Why Closing the Customer Feedback Loop is a High-Value Activity

The real irony here is that the goal of the exercise is to improve CX, but the process offers terrible CX.

What is the User Experience of your Customer Feedback Survey?

It’s no wonder that the engagement rates on many in-store surveys are so low (often less than 1%).

Never Create the Expectation that you WILL Follow Up

Why is Closing the Customer Feedback Loop so Important?

Why respond to customer feedback from promoters?

“Really appreciate your kind words and continued support.”

“Thanks for the great suggestion. We will make that change before the end of the month.”

Why respond to detractors?

create a loyal customer. One such study

Pros v Cons of Closing the Feedback Loop with Super Detractors Pros Cons Less likely that they will post complaints on social media Need to be careful the follow-up doesn’t make the situation worse 70% of complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve complaints in their favour. It takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience Happy customers who get their issue resolved tell 4-6 people about their experience in a good light A dissatisfied customer will tell 9-15 people about their retail experience in a negative light

How to Close the Feedback Loop More Efficiently

Empower outlet managers or franchisees to follow up with customers makes the volume of feedback more manageable on a local level. This also adds value in terms of building relationships with local customers, but be careful to provide the necessary training if you go down this road.

Use A.I. to respond to customer feedback is automatically fraught with danger, but implemented well it could add enormous value. However, I strongly recommend having human support involved, at least as a fallback option. Leaving the entire interaction to bots could make a bad situation worse.

Getting customers to complete surveys while they’re still on your premises gives your staff the opportunity to react in real time if they have the right tools. This is equivalent to getting the customer to make a spoken complaint and can be handled in the same way.

There’s listening and being seen to listen

I regularly do customer feedback surveys for competitive analysis purposes (full disclosure: ServiceDock is a provider of survey solutions). For the most part, I am a genuine customer of the business when I do them and try to think as such, while also making notes on the survey solution. Some of these surveys can be extremely tedious and drawn out, to the point that the experience actually takes away from my perception of the brand. The most frustrating thing I frequently encounter is brands telling me that there is no chance of a follow-up to my feedback or in other words, they’re not going to close the customer feedback loop.In this post, I cover why closing the customer feedback loop is so important and how your business can do it more efficiently to stand out from the competition.This is the first question you should ask yourself when creating or updating your customer feedback survey. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes for a moment. A business has just asked you to spend a few moments of your valuable time to provide feedback that will help the business improve the customer journey. So the business is getting something very valuable from the customer. In return, you, the customer, get a small statistical chance of winning a low-value prize, while being informed that no one is really paying attention to what you’re saying. Does that sound customer-centric to you?Closing the feedback loop is just one aspect of how customers experience your survey. We go into this topic in more detail in this blog post: 5 Ways to Increase Survey Response Rates. Of course, it would be very difficult for any busy consumer-facing business to follow up on every piece of feedback, particularly if you’re being successful at capturing it in high volumes. And the truth is, the worst thing you can do is to create the expectation that there will be a follow up when you don’t have the resources to do it. It is always better to under-promise and over-deliver to wow customers rather than doing it the other way around and disappoint them. The goal should be to respond to as much customer feedback as possible, which in an ideal world would be all of it. Avoid promising that you WILL follow up but certainly do not state that you WILL NEVER follow up. There is nothing wrong with offering a secondary channel that will receive a more immediate customer support response, but stating outright that the feedback being provided is not going to get any direct attention is discourteous at best.For simplicity, let’s assume there are only two types of customers. Happy loyal customers (aka promoters) and unhappy customers who are ready to do business with someone else (aka detractors). The benefits of following up with both customer types are different so we’ll look at them separately:If you’re only going to reply to a small percentage of feedback your time is probably better spent on detractors, but there is a lot of value to be gained from promoter follow-ups. These people already like your business enough to be willing to tell their friends and colleagues to avail of your services. Imagine the pleasant surprise and subsequent increase in advocacy levels if you come back with a well-timed —orIt takes effort, but there is real payback on such follow-ups.Be careful not to make the follow up intrusive. Following up with a phone call, for example, can actually have a negative impact on customer perception if it is timed badly and interrupts an important meeting.When I talk to potential clients, they often express concern that all they will get are complaints. In our experience, that is not the case and studies have shown that proactively dealing with a complaint creates a huge opportunity to suggests up to 70% of complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve complaints in their favour. Weighing up the pros and cons of following up on the most critical customers (i.e. super detractors) is an analysis worth doing.Make sure the follow up is prompt. Following up a few days after the customer interaction can act as more of a reminder about a negative incident rather than addressing the issue. A quick response shows an interest in the customer’s issue and demonstrates that the business is actively listening.There are ways of increasing your follow up rate without going out and hiring a new customer service team: Messaging apps offer one of the most efficient ways to close the feedback loop. They are not intrusive and the real-time yet asynchronous engagement makes it easier to respond quickly without having to dedicate staff to the channel 24/7.I have no doubt that the vast majority of businesses running customer experience surveys act on the results. I’m sure they are listening. But there is a lot of value in being seen to listen by actually responding to customers to prove it. That is probably more important than ever if you believe all the hype about Millennials being self-centred. This generation are thought to be loyal only to brands paying individual attention and providing one-to-one support to them.I’m not sure I buy into all of that, but no matter what generation you’re dealing with, closing the customer feedback loop is a high-value activity. Your goal should be to do as much of it as resources permit and then track the impact to see if increasing resources makes sense. ServiceDock is a customer interaction management platform for multi-unit business like retail chains. Our platform includes a customer experience management module that leverages popular messaging apps to capture real-time customer feedback and facilitate live follow-ups with customers. There is no more efficient way to close the customer feedback loop than via messaging.