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Do you close the loop with customers after they provide feedback?

Many companies listen to customers, but a big chunk of these companies don’t do anything with the feedback or follow up with customers about what they heard. What a shame! What a huge missed opportunity!

Remember the old Gartner stat: 95% of companies collect customer feedback. Yet only 10% use the feedback to improve, and only 5% tell customers what they are doing in response to what they heard. It’s from a few years ago but still fairly representative. I’ve seen the 10% as high as 34% in some studies. Perhaps the 5% has bumped up a bit, but tell me the last time you heard from a company after providing feedback. It’s pretty rare.

This week’s #CXChat (they happen weekly on Wednesdays at 11am PT) is all about closing the loop with customers on their feedback, and I thought it would be a great opportunity to write again about the importance of doing so.

Customers take time to provide feedback, to help companies improve! Why don’t companies act on the feedback or close the loop with customers? I’ve got a few thoughts on that:

At Some Point, You Have to Stop Listening
Two Major Flaws of Your Customer Listening Efforts
Today’s VoC Program Challenges

A closed-loop feedback process begins with feedback. And that means it actually begins with the survey or the listening post from which the feedback is derived. Let’s focus on surveys as the feedback channel.

First and foremost, you’ll need to design surveys that provide you with actionable feedback. Some tips to do that can be found in these posts:

22 Tips for Proper Survey Design
20 Signs That It’s Time for a VoC Redesign
Surveys Don’t Sell!
Do You Employ Actionability Thinking in Survey Design?
How Do You Know When It’s Time to Redesign Your VoC Program?
Customer Surveys are as Important as Ever
Improving the Respondent Experience

And you’ll need to ensure that you maximize response rates.

Maximizing Survey Response Rates – Part 1: Defining Concepts
Maximizing Survey Response Rates – Part 2: 10 Tips to Achieve Your Goal

Once the feedback starts pouring in, you’ll want to make some sense of it. There are many different ways to analyze the data.

Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail
CEM Toolbox: Making Sense of Your Data
Data is Just Data…
Making Sense of Customer Words
The Definition of CX Insanity
The Future is Now: Take Your Customer Data to the Next Level
Data for the Sake of Data? Never!

What will you do with the feedback? What will you do with the analysis? How will you socialize it with employees? Design a closed-loop process – and empower employees to follow up with customers.

• Ensure that your VoC platform allows for automated alerts that are triggered based on customer responses to certain questions in the survey.
• Set up workflows and case tracking.
• Thank customers for their feedback.
• Share the feedback with employees.
• Triage those customers who have issues, whether new or unresolved.
• Conduct root cause analysis.
• Fix the problem.
• Let customers know what you did and what the new experience will be.
• Train employees on the resolution/new experience.
• Remeasure: What do customers think about the new experience? Do they consider the issue to be resolved? How well did you improve the experience?

Transforming the Customer Experience with Big Data
Five Fails to Avoid with Your VoC Program
Closing the Loop on CX Improvements
Tips to Help You Close the Loop with Your Customers

Two final things to consider:

1. Follow up with customers who provided positive feedback, too. Appreciate the positive; improve the negative.
2. If there’s an issue, that’s not the end. Research shows that customers who had an issue that was followed up with via successful service recovery tend to be more loyal than if there had never been a problem.

Listen. Follow up. Appreciate. Recover. Delight.

It takes humility to seek feedback; it takes wisdom to understand it, analyze it, and appropriately act on it. -Stephen Cov
ey

Related posts:

11 Tips to Ensure You Achieve ROI from Your VoC Program Take Action on Your Customer Data! Do You Employ Actionability Thinking in Survey Design? Today's VOC Program Challenges