Blog Article

How to Improve Your Customer Feedback Loop With Automation

Abhinav Girdhar
By Abhinav Girdhar | Last Updated on April 23rd, 2024 12:53 pm | 5-min read

Positive customer experience is the need of the hour. In fact, as per a recent survey, 86% of the customers are willing to pay extra for a better experience. Before you can do anything about the customer experience, it is essential to understand the importance of customer feedback and put a robust customer feedback strategy in place. Automation plays a vital role in establishing and maintaining an efficient customer feedback loop. Appy Pie Connect recognizes this as an opportunity to help businesses add efficiency to their customer feedback loops.*


Table of Contents

Introduction

You need customers, and your customers are looking for you. So how do you make sure that their experience with you is so good that they keep coming back for more? Why don’t you just ask? Yes, it can be that simple. Just ask your customers how they are enjoying their experience with you. More precisely, we are talking here about putting a robust customer feedback strategy in place so that you are better prepared to create and maintain an efficient customer feedback loop. Take a look at the infographic below and learn more about customer feedback loops and the impact of automation on them.

Why customer feedback is important

The success or failure of your business depends on how happy your customers are with the offerings and service. Customer is the King, after all! As a business owner, what are you doing to ensure that you are aware of your customers’ needs and expectations? However, most companies ask the customers for their feedback only after the sale is complete. While it is great when you are looking for feedback on product improvement, there is still the question of addressing and solving the right problems faced by your existing customers and prospects. Instead of guessing your way through this challenge, it is a good idea to go and talk to the customers and ask them for detailed feedback! Customer feedback can give you access to massive amounts of valuable customer data and come up with new product ideas, processes, and strategies, thus improving a business’s overall functioning. The most effective way to get genuine feedback from your customers is by setting a customer feedback loop. Now, it is natural for businesses with a restricted budget to doubt the efficacy of the process, but automation with Appy Pie Connect can help you get through without much of a hassle.

What is a customer feedback loop?

A customer feedback loop is a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy put in place for continuous improvement of your products and services through user reviews, opinions, recommendations, or suggestions. This feedback loop can only be created when there is a two-way interaction between the customers and the businesses. The customer feedback loop can be broken down into four steps or phases, often referred to as the A.C.A.F. customer feedback loop. Let’s discuss.
  1. Collect information (Ask)
    2. The first phase or step of the customer feedback loop is collecting the feedback. There are multiple ways to collect user feedback, e.g., survey tools, online review platforms, live chat, call data, social media platforms, etc. Irrespective of which tools you choose for your customer feedback process, the basic idea is to collect genuine answers from your customers.
  2. Data analysis (Categorize)
    3. In the first phase, you would have collected a large amount of data from the customer feedback you collected in the first phase of your feedback loop. It is impossible to go through copious amounts of data without a scalable system for categorizing the input and conducting a detailed customer feedback analysis. Failing to come up with a proper categorization system would have you scrolling through an endless spreadsheet of figures that make little sense. As you start categorizing and analyzing the data, you would see some patterns emerge. In the reviews or feedback from dissatisfied customers, you would see some common pain points and similar issues that cause frustration. It will be the same for the positive feedback, as you would see similar aspects that seem to delight your customers. If you see that the problem areas are primarily technical, get your development team to look into it. However, if there are usability issues, let your product team take over. And, if you see concerns about onboarding, your customer success team should get involved. The idea is to get the feedback loop turning! This process ensures that your customers are at the focus of product development, content creation, and process implementation instead of being an afterthought.
  3. Application & testing (Act)
    4. Now that you have some actionable insights at your hand, you must prepare to implement them and test them out. You may even run some A/B tests to collect data and feedback on both versions. Finally, your new version must be the winning version. If it does not, you will have to regroup and brainstorm again to come up with a better solution. You can also send your new updates to those customers who actively gave you recommendations and suggestions. Ask them for additional feedback, and you may get deeper insights and make further improvements.
  4. Talk to the respondents (Follow up)
    5. It’s time to close the loop by following up with the customers. If a customer has taken the time to send you feedback, you must acknowledge their effort. Irrespective of the issue they had, let them know of the impact of their feedback. Thank them for their feedback and help in improving the product. Let them know of your actions and their impact on the performance or efficiency of your product. You can approach the customers who gave you negative feedback and apprise them of the changes you made. Also, ask them whether they are open to change their review to positive after the changes. Similarly, you can also reach out to those people who gave you positive feedback and ask them whether they would be willing to write a testimonial for your home page!
This feedback customer loop does sound like a time-intensive process and leaves you second-guessing it. This is where automation can help you save time and resources by a considerable margin.

How to improve customer feedback loop with automation

Automation has brought about efficiency in how we operate while lowering the time and money requirements. Eventually, automation makes it possible for businesses of varying sizes and scales to compete on a level playing field.
  1. Use leads to get insights
    2. The single most important aspect of your business growth strategy is - lead generation. Once you have managed to capture some leads, it is time to go to work! Ask your leads what brought them to your business. Ask this question even if they do not convert. It can help you get some very valuable insights. Their answers can help you identify trends or emerging patterns, even opportunities. For example, if you see that the leads coming in through a specific landing page appear confused about your offerings, give your marketing division a heads up, or see a gap or mismatch in expectations, figure out how to resolve it! Whether you are generating or capturing leads through forms, emails, ads, or any other creative way, you must ask them what brought them to your business and what they expect from the product or service. This feedback must be collected in one central place through intelligent automation like the ones mentioned below.Connect Hubspot and Google Sheets so that every new form submission on HubSpot creates a new row on a specific Google Sheets spreadsheet. Connect Trello and Typeform so that whenever a new entry is submitted on Typeform, a corresponding record is created on Trello.
  2. Greeting new users
    3. A new customer you have acquired needs to be nurtured, and you must onboard them to your platform through a series of meaningful emails. A warm onboarding email drip not only makes them more familiar with the product but also makes them feel valued. Additionally, you can use this email campaign to ask the customers for their feedback through NPS or CSAT surveys or even reviews and testimonials.Connect Stripe and ActiveCampaign to add new Stripe customers to ActiveCampaign as new contacts.
  3. Increase customer engagement
    4. Another interesting way to gain valuable feedback from customers is through communities. Now when I say communities, I do not mean just the forums. It could be your social media followers, email subscribers, or any other community you are engaged with. Connect Patreon and MailChimp to add new Patreon patrons to MailChimp lists.
  4. Talk to ex-customers
    5. The customers who chose not to buy or those who decided to leave you are important for garnering genuine feedback. Reach out to the customers who left you and ask them what made them leave. These insights are especially useful as this information can be used to invite them back to your platform or prevent more people from leaving for the same reason. Send out a feedback survey and find out how you can make people stay!Connect Shopify and Gmail to send Gmail emails with new canceled orders in Shopify
  5. Internal customer feedback management
    6. When you establish a customer feedback loop, you will naturally get a massive bulk of data coming your way. It is important to manage all the feedback you receive in a cohesive, organized way so that it can be accessed and used in a constructive manner. Doing all this manually will bring about challenges like human errors, a need for additional resources, and more. Connect Slack and Google Sheets to add Slack messages to a specific Google Sheets spreadsheet
Now that you know the role of automation in your customer feedback loop, it is time to go and explore many such more unique and innovative ways in which you can improve your customer feedback loop.

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Abhinav Girdhar

Founder and CEO of Appy Pie

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