💡How much and to what extent should customer feedback be incorporated into products or services?

This is a crucial question not only for customer-facing departments such as Customer Experience, Customer Support, Sales, and Customer Success teams, which are closest to hearing the voice of customers, but also for cross-functional teams like Product and Operations that use this customer feedback to improve products or services.

In this article, I aim to delve into the concept of "Prioritizing customer feedback" by sharing insights gained from various teams that efficiently manage and analyze Customer Feedback to effectively incorporate it into products or services.

Challenges of Prioritizing customer feedback: Three Key Reasons

When we hear various negative customer feedback like "I won't use this product without this feature," "I'll leave if this feature is missing," or "It's too slow to use," we tend to think that addressing these concerns would enhance customer satisfaction and prevent them from leaving.

In reality, we witness cases where customers do leave due to such reasons. 

Normally, teams engaging directly with customers, such as Sales, CX representatives, etc., convey this feedback internally and raise the issues.

However, within the organization, due to lack of hands-on communication with customers, these issues might not be taken seriously, or they might get overshadowed by numerous other issues. Consequently, the degree to which Sales and CX professionals raise these issues can result in poor decision-making, whether certain customer feedback gets incorporated or not.

In some cases, customer feedback might not be incorporated at all, and products that customers do not actually need might even be developed.

These issues can be categorized into three main reasons:

#1 Lack of Consistent Consolidation of Customer Feedback

Customers provide feedback through various channels such as chat, phone calls, sales meetings, and emails. Without establishing a pipeline to consistently gather and organize this customer feedback data in one place, there's a risk of:

1.Missing out on some customer feedback

2.Unable to quantitatively assess customer issues, making it challenging to make decisions based on customer feedback data.

Only the individuals directly handling customer interactions truly understand the context and, based on whether issues are raised, can guide the internal review process. From the standpoint of product teams, designers, developers, etc., who haven't directly heard the voice of customers, it becomes difficult to judge the importance of specific customer feedback without clear criteria and evidence.

#2 Lack of Alignment with Company Goals

When faced with conflicting customer opinions, questions arise: Which customer feedback should be incorporated? What should be done when internal opinions differ from customer feedback? How should you prioritize when there are numerous customer issues?

Quantifying customer issues solely based on the number of inquiries makes decisions difficult. Most businesses operate using revenue-related metrics (MRR, ARR) or leading indicators (NPS), so quantifying customer issues from these perspectives is crucial. Furthermore, customer feedback analysis results need to align with the company's strategic direction and target customer segments for specific periods.

However, tracking and obtaining customer data constantly to determine the impact of customer issues on revenue or business becomes challenging, leading to the omission of this essential step.

#3 Lack of Acknowledgment of the Importance of Customer Feedback

If internal stakeholders, especially decision-makers, do not empathize with the importance of customer feedback, even when customer feedback analysis results are linked to key company metrics, they might not be well-received. In such cases, vital business opportunities could be missed.

Unless a company possesses technological superiority or differentiation, customer management and incorporating customer feedback become even more critical. Thus, there is a need to lead the organization in creating a feedback loop experience based on accumulated instances of customer feedback incorporation.

Guidelines for Setting customer feedback Priorities

After exploring why setting customer feedback priorities is challenging, how can companies efficiently and effectively operate based on customer feedback analysis? Let's share how companies are doing this using Syncly, addressing the aforementioned issues.

#1 Building a Customer Feedback Database

Consolidate customer feedback from various sources into one place.

As businesses grow, the volume of inquiries increases proportionally. It becomes crucial to consolidate customer feedback from various channels into a single, consistent location. This should be achieved using a system that allows you to create an archival pipeline where customer feedback from tools like chat platforms, ticket management systems, etc., is automatically archived. This eliminates the need for manual export and copy-paste operations and creates a pipeline for collecting customer feedback.

Syncly solution offers integration with various customer feedback channels, creating an automatic archival system. By setting up rules for tagging and labeling based on existing tags, or even using AI to analyze and summarize key topics and issues, companies can significantly reduce the effort and time spent by CX managers.

2. Systematizing with Auto-Categorization

Categorize customer feedback to identify recurring customer issues.

Customer feedback data consists of qualitative and quantitative data. While surveys can be controlled to be quantitative due to limited choices, feedback received through conversations (chat, calls, meetings) or open-ended surveys is challenging to use as-is. Quantifying qualitative data is crucial to easily understand numerous customer feedback instances.

Tagging and labeling each customer feedback entry manually, or using AI for automated tagging/labeling and summarization, are possible methods. Regardless of the method, preserving the original qualitative data is essential. This allows anyone to understand the context and requirements easily.

3. Measuring Customer Feedback Impact

Calculate customer feedback impact aligned with company goals.

Measuring impact is crucial when prioritizing tasks, and the ICE (Impact, Confidence, Effort) evaluation model is well-known. Let's focus on calculating the "Impact." This refers to the extent of influence a task has on the business. Impact calculation can vary between companies and is generally calculated based on revenue.

Segment your customers based on whether they generate revenue or not. Further segment based on factors like plan type, membership level, etc. Calculate the impact by analyzing customer feedback from the most important customer segments. This provides insights into customer feedback's effect on revenue.

Customer feedback impact measurement can be tailored by utilizing various customer metadata, especially when targeting specific customer segments for business expansion. For example, dividing customers into segments like enterprise, small business, startup, you can prioritize segments based on the potential impact of addressing their issues.

Syncly solution not only provides metrics like customer feedback count but also negative sentiment and revenue impact. With features allowing you to explore the distribution of each task among customer segments and see customer profiles, qualitative data can also aid in decision-making.

By considering impact and internal resources, companies can prioritize customer feedback tasks, ultimately creating a systematic process for customer-oriented improvements.

After Setting customer feedback Priorities

Once customer feedback priorities are established, it's important to execute improvements based on them and inform customers of the changes.

Prioritizing customer feedback is essential to identify tasks with the most impact and address them first. After prioritization, executing these tasks is crucial. Assign the most suitable individuals or teams to handle them. After improvements, inform customers of the changes and create a feedback loop where their responses contribute to further improvements. Over time, this customer-driven approach can contribute significantly to business growth.

To learn more about analyzing and prioritizing customer feedback using Syncly, you can request a demo session for a two-week free trial and product introduction. We're here to help you create success stories in customer-led growth. 🙂