In a world overflowing with customer feedback, from Amazon reviews to tweets on Twitter (now X), understanding this data is crucial for any business aiming to excel. But how do you sift through the noise and turn these insights into real business growth? This article will reveal how customer feedback analysis can unlock hidden opportunities, refine your offerings, and give you a competitive edge. Ready to discover the power behind what your customers are really saying? Keep reading to learn how to transform feedback into actionable strategies that can elevate your brand.
What is Customer Feedback Analysis and Its Process?
Customer feedback analysis is a strategic process used to systematically collect, evaluate, and interpret feedback provided by customers about a company's products, services, or overall experience. This process involves 3 key steps.
3 Steps for the Customer Feedback Analysis Process
- Collect Customer Feedback - Gather honest, unfiltered feedback from diverse touchpoints across the customer journey.
- Analyze Feedback & Transform into Insights - Use AI-powered tools like Chattermill to analyze feedback data at scale.
- Act on Insights - Determine the best course of action based on the insights gained.
The methods of analysis can vary based on the feedback’s source and volume. For instance, handling and analyzing thousands of support emails manually can be impractical. Instead, automated tools and AI-driven solutions, like those offered by Chattermill, can process large volumes of feedback efficiently, extracting meaningful insights from complex data sets. This enables businesses to stay responsive to customer needs, enhance satisfaction, and maintain a competitive edge.
3 Problems with Customer Feedback Analysis and their Solutions
1. Feedback from Multiple Channels
Handling feedback from various sources can be overwhelming. Using customer feedback tools like Chattermill, which integrates feedback from multiple channels, can streamline this process. We want to automate the process – incorporating AI and machine learning – so our clients can analyze all this feedback at scale.
2. Interpreting and Categorizing Feedback
Gathering feedback from a vast range of customers across a massive number of touchpoints is already pretty complicated.
If we consider, too, the nuances and quirks of language (or languages for international brands), we can start to see how difficult it is to analyze feedback. That’s before we consider spelling mistakes, regional and demographic variations.
For the feedback to be useful, it needs to be actionable by your teams. If you export and collect all the data into one place (like an Excel sheet), it’s much more manageable to interpret. The next level is an AI-powered analysis tool like Chattermill with its ability to interpret and categorize feedback at scale.
3. Feedback Quality Varies
Feedback can range from insightful to non-informative. Analyzing the sentiment behind the feedback helps determine if the overall feedback is positive or negative. Also, customers might be more (or less) honest depending on what channel they are leaving their feedback. The solution is to employ sentiment analysis tools to quickly identify the tone of the feedback. By analyzing the language used, these tools can categorize feedback as positive, negative, or neutral. This is particularly useful for large volumes of data, allowing businesses to prioritize which feedback to address first based on sentiment trends.
6 Benefits of Customer Feedback Analysis
1. Understand Your Customers on a Deeper Level
Feedback provides a comprehensive understanding of customer thoughts and feelings, complementing data analytics like website traffic and conversions.
The hard numbers we find when we look at website data analytics – such as traffic, referrals, and conversions – can give us some insight into what consumers want and their experiences.
But it is only part of the story.
Here at Chattermill, we want to help brands get the single source of customer truth. And to do that, we need to unify customer feedback with other available data, this is known as unified customer intelligence.
2. Identify Friction Points in the Customer Journey
Feedback helps identify and resolve issues that cause customer dissatisfaction, improving the overall customer experience (CX).
Brands have come a long way in giving customers many options to engage with and buy from them. But friction is still an issue. It costs UK eCommerce businesses around £36bn a year.
For Daryl Wilkes at Asos, customer feedback analysis from contacts is vital to understanding where those friction points are.
‘Customers get in contact because something has either gone wrong or something has not gone how they expected it to play out. It’s about understanding those contacts but understanding the sentiment behind those contacts, matching up the contact reasons with the feedback that you get from your customers so the richness of that feedback is really strong.’
From there, Wilkes and his team are in an excellent position to resolve the issue for the individual who has made that contact and get to the root cause of the friction so other customers won’t be affected by it in the future.
3. Enhance CX to Improve Customer Loyalty
Understanding and addressing customer feedback is crucial for nurturing customer relationships and promoting loyalty.
Today's fundamental difficulty for brands is that customers are less loyal than ever.
A massive 92% of global consumers do not consider themselves brand loyal.
The opportunity here is that the probability of selling to an existing customer is around 60-70% compared to just 5-20% for a new acquisition.
In short, it is well worth building brand loyalty – and a customer experience that frequently delights those who buy your products or use your services will most likely keep them returning.
4. Improve Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Exceptional CX can turn customers into brand advocates, improving your NPS and overall customer satisfaction.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) helps brands determine customer satisfaction and what proportion of customers are likely to shout about their experience to their friends and family positively.
Customer feedback can help you understand your own NPS. You can get to the bottom of why your promoters are so keen to promote your brand. And it can steer you towards nurturing this to help improve NPS and CX going forward.
5. Better Products and Services
When we think about CX, we think about the experiences your customers have up to purchasing a product or service.
Of course, we know that CX includes much more than that today. How satisfied is an individual once they’ve got the product home? How do they feel returning to the service long after paying for it?
Feedback analysis is fantastic for discovering how customers feel about your products and services. Keyword or aspect analysis, in particular, can help you identify the pain points here – ensuring customers are supported should any issues arise. It also helps product teams with prioritizing feature requests and new product development.
6. Drive Business Growth
This is the ultimate benefit.
We at Chattermill want to help businesses scale up.
A proper automated feedback analytics program can keep new and returning customers happy – growing sales, growing purchase frequency, and raising your proportion of seriously impressed customers.
9 Ways to Collect Customer Feedback
1. CES Surveys
Customer effort score surveys are based around the simple question, “how easy was it...” to complete a specific action. That could be to interact with a website, use a product or similar. Users feedback with a rating that’s usually between 0 and 10. This provides insightful quantitative data to work with.
2. NPS Surveys
NPS surveys (Net Promoter Score) ask your customers the straightforward question: “How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend on a score of 0-10?”
Detractors are customers who responded in the 0-6 range, Passives are customers who responded in the 7-8 range, and Promoters are customers who responded in the 9-10 range.
It is then possible to work out overall customer satisfaction and an overall NPS score for your brand.
3. CSAT Surveys
Another type of customer satisfaction survey is the CSAT which asks the question: “How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the [goods/service] you received?”
Respondents will rate your goods and services 1 through 5 (with 1 being very unsatisfied etc.), and from there, brands can judge the proportion of their customers who are most likely to return.
4. Social Media Mention
Customer feedback analysis can also include social media mentions – crawling through thousands of posts across Facebook, X, Instagram, etc., to get a measure of customer engagement and sentiment around your brand’s CX.
Social media mentions may be more difficult to analyse manually, but they can be an excellent barometer for perceptions about your brand, products, and services.
5. Emails and SMS
Surveys sent to your database audience via email or SMS can be very targeted, going only to those you select as appropriate. For the audience, they can answer it when they choose. They’re often used to follow up on a purchase or interaction.
6. Live Chats
On your website, you can host a chatbot to gather real time feedback from users. You chat app can ask if the webpage was helpful and if they found what they needed. This feedback on usability can inform new features and product development.
7. Feedback Forms
These forms are always present on your website, providing a constant way for customers to share piece of feedback. It’s a useful source of qualitative data to interpret.
8. Support Call Transcripts
Those who don’t want to leave feedback online tend to call your customer support team. These types of customer share their insights and views of their user experience, providing indispensable actionable insights.
9. Public Reviews
According to Brightlocal, 72% of Americans have written online reviews for a small business.
There is a lot of content written on review sites. Customer feedback analysis helps you understand what users say about your brand – giving you insight into sentiment about your products and services and helping you drill down into what part of your experience customers love and needs improvement.
How to Analyze Customer Feedback and Take Action on It
Analyze NPS Responses to Understand What Drives Loyalty and Churn
Getting an overall NPS score for your business is great. You can see how many of your customers are promoters, how many are passive, and how many are detractors. You can also see how you compare to your industry average.
Analyzing NPS responses helps you understand why customers fall into the above groups.
Are most of your promoters mentioning the product, for instance? Are your detractors referring to delivery problems?
NPS analysis helps you understand what is driving brand evangelism and, on the other hand, brand churn.
Segment Customers by NPS Scores and Feedback
Together, NPS scores and customer feedback are helpful in helping you segment your customers.
You may want to reward your evangelists with special deals and coupons. You may want to invest more time and effort to win back a proportion of your detractors.
Customer segmentation is crucial for shaping strategy and maximizing your resources.
Use an NLP Tool to Conduct a Qualitative Feedback Data Analysis
Natural Language Processing (NLP) brings together linguistics and AI.
We know that language is very complex. But when it comes to feedback analysis, an NLP tool can help us identify and tag feedback to automate – and speed up – the process of transforming qualitative free text into actionable insights.
Act on Feedback & Implement Solutions
This is the most important part of feedback analysis: getting the *voice of the customer into the business* and using it to make a difference.
Who within your organization is best placed to take the insight you have found in the feedback and act on it?
Perhaps your web developers need to redesign a part of your website. Or maybe your customer service team needs to reach out to specific customer groups individually.
Whatever needs to be done, the fact is that the actual value of feedback analysis can only be fully realized when those who need it have access to the insight you have found and then have the means to make the necessary changes in the real world.
Customer Feedback Analysis Case Study: Goodiebox
Every month, Goodiebox receives a high volume of support tickets and customer feedback data, in multiple different languages. Manually tagging all of these support conversations was time-intensive and impossible to scale. Goodiebox agents had to tag support conversations manually one by one, on top of making sure they also categorised all other relevant information.
Using Chattermill tools to automate tagging, Goodiebox quickly identified the root cause behind product issues and knew exactly how many members were affected by it.
By leveraging Chattermill’s solutions, Goodiebox is now able to automatically analyse the topics of incoming support conversations and be able to help members by delivering these insights to the corresponding teams instantaneously.
How to Analyze Customer Feedback Manually
For small-scale feedback analysis, manually collecting and analyzing data can be effective. Use tools like Excel to collate and analyze the data.
Customer feedback analysis is a time-consuming and subjective when done manually. Consequently, it’s really only advisable for small scale feedback analysis by one person.
- Select your methods of feedback. Don’t try to use them all. Select the most appropriate, be that social media, customer surveys, reviews or support call conversations.
- Create a single source of truth. Collate all of your data in one place - an Excel spreadsheet is ideal. Collect the same data on each piece of feedback and create a complete dataset. Then you can use it to get a meaningful result.
How to Choose Smart Tools to Automate Feedback Analysis
Manual analysis of customer feedback can be time-consuming and inefficient. Instead, leverage smart tools designed to streamline the process and provide deeper insights. When choosing a tool, consider the following factors:
- Data Sources - Identify what you want to analyze, such as survey responses, NPS, or social media mentions. Some tools specialize in specific data types, while others can integrate multiple sources for a comprehensive view.
- Depth of Insights - Determine the level of detail you need. Some tools offer granular insights, providing in-depth analysis, while others may only offer surface-level information.
- Usage and Reporting - Consider how you will use the analysis. Do you need quick reports, or do your teams require continuous updates via dashboards with specific datasets and metrics?
- Data Integration and Visualization - Ensure the tool can integrate with your existing systems (like CRM or analytics platforms) and offers robust data visualization capabilities for clear and actionable insights.
Top 3 Tools to Simplify Customer Feedback Analysis
Chattermill
Chattermill uses AI to analyze customer feedback at scale, delivering actionable intelligence on your products, operations, and customer experience. It integrates seamlessly with various tools and channels, providing a unified view of customer insights. Discover more
IBM Watson
Specializing in sentiment analysis through natural language processing (NLP), IBM Watson focuses on understanding customer satisfaction from surveys and support tickets. This tool is ideal for extracting nuanced insights from large volumes of text. Learn more
Survey Monkey
Beyond building forms and surveys, Survey Monkey offers comprehensive data analysis features. It helps collect feedback and benchmark metrics like CSAT, NPS®, and CES. The platform transforms this data into actionable insights, making it easier to enhance customer experiences. Find out more
By selecting the right tool, you can efficiently analyze customer feedback, gain valuable insights, and drive strategic decisions to improve your business outcomes.
Conclusion
Listening to and acting on customer feedback is crucial for business success. By leveraging smart tools and data-driven decision-making, you can make meaningful improvements to your products, services, and customer experience.
