Customer feedback is a valuable resource in improving satisfaction and employee experience.
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For years, companies have been damaging customer relationships by not responding to their complaints, concerns, and requests. “Too many companies squander the gold mine of customer feedback,” McKinsey once wrote.
How bad is this problem? In 2017, Gartner concluded that “95% of companies collect customer feedback over the years, but only around 10% use these suggestions to change processes and improve customer experience.”
Consumers themselves have more hopeful numbers: According to Statista, just over half in the U.S. believe most brands act on their feedback. Globally, just under half (49%) say the same.
I see this problem all the time because my job is to make sense of the thousands of conversations companies have with their customers across different platforms and channels. Not only do people want organizations to act on their feedback, they want them to act fast. In this day and age, consumers are accustomed to acting at lightning speed.
Why do companies too often fail to make the changes their customers want? A big culprit is scattered feedback. Different agents and chatbots have been reaching out to customers across social media, email, apps, text messages, phone calls, and more. Organizations haven't been able to bring it all together in one place to help teams uncover key insights.
My colleague Ken McMahon, who heads customer success at Nextiva, recently wrote, “Collecting feedback from multiple feedback channels provides insights that help business leaders make customer-centric decisions and improve customer experiences.” For example,
With all this feedback collected in one place, businesses might find that two-thirds of visitors want a longer demo session.
AI highlights needs and emotions
Fortunately, technology can finally provide a solution: AI-powered tools can collect, process, and organize all that feedback, consolidating every customer interaction into a single stream. These tools can even transcribe what customers say on the phone, making it searchable, and can include any notes or ideas that customer service reps add themselves.
These tools use natural language processing (NLP) to “understand” the text – looking for the most important points, highlighting them and displaying key guidance to the next agent or chatbot serving the same customer.
These tools can also search all feedback from all customers, looking for recurring patterns and themes, and highlighting elements that need to be addressed. In a study published in the International Journal of New Media Studies, Dharmendra Singh from India's PIIT College wrote, “AI-powered analysis of customer feedback and comments can identify trends in customer behavior and help e-commerce companies adjust their strategies and marketing accordingly to improve customer satisfaction.”
AI tools can go a step further and even measure customer sentiment, which is invaluable. It lets businesses know how their customers feel about the changes they're requesting. Do customers see these changes as urgently needed or simply a good idea? Do they think these changes will help reduce customer pain and frustration? All of this comes through in the words customers use.
Researchers Darlington Nwachukwu and Mievi Affen made this point in a literature review published in the International Academy of Management, Marketing and Entrepreneurship Research, where they noted that a Salesforce study found that “AI-powered sentiment analysis can help businesses better understand customer feedback and effectively address their needs and concerns, improving customer satisfaction.”
Customer Feedback Loop
The best system is one that creates and maintains a customer feedback loop, a continuous process in which a company acts on customer input and evaluates their responses. This system typically involves four stages:
Collect feedback, analyze it, turn it into data, apply it, test it, and follow up with customers
Given the development of technology, much of this loop can be automated, and in the near future, it will probably be nearly entirely automated.
As companies increasingly use chatbots to handle parts of customer conversations, there are fewer excuses to avoid responding to feedback, and research over the next few years will reveal that the majority of companies and customers believe organizations are finally tapping into that treasure trove.
