Your customers are important stakeholders. Without them you wouldn’t be in business, and they have a valuable perspective on your organisation’s strengths, weaknesses, and even potential opportunities.

Engaging your customers and seeking their insight could help you with anything from new product ideas and expansion plans, to fine-tuning marketing and customer-service strategies. And it could have other benefits, too: research has found that companies with high customer satisfaction scores grew revenues 2.5 times faster than peers in their industries.¹

But it’s not possible to please everyone – when analysing feedback, it’s also essential to cut through noise so you can understand what the most valuable suggestions are. This step-by-step guide breaks down how to go about collecting customer feedback and how to make it into something useful.

You probably already receive feedback from customers in one way or another, such as reviews on your website or other sales platforms, or comments to customer service staff. But without a clear purpose, that feedback is less likely to be of benefit to your business.

Instead, consider outlining any specific goals that you are hoping to achieve – such as launching a new product, or increasing your return on marketing investment – based on your customers’ views. This will influence how you collect feedback and the questions you ask, as well as the steps you take afterwards.²

These days, there are myriad ways to collect customer feedback and plenty of tools available to help you do so.
 

Some strategies include:

• Monitoring social media channels
  
• Sending surveys
  
• Analysing recorded customer service calls or live chat transcripts (making sure you adhere to data protection regulations)
  
• Using Net Promotor Score (NPS), which is a measure of customer satisfaction calculated by asking customers: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?”
  
• Running focus groups³
   

There are various benefits and limitations to different methods, so the one you choose will depend on why you are gathering the feedback in the first place. For example, if you’re planning to launch a new product, customer focus groups and qualitative surveys could be most helpful for getting detailed insights. However, if you’re looking to review and refine your business’s customer experience, social media channels and live chat transcripts might be most useful.

Consider using several methods to get a more complete picture. A 2021 McKinsey survey found that while the majority of customer experience leaders use surveys as a way to measure customers’ satisfaction, only 15% said they were fully satisfied with this measurement strategy.⁴

Once you have collected insights from customers, look to store them together in a single location that your team can add to and refer back to over time.⁵

It’s then helpful to divide feedback into categories and sub-categories that are meaningful to your business.¹ This allows you to focus on the most relevant insights that can help you achieve your goals. For example, you might categorise feedback by topic, such as marketing or customer service, with sub-categories for feedback on the different platforms you use for customer service, such as live chat and telephone support.²

Dividing insights according to customer segment could also be helpful in guiding your strategy. And remember to monitor positive feedback, too; understanding what your customers like about your business can be just as valuable as understanding what they’d like you to change.

Feedback from customers can only become useful if you put it into action. But it’s not possible to change everything at once. Organising insights in a clear and manageable way can help you review it and spot recurring points. That in turn can help you to plan how you’re going to address the feedback and prioritise the most important issues.⁵

Many businesses can fall into the trap of asking their customers for feedback and then not doing anything with it, which can erode trust.² McKinsey found that just 6% of customer experience leaders were confident that the feedback their team gathered had an influence on decision making in their business.⁴

On the other hand, demonstrating to your customers that you value their opinion enough to make changes can make them more engaged and loyal to your business.

Taking the time to respond to customers who gave their feedback is an important final step. Failing to do so could discourage customers from giving you their feedback in the future. On the other hand, by telling customers what action you have taken as a result of their feedback, you demonstrate that you value their input.²

If you have gathered feedback from a large volume of customers, it could be most effective to create a report detailing the feedback you have received and the steps you’ve taken in response. But if you only need to respond to a smaller amount of customers, a personalised email might be a good option.²