Customer Feedback Management: Tested Ways To Turn Feedback Into Action

For every organization that excels at feedback management, 3 others struggle. 

And the result? 

Scattered feedback, misaligned priorities, wasted efforts, and a messed up product roadmap are the consequences. We’re taking on this problem today but not without covering the fundamentals.

What is customer feedback management? 

Customer feedback management involves collecting, organizing, processing, and translating insights into outcomes. Any back-and-forth exchange of opinions leading to better product decisions, and fixing bugs constitutes feedback management.

How to collect customer feedback? 

When collecting customer feedback, you’ve plenty of options to keep your feedback process on autopilot, starting with: 

1. Surveys 

Surveys come right at the top thanks to NPS, CSAT, and other in-app surveys that make it easier to collect feedback. The only problem is increasing response rates and better insights. Try these tips:

• Ensure your answer options are in a vertical order—a horizontal orientation is underwhelming for the mind 
• Stay away from double-barrelled questions—ask one question at a time 
• Align with the eye reading pattern(Z on desktop and F on mobile)—include the lowest option from the left and progress higher to the right 
• Ask questions that illustrate the experience ensuring the right recall

2. Email 

The ideal survey response rate for email surveys is a little over 20%. 

For higher email survey response rates, we recommend you to: 

• Personalize using the first name 
• Add an intriguing subject line—bring in humor or reciprocity(Maria, here’s a $50 gift card for 3 mins of your time) 
• Take help from the preview text—for instance, While you’re at it, here’s a $15 credit  
• Ask questions to compel users to take action thanks to the subconscious urge to think about anything but the question
• Use emojis to convey emotions better 

3. Customer interviews 

While customer interviews are way more accurate than surveys, it’s time-consuming and painstaking. 

But there are ways to make it worth the effort. Start by:

• Interviewing customers till you keep hearing the same thing on repeat—whether you start with 5-7 or 10-15, don’t stop till you feel there’s nothing more to learn 
• Limiting the focus group members to around 4-5 so that there’s no influence 
• Asking the right questions—avoid yes/no questions and heed to listening 
• Timing your conversations into 5-minute blocks so you don’t end up straying off-topic 
• Asking the right questions such as goals, frequency of pain, willingness to pay, and alternatives 

4. Support tickets 

To be honest, your support tickets are a goldmine when collecting feedback. Here’s what you can do:

• Use your support tickets to collect quantitative data—CSAT, NPS, post-purchase or other surveys 
• Next, ask customers to provide qualitative data—ask them to give responses to open-ended questions 
• Group support tickets based on feedback topics based on the number of times they pop up
• Take a look at the sentiment of the complaints—prioritize based on the number of tickets raised which can be easy with a tool 

Here's an interesting opinion on customer support by Geoff Charles, VP of Product at Ramp.

5. Reviews and social media 

You can monitor social media mentions and online reviews using a social media monitoring tool. Don’t forget to respond within 3 hours of the mention since 50% of the users want a response within the first three hours. 

While reviews on popular review sites may not go as viral. It doesn’t mean it's not cause for concern. 

How to organize customer feedback? 

While logically, analyzing customer feedback comes first, there’s a reason why organizing feedback should come first. 

When feedback isn’t categorized, product teams find it difficult to distinguish between critical problems and not-so-important ones. Eventually making it harder to identify trends and patterns needed to kick off analysis.

Here are some of the practical tips we recommend: 

• Create a one-stop destination where all the feedback channels integrate including emails, CRM, Notion, or Google sheets 
• Create a template where it's easier to organize data based on date, source, and category—helps in easy documentation
• Organize feedback by creating buckets featuring words or phrases for a particular interaction—create a glossary list accessible to all  
• Chalk out a taxonomy—Use customer terms instead of jargon recognize buyer personas and use category names that appeal to them 
• Focus on creating a uniform tag schema—go for words easier to remember and search
• Create defined categories such as features, development, or checkout and further split them into micro categories such as ui: User interface related features, performance: Performance improvements or issues

How to prioritize feedback? 

After sorting the feedback, it’s time to focus on implementing what’s required. Before you start, here are some pointers you might want to consider: 

a. Frequency: Take a look at the number of times an issue or request has been asked. Additionally, analyze key events such as increased drop-offs, surged bounce rate, decreased user engagement, and declining ARPU. 

If there’s an alarming dip in the data, you know what to do. 

b. Impact: Consider three key factors such as conversions—the number of users likely to sign up, anticipated revenue, and cost reductions. If the level of confidence is 50% or less, then it's a no-no.

c. Customer segment: Build for high LTV folks, typically who are your customers for 3-5 years. As a yardstick, customers who generate 70-80% of your revenue are your ideal segment. 

d. Feasibility: Weigh the cost-to-benefit ratio. If it's greater than 1, then it's a go-ahead. You’ll also want to factor in the number of users impacted. For instance, if it's a feature request impacting 50 users, building a feature affecting 150 users is an ideal decision. 

e. Part of the overall growth: You might want to consider building features that directly affect the core users. If your product is meant for product teams, building a feature that’s solely used by marketing teams defeats the purpose. 

If you find yourself drifting away from your product goals, remember that highly aligned teams generate 58% more revenue and are 72% more profitable than their misaligned counterparts. 

How to analyze customer feedback and turn it into action? 

The next step includes a lot of number crunching and inferences. Beginning with:

a. Identifying patterns along with positive and negative feedback 

You’ll have to draw parallels and identify patterns among all the feedback channels. Pull out the feedback from all channels and identify the sentiment. For every 10 feedback responses, if more than 5 have a score of less than -0.5, then that’s worth attending to. 

If the qualitative data shows a high score but specifies a problem or shortcoming, it's time to take it up. 

For instance, take a look at DAU and MAU, if there’s a decline of 10-20% in 3 months, it's cause for concern. 

b. Narrow down customer segments 

You will have to filter your customers based on free vs paid users(free may not be of much value in monetary terms), heavy users vs moderate users, and demography. For instance, occasional users on weekends or holidays could not mean much to you. 

Identifying a user as a discount-only or all-weather customer determines if its feature is worth building or fixing a supposed bug. Customers with high referral value may be worth more than others. 

c.  Look for outliers 

Especially, when fixing a bug can bring forth new problems such as code complexity where modifying the existing code can set off a chain of errors because of a compromise in the overall code structure. 

Another outlier could be technical debt—mistakes due to the introduction of code. Other ones could be purely the ARPU.

d. Get down to root cause analysis

By definition, root cause analysis identifies the underlying cause of a problem. It focuses on solving the foundational defects instead of the external symptoms. 

Here’s how you can accomplish it:

i. For bug requests, document all details such as screenshots, errors, logs, and user reports 

ii. Try introducing the bug in a controlled environment to find the extent of damage, the effort to identify the cause, and testing efforts 

iii. Identify whether delaying it will cause loss to the business 

iv. The next thing is to get down to finding the answer using the 5 Whys template and find answers to:

• Why is this happening?
• Why did that happen?
• Why did that cause occur?
• Why is the root cause happening?
• Why has this problem not been fixed? 

e. Notify all the cross-functional teams 

Collaborating with marketing, customer support, sales, and engineering can help put things in perspective. It will help you understand the context and hindsight behind any sort of feedback. 

Ideally, you can use JIRA tickets, and relevant tags, to work with developers to sort issues out. Set up Webhooks so relevant teams are kept in the loop about the issues. All issues are directly notified and sent to teams. 

f. Close the feedback loop 

Once the feedback is translated into action, notify the customers either via email or in-app messages. Let them know what steps were taken by adding context. Ask them for feedback either after 15-20 days. Finally, close the feedback loop.

Wrapping Up 

By now you’d agree that customer feedback management is tiresome. Using a feedback management tool would make it easier. From collecting feedback to converting them to action, you can manage your time and efforts better.  

More than that, it could solve the problem of having a dedicated team doing it for you. You could explore Blitzllama which could help you achieve a 30% response rate. That’s a byproduct of analyzing over 4 million calls along with 50 million API calls.