You may have a treasure trove of customer feedback at your fingertips, but it won’t do you any good if you don’t take action and implement thoughtful changes in response to it. Closing the feedback loop is essential for any business that wants to truly understand and cater to its customers’ needs.
Over the years, I’ve developed a systematic approach to transforming feedback into actionable improvements.
By splitting feedback into three buckets — product feedback, support and experience feedback, and help center feedback — you can create a reliable strategy to implement meaningful changes based on what our customers are telling you.
Analyze and Determine the Impact of Feedback
The right action will depend on the type of feedback you’ve received. Thus, it’s essential to analyze and assess the impact of customer feedback before diving into changes.
For example, product changes generally need development work and may take weeks or months to act on. Compare that to help center feedback, which you can usually take action on very quickly without relying on anyone outside of your CX team.
Adopting the same approach in both situations doesn’t make sense.
Analyze customer feedback
When analyzing customer feedback, I organize it into three main categories. They are:
- Product feedback. This type of feedback provides direct insights into how well your product meets customer needs and where it falls short.
- Overall support feedback. This type of feedback often highlights systemic issues or areas where the customer journey can be improved.
- Help Center Feedback. Feedback on help center resources can show how well your self-service options are performing and where they might need improvement.
For a detailed guide on analyzing feedback, check out this Swifteq article.
Determine the impact
When you’ve analyzed your feedback, evaluate the impact you’d see by addressing each one.
Focus on issues that either affect a large number of customers or significantly impact the user experience.
For example, a recurring issue with a key product feature should be prioritized over minor usability concerns.
An example of prioritization based on impact is when Apple or Google release a security fix quickly before anything else but wait for major OS releases to address smaller bugs.
Similarly, you can try addressing several pieces of feedback at once depending on the issue or enhancement request.
You’ll want to do this within your department before engaging product, engineering, or development teams. You’re more likely to get help with implementing changes based on product feedback if you’ve already got a clear path forward.
Closing the Feedback Loop: Implement Product Changes Based on Customers Reaction
Product feedback provides direct insights into how customers interact with your offerings, and making changes based on their feedback is necessary to continually meet high expectations.
Here’s my closed loop process and approach to implementing changes based on product feedback after it’s analyzed:
Engage and collaborate with stakeholders
The advantage of presenting already-analyzed data to stakeholders is that it already has everything you need to show exactly what the customer wants.
Come prepared with how proposed changes would impact retention and revenue as well as volume of the feedback you’re seeing and also negative feedback.
Ensure that all stakeholders understand the customer pain points and the importance of these improvements.
At the same time, come to the table with a mindset of collaboration rather than “this has to be done.”
Rely on your product, engineering, and development teams’ expertise to see what’s possible and determine the level of effort.
Simon Sinek says, “The smartest person in the room is ‘the room’” so collaborate with teams across the organization to meet the customer’s needs in the best, fastest, and most efficient way possible.
Closed loop process – Create a roadmap
Your product team probably already has a defined process for planning their work, and your customer feedback should slot nicely into that process.
If they don’t, here are a few best practices:
- Ensure your roadmap includes timelines, responsible teams, and specific goals for each feature release or piece of work.
- Prioritize quick wins that can be implemented swiftly alongside more complex, long-term improvements. If something has a low level of effort, it’d be easy to work on it with the higher impact improvements.
- Expect the roadmap to change as time goes on. Businesses are always changing, sometimes on the fly, and it’s ok to pivot and reprioritize down the line.
Closed feedback loop – Test and iterate
With big product changes, it’s often wise to implement changes in stages, starting with prototypes or beta versions.
Your customers may want changes to your product, but it won’t be perfect the first time.
If possible, involve customers in testing these updates to gather further feedback, including negative feedback and refine the changes before a full rollout.
Closed feedback loop – Prioritize major bug fixes
Problems with the functionality of your product can erode trust leading to customer churn and missed revenue.
CallMiner estimates that churn due to poor customer experiences costs U.S. businesses $168 billion a year.
Every product team needs to strike a balance between building new features and enhancements, and fixing existing issues with the core product so it meets customers’ needs.
Close the Feedback Loop: Implement Support Process and Experience Changes
Feedback on the overall support experience often highlights areas where the customer journey can be improved.
The good news is there are many support changes you can make that don’t require additional resources.
Here’s how I tackle support feedback:
Look for trends in support interactions
Trends in feedback help you identify how much action you need to take.
Is the support feedback you’re receiving reflective of one support agent or the entire customer service team? Is it broadly representative of your customer base, or is it one unhappy customer making a lot of noise?
Your CSAT scores and comments will be a godsend here.
Look for patterns in support feedback, such as common complaints about response times or the quality of assistance. Implement process improvements, such as better training for support agents or the introduction of new support channels.
Closed feedback loop – Optimize support workflows
Customers like to be able to get help quickly and easily, and they’re happy to do business with you if they have a great experience.
Zippia found that companies that focus on customer experience increase revenue by 80%.
Make it easy for your customers to get the help they need and you will win your customers loyalty. This includes decreasing hold times to talk to an agent, shortening resolution times, and offering robust self-serve options.
Not only do you want to make it easy for your customers to get help, but you’ll also want to make it easy for your support team to help your customers.
Break down data silos so your customer service team has the data they need to take action quickly.
Closing the feedback loop – Improve communication
There are two areas of communication you’ll probably need to improve at different times: from leadership to the support team and from the support team to your customers.
For leadership, make sure the vision and expectations are clearly delivered to your support team.
Remove as much ambiguity as possible to ensure your team knows exactly what they have to do to serve customers well. This is an ongoing need for any team, and great communication is one of the things that separates poor leaders from fantastic ones.
More tactically, you’ll need to ensure you’re improving and optimizing your communication with customers based on their feedback. This can take a number of different shapes:
- If shipping delays are a common issue, provide regular updates on order status and expected delivery times.
- If customers are unclear about next steps in your support process or how to get help, communicate what they need to know proactively.
- If customers are complaining about certain support channels, consider whether it makes sense to introduce a new channel (and if you can support it well).
Every customer encounters trouble eventually. The ease of finding help and your ability to communicate clearly with customers has a big impact on customer satisfaction in those moments.
Monitor results
After implementing changes, continuously monitor customer feedback to assess the impact.
Metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) will be a huge help in measuring the impact of your attempts to improve your support and overall customer experience.
Closed Loop Feedback: Implement Help Center Improvements Based on Customer Feedback
Your help center is your most valuable self-service resource.
It makes for a more scalable support team, and it enables customers to find help 24/7 — even when you don’t have agents available around the clock.
Zendesk natively includes a mechanism where customers can vote on whether an article is helpful, but it’s a binary option and frankly, it’s not the most helpful.
When you’re looking to make improvements based on customer feedback, you need to capture context too — the “why” behind whether the article was helpful or not.
That’s where Help Center Analytics saves the day.
Help Center Analytics lets customers leave feedback on why an article was helpful, so you can take action based on that feedback.
In addition, it also enables other functionality that Zendesk can’t do on its own — like resetting the “helpfulness” score of an article after you make major changes, so that you can better assess the impact those changes had.
If that sounds valuable, you can start a free 14-day trial of Help Center Analytics.
Review and update content
Regularly review and update help center articles based on common search queries and feedback. Ensure that content is clear, concise, and addresses the most frequently asked questions.
You’ll know it’s an effective article if your customers don’t have to reach out to your support team when they’re done reading it — another thing Help Center Analytics enables you to understand.
Help Center Manager is another tool that allows you to keep your Zendesk Guide content up to date with a lot less work.
It includes functionality like “Find & Replace” across your whole knowledge base — for when you change a feature name or adjust your global navigation — as well as highlighting broken links across your help center.
Improve your help center navigation
If customers report difficulties finding information or are reaching out for support on issues that could be solved with info in your help center, then you may need to reorganize the layout of your help center.
Implementing intuitive navigation and search functionality to make it easier for users to locate the information they need.
Make sure your content is organized in a way that makes sense for your customers. Here are some ways to improve navigation:
- Categorize articles in a way that makes sense. Your customers should be able to easily browse your knowledge base and find what they need. Your help center’s structure should be logical and should use the same words and terms your customers use.
- Keep information concise and clear. Shorten and split out articles. One long, comprehensive article might make sense but it can quickly become overwhelming and hard to find information.
- Format to break up content. Use headings, bullet points, images, tables, and videos to supplement the text.
Your support team can also help tell you exactly where your help center navigation needs updating. Where does the support team have to point to articles frequently that your customers may not be able to find?
Closing the feedback loop – Track usage metrics
Lastly, after your updates based on feedback are done, use analytics to track the performance of help center articles. Metrics like article views, time spent on pages, and user ratings provide valuable insights.
If an article is becoming popular, that can demonstrate the effectiveness of the article. Aim for a balance with time spent on pages.
A short time spent on an article might mean an article is too unhelpful to spend time on while a longer time might mean a customer is struggling to find the information they’re looking for.
Turn Action into Customer Satisfaction
The work to make changes based on customer feedback is an ongoing process. By analyzing feedback, prioritizing impactful changes, and iterating to improve, you can quickly enhance your products, streamline support processes, and optimize help center resources.
The goal is to create a better experience and improve the number of satisfied customers by addressing their needs and expectations. Communication and transparency are key to maintaining trust, gaining buy-in and customer loyalty when making changes.
By maintaining open communication and continuously monitoring the impact of your changes, you can not only delight your customers but create a loyal customer base.
Swifteq can help with great tools like knowledge base management and support workflow automation tools to help your support team do more with less. Request a demo today!
Tim is a Manager of Customer Support at Cars.com and a writer for Supported Content. When he’s not busy leading his team, you’ll find him spending time with his wife and two daughters, usually on some Disney-related activity. He also blogs about personal finance at Atypical Finance.
