Mastering Customer Feedback: 7 strategies for enhancing customer satisfaction

Read time 4 mins

Customer feedback is an essential element of customer retention. It helps you understand customer needs and expectations and tells you what they value most about your business. It also alerts you to issues and common problems customers encounter.

Responding to feedback, either by resolving issues or thanking customers for their input, shows that you value their opinions. This builds trust, and customers who feel valued and heard are much more likely to stick around. Satisfied customers are also more likely to refer your brand to others, providing you with opportunities to attract and retain more customers. 

The Strategies You Need for Success 

So what strategies can you use to gather, understand and action customer feedback? Here are our top 7 recommendations for boosting customer retention.

Build Feedback Mechanisms into Everything You Do

Your customers interact with your brand through several channels. It's crucial that you provide avenues for feedback on as many of those channels as possible.

• Online Surveys: You can use online survey tools like Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, or Typeform to collect feedback from customers. Create a set of questions that gauge customer satisfaction and allow for comments and suggestions. These surveys can be sent via email, shared on social media, or a pop-up on your website after the customer's journey is complete.

• Feedback Forms: These are similar to online surveys but are often more specific and focused on a single activity or interaction. For instance, after a customer calls your customer service centre, you could send them a feedback form asking about their experience.

• Social Media: When using social media for feedback, post open-ended questions, polls, or just monitor comments and messages. Encourage users to express themselves. Remember to regularly check these platforms and interact with your customers, answering questions and addressing concerns when necessary.

Use Data to Power Your Strategy

Once you’re collecting lots of feedback from a variety of touchpoints, you can start to see patterns and trends in the data. Instead of dealing with comments on an ad-hoc basis, you can quantify the results of surveys and feedback. Data analysis tools can help you process and organise feedback, allowing you to more quickly and efficiently put these insights into practice. 

Use Sentiment Analysis

Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and similar satisfaction measurements consolidate feedback into an easily understood metric that shows you how well you’re serving your customers. 

But a static metric alone won’t improve your satisfaction scores. For that, you need to interpret the feedback you’re getting with sentiment analysis. Instead of simply collecting NPS scores, use sentiment analysis to understand what’s motivating your customers to give high or low scores, and what you can do to boost these scores. 

Close the Feedback Loop

Follow up on feedback received, especially when a change has been made as a result of it. This lets the customers know their feedback was listened to and leads to a higher overall customer satisfaction. Doing this consistently means incorporating feedback into the customer journey and developing internal processes that allow you to prioritise issues based on their potential impact on your business.

Create a Community Around Your Brand

Bringing your customers into an organised community or even creating a customer-led advisory board lets you tap into a wealth of direct feedback.

The communities you create can be online forums, social media groups, or scheduled in-person meetups. They’re places where customers can engage in discussions, share their experiences and provide constructive feedback about your products or services. These honest insights from real users can inform important business decisions, from developing new features to enhancing the customer experience and even launching new product lines.

Advisory boards go a step further, composed typically of VIP customers or highly engaged fans of your brand.  They’re a great place for real-world testing and early adoption of new features. 

It's important to be actively involved in these discussions: addressing concerns, showing appreciation for contributions, and implementing suggestions wherever possible. This back-and-forth conversation builds trust and demonstrates your customer-centric ethos.

Encourage Positive Feedback by Putting Customers First

Make it easy for happy customers to share their experiences. Encourage customers to leave reviews or testimonials, or share positive experiences with others. Every piece of positive feedback can serve as a powerful advocacy on behalf of your brand.

However, you can’t wish positive feedback into existence. Consistent positive feedback is the result of an outstanding customer experience. To make your feedback really work for you, don’t just use insights to fix things that go wrong, analyse the great feedback you receive for opportunities to strengthen your CX even further. With a little care and attention, a positive customer interaction can turn into a moment of genuine delight. 

Leverage Technology

Having the right technology in place can be the difference between a mediocre feedback strategy and one that adds real value and strengthens retention. 

Mention Me’s Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform is a powerful tool that allows you to gather valuable data from your customers and gain greater insights into how they feel about your brand. It provides a comprehensive repository of customer feedback, creating a 360-degree view of your customer's sentiments and automates the crucial tasks of collecting, tracking, and analysing feedback across various touchpoints of the customer journey.

Get data-driven insights that empower you to make strategic improvements to your product, services, or customer experience based on precise customer sentiments and needs.

If you want to know more about how an advocacy marketing strategy can benefit your retention efforts, request a free demo today.