Customer feedback is an opportunity to make your business better. Each individual customer complaint potentially represents a much larger sentiment.
Your customers are the lifeblood of your business, and they have certain expectations. The problem is that the majority of customer experiences aren’t being met. In fact, while 80% of CEOs believe they’re already delivering great customer experiences, only 8% of customers agree.
Let's explore how to use feedback analytics to understand your customers’ experience and identify areas for improvement for your business.
With social media and public review sites, negative brand sentiment can spread quickly. There are three main channels customers complain:
Regardless of the channel, you need a way to collect all of this customer complaint data accurately. Collecting and managing all that data from across several departments is a tremendous task. So, having a database of customer feedback is needed before your chosen analytics solution can be used for further analysis.
To accurately collect this data, you need to address the following:
Data standardization — Standard fields that encompass a wide range of customer issues ensure you can categorize them for trend analysis. All responses must also be quantifiable to be analyzed. I.e. each response should be translated to a metric to be usable for analysis. If you just collect written summaries of each complaint, then it will be impossible to this analysis.
A culture of accuracy — Your staff should understand why it’s important to collect data accurately. If you are using data from a web form, you may want to randomize it or use an auto-fill to ensure customers are not just selecting the first option from a dropdown menu.
Since only 4% of unsatisfied customers complain, a lack of customer feedback doesn’t necessarily mean your customers are completely satisfied with your business.
To find the hidden value of a complaint, you’ll want to start by collecting all of the relevant information, such as:
Customer experience belongs to more than just one department. Having all this data in one place will help remove siloes.
Businesses aspire to use data efficiently but often can’t if they’re using standalone marketing, sales, and service solutions that aren’t connected to one another. Disparate systems mean data silos, and that has an impact on efficiency, sales, and morale across the entire business.
Sales and customer service requires a holistic approach to ensure representatives feel empowered. And these days, that approach looks like a single cloud solution that connects your people, data, and ideas from multiple sources. And for those who can't move over yet, there's a hybrid approach that enables you to keep your data where it is while leveraging the innovative capabilities of the Cloud.
When all of your data is in one place, you have a complete picture of your business and customers, and are ready to start telling a story with your data.
Next, you’ll want to visualize your data to reveal insights such as trends and patterns. This visual representation helps businesses to understand what their data is telling them, and the faster they can do that, the faster they can make intelligent decisions.
As humans, our brains can only process a very limited amount of information at a time. If that information is presented to us visually, we are more likely to quickly process that information.
That's because our brains are programmed to understand images much faster than text: it processes information 60,000 times faster than the time it would to decode text. In fact, when paired with visuals, information is 70% more memorable than it would be if it were lone text.
You may want to consider visualizing:
Volume and nature of customer feedback — Once all the customer complaints are tallied and categorized, you will be able to identify which areas of your business are causing the most pain for your customers. This enables you to focus on putting out the largest fires first.
Customer attrition — Are your subscription rates dropping month over month? Identify the leading indicators of churn and address those complaints first.
Support call volume — If your product or service is overly complicated, the design is not intuitive, or it doesn’t work as it should, then you may be losing customers.
Warranty claims — This could be an indicator of poor quality or manufacturing standards. Having a large percentage of warranty claims could lead to reputational damage.
Number of complaints over time — You’ll want to keep track of customer complaints trends. Are there more complaints over time, or less? An increase in customer complaints could mean more customers will become dissatisfied and stop using your product or service.
There are two other metrics that are important for addressing customer concerns and pain points within your company. However, they are after the fact so resolving the issue may be too late to win back these customers.
Number of cancellations — If a large percentage of customers cancel due to high prices, poor customer service, competitor offer, etc., then it will alert you to what some consumers value most.
Product returns — Tracking volume of product returns is less important than the reason why and the product SKU. Perhaps there’s a quality issue with a particular product, poor fit, dissatisfaction with the utility, or the product failed to meet customer expectations based on advertising.
With the right solution, you can dig into your data and uncover actionable insights from your customer feedback data. To find the hidden value within your customer feedback, try SAP Analytics Cloud.
Your customers are the lifeblood of your business, and they have certain expectations. The problem is that the majority of customer experiences aren’t being met. In fact, while 80% of CEOs believe they’re already delivering great customer experiences, only 8% of customers agree.
Let's explore how to use feedback analytics to understand your customers’ experience and identify areas for improvement for your business.
Collecting Common Customer Feedback
With social media and public review sites, negative brand sentiment can spread quickly. There are three main channels customers complain:
- Phone
- In person
- Digital Channels (website, social media, review site, forum, email, etc.)
Regardless of the channel, you need a way to collect all of this customer complaint data accurately. Collecting and managing all that data from across several departments is a tremendous task. So, having a database of customer feedback is needed before your chosen analytics solution can be used for further analysis.
To accurately collect this data, you need to address the following:
Data standardization — Standard fields that encompass a wide range of customer issues ensure you can categorize them for trend analysis. All responses must also be quantifiable to be analyzed. I.e. each response should be translated to a metric to be usable for analysis. If you just collect written summaries of each complaint, then it will be impossible to this analysis.
A culture of accuracy — Your staff should understand why it’s important to collect data accurately. If you are using data from a web form, you may want to randomize it or use an auto-fill to ensure customers are not just selecting the first option from a dropdown menu.
Get started today with your free trial for SAP Analytics Cloud. Sign up now.
Find the Hidden Value in Customer Feedback
Since only 4% of unsatisfied customers complain, a lack of customer feedback doesn’t necessarily mean your customers are completely satisfied with your business.
To find the hidden value of a complaint, you’ll want to start by collecting all of the relevant information, such as:
- Details of incident
- Date
- Location
- Product
- Customer service agent involved
Customer experience belongs to more than just one department. Having all this data in one place will help remove siloes.
Single Source of Truth
Businesses aspire to use data efficiently but often can’t if they’re using standalone marketing, sales, and service solutions that aren’t connected to one another. Disparate systems mean data silos, and that has an impact on efficiency, sales, and morale across the entire business.
Sales and customer service requires a holistic approach to ensure representatives feel empowered. And these days, that approach looks like a single cloud solution that connects your people, data, and ideas from multiple sources. And for those who can't move over yet, there's a hybrid approach that enables you to keep your data where it is while leveraging the innovative capabilities of the Cloud.
When all of your data is in one place, you have a complete picture of your business and customers, and are ready to start telling a story with your data.
Visualizing Results
Next, you’ll want to visualize your data to reveal insights such as trends and patterns. This visual representation helps businesses to understand what their data is telling them, and the faster they can do that, the faster they can make intelligent decisions.
As humans, our brains can only process a very limited amount of information at a time. If that information is presented to us visually, we are more likely to quickly process that information.
That's because our brains are programmed to understand images much faster than text: it processes information 60,000 times faster than the time it would to decode text. In fact, when paired with visuals, information is 70% more memorable than it would be if it were lone text.
You may want to consider visualizing:
Volume and nature of customer feedback — Once all the customer complaints are tallied and categorized, you will be able to identify which areas of your business are causing the most pain for your customers. This enables you to focus on putting out the largest fires first.
Customer attrition — Are your subscription rates dropping month over month? Identify the leading indicators of churn and address those complaints first.
Support call volume — If your product or service is overly complicated, the design is not intuitive, or it doesn’t work as it should, then you may be losing customers.
Warranty claims — This could be an indicator of poor quality or manufacturing standards. Having a large percentage of warranty claims could lead to reputational damage.
Number of complaints over time — You’ll want to keep track of customer complaints trends. Are there more complaints over time, or less? An increase in customer complaints could mean more customers will become dissatisfied and stop using your product or service.
There are two other metrics that are important for addressing customer concerns and pain points within your company. However, they are after the fact so resolving the issue may be too late to win back these customers.
Number of cancellations — If a large percentage of customers cancel due to high prices, poor customer service, competitor offer, etc., then it will alert you to what some consumers value most.
Product returns — Tracking volume of product returns is less important than the reason why and the product SKU. Perhaps there’s a quality issue with a particular product, poor fit, dissatisfaction with the utility, or the product failed to meet customer expectations based on advertising.
Customer Feedback Only Helps When it's Analyzed
It’s often said that data is the backbone of today’s business. But data does not provide value until rationalized and harmonized to provide insight. Data is only half of the story.
To get the full story, and make informed decisions, businesses need a way to easily, quickly, and comprehensively extract meaning from that data. It's great to gather feedback from every step of the journey, but what are you doing with it? If it’s sitting in a spreadsheet somewhere, your business won't benefit.
With the right solution, you can dig into your data and uncover actionable insights from your customer feedback data. To find the hidden value within your customer feedback, try SAP Analytics Cloud.
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