3 ways to use reviews to make decisions or organizational improvements

Making sure there are strong, user-friendly customer feedback channels in place can help brands create loyal customers, attract new leads and solve organizational problems.

Simply receiving customer feedback means nothing if you don’t analyze and act on the customer insights you receive. Empowering customers to speak up is great, but really listening to them and making positive changes based on their feedback is what sets the most successful companies apart. Enter the art of the well-oiled customer feedback loop.

What exactly is a customer feedback loop?

According to one study, 89% of consumers have stopped doing business with a company after experiencing poor customer service, but 67% of churn is avoidable if a customer’s problem is solved in their first interaction with customer service.

A customer feedback loop allows you to receive and address these concerns head-on, making the changes necessary to salvage existing customer relationships and build stronger one’s in the future.

There is not textbook definition for the exact steps of a successful feedback loop, and you can see laid out differently all across the Internet. In the end, it takes some finessing and personalization for each brand to get a system in place that works for them, but essentially, it all boils down to these things:

1. Listen. Create a clear-cut and simple platform for your users to share their feedback with you. This could be through customer surveys, social listening, or a review collection service, like those offered to ConsumerAffairs partnered brands.
2. Learn. Whatever your method, getting your hands — or, er, eyes — on as much raw customer feedback as possible is going to go a long way in helping you analyze your greatest wins as well as your greatest opportunities for growth. Look for common threads in the feedback. Are most issues tied back to the same facet in the customer experience? If so, you can identify this as an area that calls for some deeper organizational improvement. If your customer responses are more varied, reaching out privately on an individual basis to get more information from each customer will help you get to the heart of the problem.
3. Act. Once you’ve heard from your customers, and have analyzed what areas of your product or service may need a little TLC the crucial final step is to act on the information you’ve uncovered — make those changes, and let your customers know they were heard.

Take ConsumerAffairs accredited brand Easy Rest Sleep Systems, who through review collection discovered a breakdown with a delivery team was causing customer dissatisfaction. They were able to use the reviews as proof that company policy was not being followed, and re-staffed the department for greater success.

Using reviews as a data source for important organizational decisions can be a huge asset, and remains a largely overlooked one for many brands. Sitting down and fine-tuning that customer feedback loop can put you on a great track for greater (and trackable!) success for years to come.