5 tips that will make you rethink your current online feedback strategy

Are you serious about listening to your online customers or is your website feedback tool just a vanity project?

A lot of feedback tools out there make it easy to collect user feedback on your website or mobile app, but do they really help make your digital channels more customer centric? The majority of these tools just focus on collecting data, but that’s only part of the process. What comes next?

In this blog, we will share our 5 tips on how you can optimise your feedback strategy in a way that will save you tons of manual work.

1. Don’t lose time analysing feedback with Excel

Spreadsheet tools like Excel and Google Spreadsheets are great tools, but do you really want to export your feedback data on a daily or weekly basis to a .csv or .xls file to manually run through it? This can take a lot of time and extra effort. And who has time to click through each single feedback item just to get an idea of the overall customer experience?

Excel is built for many things, but is analysing your feedback data on a continuous basis one of them? If you have the time, you can indeed calculate and analyse quantitative data such as NPS or CSAT scores (or other customer metrics that you love) using Excel, however when it comes to qualitative data such as text (open comments), you may find that this isn’t so simple. In other words, Excel provides the tools for crunching numbers, so what about large volumes of feedback or open-ended comments that require text analysis?

Our tip? Visualising and analysing your feedback using personalised dashboards can be a great way of getting the overall picture, because it will save you a lot of valuable time and money. No exports are needed. Don’t put yourself through the hassle of calculating your NPS in an Excel file or running through your open comments one by one. Mopinion’s software offers built-in automatic learning and alerting systems, which have the capability to assign feedback to a certain category based on your chosen criteria. This enables you to accurately assess and filter incoming feedback and uncover root causes in no time.

2. Use automated trends analyses

Are you analysing trends or counting smileys? Many feedback tools only offer pre-defined dashboards and visualisations, which only display basic metadata (e.g. amount of feedback items, browsers used, etc), making it hard for you to visualise your data the way YOU want to.

Being able to customise your dashboards makes its easier for you to identify trends that are important to you, even as the volume of feedback increases. Let’s use another example. Say you have a specific goal in mind, such as improving your ordering funnel. On one dashboard, you want to see where and why people are leaving the funnel, which kinds of scores each step of the funnel receives on average and how this differs compared to other users on other devices, browsers and operating systems. Being able to combine these variables into one dashboard will help you uncover deeper insights, all in relation to your goal of improving your ordering funnel.

You can use these dashboards to analyse, compare and identify different trends and scores based on the different URLs or groups of URLS (different parts of the website or steps in the funnel, etc). Additionally, you are able zoom in on trends by looking at open comments and really identify the origin of an issue.

Use the metrics and data you think are relevant and suitable to your business’ needs. Perhaps you want to see how your CSAT scores rank on a particular part of the website in relation to certain browsers, operating systems and devices, or other customer data that you have in place. Does a “one-size-fits-all” dashboard really provide these insights? Can you monitor how specific scores evolve over time? The devil is in the detail.

3. Smart question routing for data collection

Part of attaining good feedback is knowing how to ask the right questions. In other words, smart question routing strategy is key.

Many feedback tools only offer a couple of pre-defined question elements such as smileys and NPS. To illustrate, let’s say in one of your feedback forms you’ve asked the customer to rate their experience on your website with a smiley and they click on the “sad face”. With this feedback alone, you haven’t exactly learned much aside from the fact that your customer is dissatisfied, right? So to make this feedback actionable, it’s helpful to know why they’re not happy with their experience.

And why is it important to know why? Well, with a more in-depth understanding of your customers’ pain points, you’ll be more better equipped with the knowledge to improve those areas and in doing so, enhance the customer experience. You can do this by asking specific follow-up questions to gauge where it went wrong. Keep in mind this works the other way around too – if a customer clicks on a “happy face”, you can ask follow-up questions to discover your strengths. To put it simply, based on the selections made in a feedback form, you can ask different types of follow-up questions giving you more relevant answers.

Another example: we often advise clients to monitor the Goal Completion Rate (GCR) in an online funnel. Our clients, including BMW, TUI and Interpolis put this into practice and gain a lot of valuable feedback. You ask the visitor if they have reached their goals in an exit feedback form (options: yes-no-partly). If a visitor has reached their goal it is good to know how much effort it cost them (Customer Effort Score – CES). This can be determined by using a follow-up question on how you can improve and why it took very much (or very little) effort.

Conversely, if a visitor did not reach their goal, you’ll want to get more insight into why this is as well. In this case, you can offer a couple of pre-defined categories (e.g. bug, suggestions, etc) in combination with an open-ended text field and ask why customer thinks you can improve this issue. However, don’t go overboard. Four questions is typically the max – you want quality insights but you don’t want to annoy your customers!

4. Categorise (and sub-categorise) feedback

Categorising and even sub-categorising feedback is a great way of identifying some of the less noticeable elements of your business operations. However, many feedback tools will prompt the customer to categorise the feedback for you. What’s tricky with this approach is that there is nothing as unpredictable as human behaviour.

For example, the consumer clicks the “BUG” category, but then starts complaining about poor customer service AND they have a suggestion for the product. In our experience, the manner in which customers provide feedback is never a linear or pre-defined process. And it is never entirely possible to pre-define all the right categories in advance. If you have, let’s say 3 to 4 categories (bugs, suggestions, ideas, and other) and more than 50% click on “Other”, how do you plan on organising that data?

The Mopinion Feedback Analytics Platform has an integrated smart labelling system to help you out. Using this system, you can sort feedback into categories on your own the moment feedback comes in and coordinate this with your team. Read more about this in our article on how to analyse customer feedback with the use of labels.

5. Determine your plan of action and alert the right teams

Now it’s time to put together a plan of action for addressing the feedback you’ve collected. Take it from Bruce Temkin, a customer experience transformist and Managing Partner of the Temkin Group, “Companies obsess about the measurements and analysis, but many lack processes for responding to the insights in a closed-loop manner” in his blog, Six Trends Reshape Voice of the Customer Programs. Don’t just let your feedback build up and float off into oblivion – make it actionable.

You might be quick in resorting to your scrum and project management tools, however that might not always the most efficient option – especially when an issue needs to be addressed quickly. For example, you have incoming feedback showing that a customer is trying to place an order on your website but due to an error, he/she can’t go through with the order. Using Mopinion’s “action management” features, you can alert the appropriate person in your team right away so as to ensure the customer completes their order successfully. With these features, you can also track progress to see if and when an issue is resolved by your or your digital team, e.g. using notes for individual feedback items, e-mail reminders, mail alerts and forwards.

Improve your feedback strategy now

It’s great that you’re on the right track and have already started collecting feedback but you are only scratching the surface. Feedback is powerful – so make sure you’re doing it right. Many of Mopinion’s customers are already easily importing their feedback data or integrating various feedback collection tools using Mopinion’s software.

Want to see how this customer feedback software works for you?