The ultimate guide to building effective customer feedback programs

A staggering 89% of CX pros believe customer experience is the leading contributor to churn. Investing in customer feedback programs is an investment in your company's longevity and success.

Gathering customer feedback allows an organization to confidently hone its products, services, and customer interactions. Rather than making inferences blindly, feedback provides a roadmap to creating better customer experiences (CX).

While there are distinctions between business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) feedback programs, the main pillars of a great strategy remain the same. In our ultimate guide to building effective customer feedback programs, we’ll dive into everything you need to know to create winning customer experiences, no matter your business model.

Chapter 1

Customer feedback is invaluable for any business in today's competitive market. It provides direct insight into what customers think about your products or services, highlighting what you are doing well and uncovering areas for improvement. By understanding customer needs and preferences, you can make informed decisions that enhance their overall experience, drive innovation, and build customer loyalty.

Customer feedback is the information, opinions, and insights customers provide about their experiences with a company’s products or services. It can be positive, neutral, or negative, including reviews, reactions, complaints, suggestions, and observations about products, services, and interactions. Collecting and analyzing this feedback helps businesses understand customer needs, identify areas for improvement, and enhance customer satisfaction.

Customer feedback is vital as it offers you clear insight into how your customers feel and what they want to see in the future. When you understand what your customers want, you can make effective decisions to improve their experience.

Effectively collecting, responding to, and implementing customer feedback allows your business to:

Related reading: Tips and resources for building a better customer experience

Chapter 2

Organizations need full support from leaders and teams across their business to develop an effective customer feedback program. Although you can share facts like 91% of customers will share a positive experience with their friends and family, it also helps to get real-world data from your business.

Here’s how you can get stakeholders at every level on board with creating a customer feedback program. 

The first step in building a customer feedback program is identifying who will be involved. For example, your stakeholders may include:

If executives and senior management don’t consider your program mission-critical, you won’t get the resourcing and funds you need to ensure its success. To show why your program matters, you must demonstrate how collecting and acting upon customer feedback delivers results that leadership will love.

Here are four methods to show your leadership why investing in your feedback program is vital across every stage of the customer journey.

The easiest method to get your executive team on board when implementing a customer feedback program is to show demonstrable profit impacts. Showing the potential ROI of customer feedback programs will clarify why your business should invest in CX.

Related reading: 10 strategies to maximize the ROI of your CX programs

Another useful way to increase the appeal of a customer feedback program is to demonstrate how it aligns with your organizational goals. Your feedback program should not be at odds with your goals, nor should it seem like a new and random pursuit. Develop a clear connection between the feedback program and your organization's broader goals.

A pilot program will help test the efficacy of your feedback initiatives before launching a widespread integration. Running this pilot scheme over three or six months gives you plenty of data to show why it's time to expand to a full-scope implementation.

Luckily for everyone, customer feedback programs aren’t something new. The biggest and best companies around the globe have been using these for decades. With that in mind, there are plenty of third-party case studies that you can turn to.

Read SurveyMonkey success stories to learn how top brands leverage customer insights to deliver a better customer experience.

Chapter 3

Building an effective, centralized, and systematic customer feedback program from scratch isn’t simple. You must define goals, objectives, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to bring your customer feedback program to life.

To justify the need for a customer feedback system, it is essential to establish a target for your program that aligns with your company's goals. Start by setting a clear and achievable objective before proceeding with any other steps. 

We aim to increase NPS by 15% over the next six months. To achieve this, we'll launch transactional and relational NPS surveys to track changes in this metric. Continuous monitoring and responding to feedback will help us identify improvement opportunities and implement them. After six months, we’ll evaluate the effectiveness of our customer satisfaction initiatives.

Related reading: How to use NPS surveys to create the best customer experience

Chapter 4

In this chapter, we will explore the various methods of collecting customer feedback, the importance of analyzing this feedback, and how to effectively implement changes based on the customer insights you yield.

Here are the main types of customer feedback your business should be familiar with:

There are numerous channels for collecting customer feedback. Engaging with customers across several channels offers your business an extensive and nuanced feedback base.

Here are the top feedback channels you can use. 

Related reading: How to get started conducting market research 

Another important aspect to consider when collecting feedback is how frequently you send feedback requests. Too infrequently, and you won’t have enough data to draw insightful conclusions from. Too often, you’ll overwhelm your audience, reducing their willingness to leave feedback.

Your business can collect customer feedback across the entire customer journey. Understanding the most important touchpoints in this journey and which are useful to monitor will help you create effective feedback request strategies.

By putting yourself in the customers' shoes, you can trace your customer journey and identify the most critical moments. Combining this with customer journey mapping will enable you to get feedback right when it's most critical. 

Chapter 5

Drawing insight from your customer feedback provides actionable steps you can integrate to improve. By constantly implementing feedback and requesting more feedback on your new features, you create effective customer feedback loops.

Continually collecting customer experience feedback over time and monitoring changes in your CX metrics allows you to gauge whether your feedback program has a positive effect. You can also actively benchmark your data to determine how your customer experiences shift over time.

Using filters in your data helps you pinpoint specific trends. A filter is a survey analysis tool that lets you focus on particular subsets of your data to see how specific groups respond to your questions. 

Charts can help you visualize your results and convert complex data into an easily digestible format. For example, you could use a multiple-choice survey question to ask respondents what they like about using your product. 

A bar chart, like the following, could help you make subtle comparisons across your answer choices:

Though close, you can see that value beats out the other options as your top differentiator. 

Now, if you want to know what customers like most about your product, you can use a pie chart. This type of chart works great in accentuating the differences in popularity among choices:

This time around, it’s clear that value beats out the other options. There’s nuance in creating different kinds of charts. For example, a line/area graph can be created from a multi-select closed-ended question, while pie/donut charts can only be used from a closed-ended question that only allows a single answer.

Related reading: When and how to use SurveyMonkey’s most popular chart types

When exploring related data across distinct customer touchpoints, you may encounter stark differences. Let’s say you were exploring satisfaction rates for customer service support via phone calls and web chat.

If these two touchpoints (which should offer the same level of support) receive opposing satisfaction rates, you can use this as a new line of inquiry. You could review customer feedback for both channels and discover why one service channel is rated better.

Reporting on survey results and drawing clear conclusions comes back to understanding the story that your data tells. Examining the patterns you’ve identified in your data will often lead to potential conclusions. However, it’s important to understand causation and correlation before making too many assumptions. 

Chapter 6

No matter how thoroughly you analyze your survey results, they won’t add value to your organization if they aren’t shared with the teams who can act on them. 

Which teams care about which types of survey data? Let’s find out.

Your program stakeholders can turn your data into powerful insights for their teams. You don’t need an advanced system for sharing customer feedback to be successful, you just need to make sure the right people have access to your data.

Here are some key strategies you can use to communicate insights obtained from customer feedback with program stakeholders:

While all customer feedback is important, your response won’t be the same for every customer. Some feedback requires immediate attention. For example, if a customer has stated that they cannot access a service they’ve paid for, your support team should fix the issue as quickly as possible. On the other hand, some feedback is worth replying to but doesn’t include the same sense of urgency.

By understanding the scope of actions you can take based on feedback, you can prioritize where you first need to respond. Determine how a response aligns with your customer service and business goals. If a quick response enhances the impact of your customer service, it should be a top priority.

Chapter 7 

If your business wants to continue receiving feedback, you have to respond to the feedback coming in and outline the actionable steps you’re taking to address it. Feedback loops only work when you respond to feedback, acknowledge your customers’ comments, and take action. 

Closing the customer feedback loop:

There’s a reason that 52% of customer experience professionals want to invest more in customer feedback programs. Closing the feedback loop is a win-win for everyone. 

Closing the feedback loop with internal stakeholders, whether from marketing, product, sales, or leadership, is crucial for improving their respective business areas.

Involving internal stakeholders in the feedback process enables teams to understand how to effectively act on customer feedback. Communicate clear plans for how each team should address feedback and highlight the impact of their actions on fostering customer loyalty and enhancing the employee experience.

On your survey’s end page (the page they see after submitting the survey), let every customer know how much you value their feedback. The page can detail how you manage their responses and provide examples of what you’ve done with customer feedback in the past.

How you respond to clients can change based on your goals, customer base, and business size. Additionally, positive feedback will require a different response than negative feedback. 

Here’s an example of how you could respond to positive feedback:

Here’s an example of how you could respond to negative feedback: 

Chapter 8

In our final chapter, discover how to enhance your existing customer feedback programs, measure your progress, refine your strategies, and create a more robust system. 

Creating a customer-centric culture should be at the heart of your company’s DNA. Beyond gathering customer feedback, it's also crucial to prioritize employee feedback. Employees who feel supported are more likely to deliver exceptional customer service. By actively collecting and responding to employee feedback, you can build a more positive, productive, and engaged workplace.

Once you understand the customer experience in more detail, you can take steps to deliver more value to clients. For example, you’ll be able to train customer-facing employees in the areas they need to improve on most, and you’ll be in a position to adjust your product roadmap to better meet your customers' needs and wants.

Providing ongoing training and development opportunities allows your employees to enhance their skills. As they become more proficient, they’ll actively deliver streamlined experiences to your customers. The more resources and training employees regularly have at their disposal, the better, especially for front-line staff who are in direct contact with your customers.

Related reading: Set your employees up for success with impactful training

Your job isn't over once you have a successful customer feedback program in place. It’s important to constantly measure performance metrics and feedback data to identify improvement areas.

Monitoring key customer experience metrics over time will also allow you to demonstrate the success of your customer feedback program. As your customer satisfaction rates improve over time, you take that data to your leaders to prove the utility of your CX program. 

When employees feel recognized for their contributions, it enhances their commitment to delivering excellent customer experiences. Similarly, embracing failures as learning opportunities rather than setbacks is vital.

By analyzing what went wrong and adjusting strategies accordingly, you can continually improve your approach and ensure long-term success in building a robust customer feedback program. These moments of reflection and growth strengthen your team's resilience and drive continuous improvement in customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Our guide has explored the full extent of how to make, refine, sustain, and improve a customer feedback program. These best practices, tips, and insights will allow you to craft a winning program that your customers, leadership, and employees love.

As you refine your employee and customer experience, you’ll receive tangible financial returns alongside happier customers. Your business can leverage SurveyMonkey to get an all-in-one platform for collecting, analyzing, and drawing actionable insights from feedback. Get started today.

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