Top 5 Steps To Setup An Effective Closed Loop Feedback Process

Unsurprisingly, the topic of Customer Feedback Loops has been in the forefront of the Customer Experience (CX) industry in recent years.  With top brands leading the way by taking into consideration every customer’s reviews and taking rapid action to close the loop.

In today’s ever critical society, companies must prioritise catering to consumers’ needs for a seamless experience. Otherwise, risk losing their customers to competitors who actually listen to their feedback. 

The importance of listening to customer feedback especially shone when the news came out that Amazon’s net sales increased by 36% to $368 billion in 2020 – almost a $100 billion increase in a single year,  thanks to their amazing CX strategies.

Being able to complete the feedback loop yields tangible benefits; in fact, over two thirds of unsatisfactory Google reviews can be rectified with an appropriate response from the business or organisation. Moreover, every star improvement in a review results in a 9% increase in revenue, so why wouldn’t an organisation look to close the feedback loop?

Let’s take a look at the Top 5 steps we recommend to setting up a closed loop feedback process!

1) Understanding The Customer Journey

Before taking action to address feedback, a good place to start is to visually map out the customer journey. You need to understand where your customers are coming from and what their journey with your organisation looks like. 

Just visualising the whole process can help your team identify opportunities to improve your customer’s experience. 

Secondly, try to identify the key touchpoints in the customer journey. Which can include things like: 

• Initial contact
• Research and evaluation
• Purchase
• Delivery
• Post – purchase followup

you should be able to illustrate all the different touchpoints, starting from the customer’s initial awareness to making the purchase and eventually becoming an advocate.

By completing this first step, you’ve already made a massive leap to a positive customer experience and have gained an edge over your competitors.

2) Capturing Customer Feedback Effectively

After plotting out the customer journey, you will quickly see how diversified the touchpoints are. To capture the feedback effectively, you should offer suitable channels of response.

If you really want to stand out from the competition more, think about going beyond direct touch points e.g. take a retail store, for instance, walk-ins could be just browsing your store or could be your loyal customers making a purchase. It would be almost impossible to get feedback from walk-ins browsing but tools like Facial Emotional Analysis you could capture their emotions by demographic and age. There are such cutting edge technologies that will help you capture feedback at every touchpoint.

It is recommended that after you gather all of this feedback, you store it in a centralised database or a location which is easily accessible by all members of the organisation. This is because it can be very hard for teams within your organisation to go over data scattered across many spreadsheets. 

But all of this feedback is futile if you don’t analyse it and turn it into good insights. Make use of a good Customer Experience Platform. With a suitable Customer Experience Platform, it’s possible to synthesise data from the various channels, detect trends, understand sentiment across the journey and interpret customer behaviour. Without this approach, all the feedback collected will be for naught.

3) Prioritising Feedback And Taking Action

Now that you have received the feedback, it’s important to prioritise it in your to-do list and take initiative. To be able to give accurate and helpful feedback, it involves people from several different departments  in your organisation. So it’s important that you set up a platform or way to communicate this feedback to the frontlines and other teams. 

Make sure your frontline team addresses immediate issues first. Don’t let your customers wait for a long time especially in critical situations such as being billed incorrectly and so on. Furthermore,  you need to provide feedback in a timely manner and don’t be too vague with your answers and address any concerns your customers have quickly. It is also recommended that you make the conversation a bi-directional one.

Closing the loop on customer feedback is important, but it’s equally crucial to analyse that feedback across different touchpoints and collate it across the organisation. Doing so can reveal valuable insights into the overall channel and organisational sentiment.

This comprehensive approach to feedback analysis helps companies gain a holistic view of their customer experience and make informed decisions that drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.

4) Optimising Customer Engagement With Follow-Ups

Now you’ve got the feedback, and taken action, it’s time to update  your customers and follow up with them. Make use of follow up methods like email or messages to do this. You can even use automated systems to streamline the process even further and make it more efficient. 

It’s important when doing these improvements to have some way of measuring your efforts. This way, you know what initiatives are effective, and what initiatives you need to improve on.  To measure your successes, you can establish key performance indicators (KPIs). These are metrics used to measure the performance of a specific objective, such as:

• Response time
• Customer retention rate
• Repeat purchase rate 

This way, you can measure things like conversation rates and see how your follow up efforts resonate with customers. 

And don’t forget – make sure to always encourage feedback from your customers!

5) Continuously Monitor And Improve

Closing the feedback loop is an ongoing process. It’s not just a one time thing. You need to regularly review and refine your feedback processes to keep up with the new trends. Not only that but, actually listen to this feedback and implement solutions in such a way that your customers never face the same problem again.

A good way of continuously collecting feedback is by using customer feedback surveys. These surveys offer the perfect chance to get useful opinions and thoughts from your customers in a very short time period, and from a diverse range of people.

Using these insights, make sure to continuously analyse these data and metrics, so you stay on top of the latest trends and keep your customers satisfied.

Close The Loop With Resonate

A good and quick response to customer feedback publicly suggests that your business is open to self-assessment and striving to improve. This reinforces your brand and gives you a competitive edge.

So don’t let your customers go unheard.

With Resonate you can instantly capture feedback from various channels and turn them into helpful insights with our powerful artificial intelligence and machine learning data analysis tools. Be the first to spot feedback trends and close the customer feedback loop quickly. . 

Check out how we  powered one of Australia’s leading retailers in sporting and leisure goods:  Rebel to close their feedback loop and achieve CX success!
So what are you waiting for ? Contact us, and see how we can close your Customer Feedback Loop once and for all!