Customer feedback is one of the most invaluable tools for any business. Knowing what your customers think and feel about you can help you shape wonderful experiences and refine your product offerings.
But customer feedback can also be challenging to leverage. To begin with, setting up mechanisms to collect feedback can be complicated; it comes from a variety of sources (surveys, support tickets, and customer interactions), and you often need a plethora of apps to gather it.
Then you need to interpret the data you’ve collected, which almost always requires either a dedicated data analyst or a data visualization app. That’s all before you can implement the insights you glean from customer feedback—a challenge unto itself because there’s usually a big disconnect between customer-facing teams that collect feedback and the product-facing teams that implement it!
Automation can make both gathering and using customer feedback much simpler. Whether you want to fix product bugs more quickly or revamp your entire offering, here are a few workflows that can make sure you’re always in tune with what your customers want!
Automate customer feedback collection and analysis
Send surveys based on relevant events and experiences
A common way to collect customer feedback is by inviting them to complete a survey. Usually, these surveys are tied to a specific event or experience, such as a customer support interaction or a retail store visit. Instead of relying on customer-facing staff to manually send survey invitations, you can use an automated workflow to deploy surveys and compile the responses.
The workflow can start with a variety of triggers; for example, you may want to send surveys after a customer support case is closed in Salesforce. This would allow you to get feedback on specific bugs or product features that might need improvement. Alternatively, you could deploy surveys on a preconfigured schedule—such as one month after a customer makes a purchase. This type of survey can help you gather feedback from new users. Whatever type of feedback you want to gather, you can customize the workflow to suit your needs!
Move results to the right place for storage and analysis
Once you actually receive customer feedback, it needs to be stored correctly before you can do anything with it. If you used an app like SurveyMonkey to solicit feedback, an automation can add the customer’s response URL to a customer field on a Salesforce case. This way, you have immediate visibility into their feedback without leaving your CRM.
Similarly, you can push survey results into a data visualization tool for easy, “big picture” analysis. There are lots of data vizualization tools to choose from, but regardless of the one you use, automation can ensure that customer feedback is seamlessly moved into the app for analysis. You never have to worry about manually entering data or performing complex analysis of the feedback you’ve gathered!
Integrate customer feedback straight into your products
Sometimes, feedback comes in through channels like customer support tickets. This type of feedback can be more difficult to work with than survey responses because it’s often qualitative and not consistently formatted.
But this feedback can also be the most valuable because it is often directly related to product issues—like bugs or glitches—that might affect other customers. To speed up issue resolution and product improvements, you can automate the customer feedback cycle and use it to refine your products right away.
An easy way to do this is by connecting your customer support ticketing app—such as ServiceNow or Zendesk—with the apps your engineers use to track product improvements (like Jira and GitHub). Every time a new ticket is created in the ticketing app, an automation can create a corresponding issue in the right engineering app. This provides instant insight into the issues customers are encountering in real-time, and it ensures that fixes or enhancements are rolled out as quickly as possible.
See It In Action: How Canada’s #1 Luxury Retailer Refines the Shopping Experience with Automated Customer Feedback
Canada’s foremost luxury department store features a wide array of designer and upscale goods, as well as a one-of-a-kind shopping experience. As a high-end department store, it isn’t just selling physical merchandise; the company prides itself on delivering excellent customer experiences.
In order to refine the shopping experience, the store asks customers to complete a survey after each visit. The survey allows each client to rate the service, expertise, and demeanor of the staff member who assisted them during their visit.
This raw survey data was difficult for the company to digest, however. To gain actionable insights from the data, they needed to move the survey results into their HR platform, Workday, so that managers could easily see how well their employees were performing, identify trends and gaps in service, and keep accurate records for legal purposes.
Using Workato, the company connected Workday with its survey app. Survey results now flow into Workday and are associated with the correct employee’s profile based on their employee identifier. Workato leverages Watson to parse the feedback and, if there’s a bad review, flag a manager via Slack so that the issue can be resolved as quickly as possible.
With these automated customer feedback workflows, the company can fine-tune its signature in-store experience based on real customers’ tastes and preferences. These workflows have also allowed the retailer to:
- Better track customer experience trends and see a complete customer 360°
- Identify employees who go above and beyond while intelligently escalating service complaints
- Push survey data into other programs and data warehouses to identify trends in other areas, like supply chain management
Read more about how they use automation to gather and implement customer feedback >
Not sure you should automate customer feedback? You have nothing to lose—except customers.
Ultimately, the customer experience should drive everything your business does. After all, if you can’t keep your customers happy, they’ll find another place to buy from. In order to give them what they want, you first have to know what they want—and what they’re struggling with.
Automating your customer feedback isn’t just helpful from a big picture perspective, however. It can reduce the workload that your support, product, and engineering teams face, and it does so by eliminating rote tasks (like data entry). It can also help those teams better track issues and trends with increased visibility, rather than forcing them to hop between apps to see whether a customer’s feedback has been addressed yet. Overall, automating the feedback cycle from collection to implementation can ensure that you deliver what you promised: great experiences from a company who always seeks to do better.
Want to learn more about how automation can enhance your support ops? Check out more solutions here >
