitive methods to gain faster and more accurate insights.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) are two of the most popular metrics used to gauge customer satisfaction today. While both metrics provide organizations with a clear and concise view of customer loyalty, they offer different insights.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score measures customer loyalty and has grown since its design by Fred Reichheld in 2003 to become one of the most widely used metrics in measuring customer satisfaction.

Around 64% of organizations use NPS to measure their customer service performance. Customers are asked, “How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?” on a scale of 0 to 10. Depending on the result, respondents fall into one of three categories:

• Promoters (answer 9 or 10): Loyal customers who would recommend you
• Passives (answer 7 or 8): Satisfied customers but could switch to the competition
• Detractors (answer 0 to 6): Unhappy customers with a high churn rate

The score is calculated by finding the difference between the percentage of promoters and detractors. The higher the number, the better your NPS.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Meanwhile, customer satisfaction measures the specific customer experience with each transaction, making CSAT a more transactional metric than the relational NPS score.

CSAT is usually calculated through a short customer survey after a business interaction. Typically, customers are asked, “How would you rate your recent product experience?” with customers able to select 1 to 5 stars.

The CSAT score is taken as an average of all customer responses, with the highest score showing the best level of customer satisfaction.

Now we know the difference between NPS and CSAT, here are the best modern methods of collecting customer feedback:

Short Surveys

Your immediate reaction might be to create a survey and ask what your customers think about every single aspect of your service. Don’t. Short, snappy surveys are one of the most effective ways of collecting customer feedback. Both NPS and CSAT scores are calculated from short surveys containing a single question and provide a valuable snapshot of how businesses are viewed by their customers.

Short surveys are particularly effective as they do not take much customer time and effort. Thus, they’re likely to have high response rates while providing insight into areas an organization is doing well or needs to improve. Understanding how to design a feedback survey to gain the most significant insight is essential to an organization’s success.

QR Codes / Social Media

Meanwhile, more avenues are available to businesses to engage with their customers than ever before. QR codes on posters, a business website, or receipts can be scanned for a quick snapshot of their service.

In addition, social media is a valuable method for businesses to collect customer feedback, particularly after a product launch, to understand whether their customers feel the product meets their needs.

AI Sentiment Analysis and Chatbots

The emergence of AI technologies is revolutionizing the collection of manual customer feedback. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis can assess free text feedback gained through surveys, email, and social media.

In addition, more businesses are seeing the benefit of AI chatbots as a valuable tool in their customer feedback collection process, as they allow customers to provide real-time feedback. AI then uses machine learning, NLP, and sentiment analysis to extract data and provide in-depth, actionable insights.

Why Analytics Matter in Customer Feedback

So, you’ve collected reams of data. How on earth do you process the results to gain actionable insights? Analytics plays a considerable role by transforming raw data into insights that drive change. We’ve already looked at the advantages of AI in data collection. While AI provides huge benefits in collecting customer feedback, it’s important to be mindful of the limitations of purely relying on Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT) tools such as Chat GPT.

A recent survey undertaken by Lumoa showed that almost 65% of 10,000 user reviews analyzed by GPT analytic tools alone were filed under ‘General’ rather than a more specific category. When the same 10,000 reviews were analyzed by GPT and Lumoa’s powerful analytics, more than three-quarters of reviews were accurately categorized. In addition, customers have raised concerns that businesses that use GPT tools to generate content feel less authentic.

These results show that AI has been a game-changer during the analytics process, but only when harnessed in the right way. Rather than relying on time-consuming manual processes with potential human error, AI-powered analytics can process and interpret data from structured and unstructured sources to deeply understand customer sentiment.

While metrics such as NPS and CSAT can be quickly generated to provide a useful strategic overview of customer satisfaction, these AI-driven analytics provide deeper insight that can be used to drive improvements and reduce risk.

Nutrition firm Huel saw a 10 percentage point increase in its NPS by using Lumoa’s analytics tool, which doesn’t simply enable businesses to ask questions but gain insights to answer them and effectively close the feedback loop.

Similarly, Fibrus, a UK broadband provider, had a TrustPilot score of just 1.7 and an NPS of -28, indicating severe customer dissatisfaction. Within eight months of using Lumoa’s analytics tools to gain valuable, actionable insights, the NPS rose to +56, and the Trustpilot score increased to 3.9

The value of using analytics to drive improvements in customer satisfaction is demonstrated in how US firm Johnson Outdoors uses Luoma’s customer analytics tool to better understand its customers’ needs. Whenever a score of 5 or below is received, a Customer Service team member proactively reaches out to the customer to ensure they feel heard and understand the specific issues.

In addition, when their NPS score fell below 50, Lumoa provided the context behind the overnight drop, helping them identify the exact issue related to a product update and inform the engineering team to take immediate action.

In each of these examples, improvement in customer satisfaction has been derived from understanding the importance of collecting customer feedback and gaining outstanding, targeted customer insights.

Conclusion

Leveraging analytics to collect customer feedback is growing in importance as businesses seek ways to remain at the head of their industries. Companies that neglect their customers will see a high churn, particularly with 78% of customers giving up on a transaction because of a negative customer experience.

Businesses that value their customers’ comments and make them feel heard benefit from improved customer satisfaction scores (CSAT). They are more likely to grow through word-of-mouth recommendations to new customers from existing ones who have had a positive experience.

As AI continues to revolutionize an organization’s ability to collect and analyze huge swathes of feedback and data without error while delivering outstanding actionable insights, businesses must adopt these technologies to stay at the forefront of their market sectors.

So, if you want to elevate your customer experience and gain actionable insights on how to grow your business, sign up for Lumoa’s free trial today and kick-start your customer feedback revolution.