How To Learn Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is the number one way your team can improve your product or service.

The toughest part is building or buying a tool to ask for and measure customer satisfaction — but you can’t stop there. It’s also important to put processes in place so that you can learn from what your customers are telling you.

Especially since feedback can come through many channels: email, NPS surveys, CSAT surveys, reviews, and more.

Read on for 3 steps that can help you put structure around your customer feedback, so your team can learn from it and constantly improve.

1. Follow up with a question.

When you get customer feedback, it’s almost always a good rule of thumb to ask a follow up question. Don’t just say, “Thanks for the feedback!” and run away with it. You need to dig in deeper for two reasons:

• There’s a chance that you can actually deliver or solve whatever is being suggested, and the customer just doesn’t realize it or isn’t using the language you would use to ask the question.
• If you don’t offer what they’re asking about, you’re almost always going to need some more context if you’re going to make the most of customer feedback and act upon it.

Dig into the basics to truly understand what’s going on: who, what, when, why, and how? A few examples of ways you can respond with follow up questions:

• “Thanks for sharing that feedback. We’d love to dig in a little more. When would you use this?”
• “What’s the end goal you’d want to achieve with this? It’ll be really helpful when we’re building if we learn more about the use case.”
• “Thanks for sharing that. We’d love to learn more so we can meet what you need. How would this look in an ideal world for you?”

Asking questions about feedback also shows you’re engaged and listening. It lets customers know you’re open to future feedback, too.

2. Organize it.

Customer feedback is only useful if you can find it, make sense of it on the whole, and track trends in it. Since most customer feedback will come to you via email, it’s easiest to organize it directly in your inbox. To do this in Gmail or Outlook 365, you can create a dedicated folder.

If you’re using Front, you can create a Customer Feedback inbox to keep it all in one place. Your entire team can access it, and anyone can drag a message to it directly if they have a note that might be interesting to the entire team. You can connect messages of all kinds to the inbox, like feature requests, CSAT surveys, emails, tweets, and reviews.

How should you slice and dice your customer feedback once it’s all organized? That’s up to you and your team. Here are some examples Front teams use often:

• By customer: Track the feedback you get from a customer over time. That way you can help intervene before a customer churns, or make suggestions about how you can improve adoption.
• By industry: If you have customers in different industries, this can help you see how usage differs for each one and how you can adjust your product or messaging for each one.
• By region: Especially for global teams, this can help you make decisions around headcount and messaging that might differ between countries.
• By feature: Group feedback on a specific part of your product or service so that you can get an isolated view of it. This is especially helpful for new big features, or core features for which you want to increase adoption.

3. Share feedback trends with your team

Asking questions and organizing messages is only useful if you share customer feedback with your whole team. That way everyone can benefit and learn from it. At Front, a few ways we do this include:

• Presenting customers’ stories in a segment during our weekly company-wide All hands meeting
• Hanging customer logos and stories physically around the office
• Creating a Slack channel where anyone can post customer feedback (the good and the bad)

Front’s Head of Customer Success Sarah Sheikh makes an important point, though: You can’t rely on summarized feedback when you’re sharing customer insights with other departments in your company. Instead, give teammates access to the exact messages your customers share. That way they don’t miss any critical context about why customers feel a certain way or what they’re trying to achieve.

Last but not least, don’t forget to reward your customers and show them you appreciate their feedback! Try these unique customer appreciation ideas to show them some love.

Together with Front we’ve updated our last year’s CSAT ebook. In this republished version we explore how to implement, measure, and train your team on CSAT, so you can take action to improve customer satisfaction and propel your business forward.