Customer feedback: How to collect and use it for strategic benefit
By Fawn Fitter
Customer feedback offers one of the best ways to spot untapped markets, common problems, and opportunities for new products and services. However, feedback tends to arrive through many channels, and in many forms. Without a process and tools to gather and manage it, you cannot transform it into real insight for your strategy team and sales staff. This article outlines four steps to help you collect customer feedback so that you can act on it.
In Summary:
| • | To gather and analyze customer feedback, deploy third-party applications or create solutions using technology you already have. |
| • | The most efficient, cost-effective way to collect and manage feedback is to categorize and structure it as it arrives. |
| • | Portal and collaboration tools offer user-friendly ways for employees to view and report on customer feedback. |
Everyone wants to make better use of customer feedback. But the problem is that companies rarely have the systematic processes or the right tools to manage and analyze it. Most customer feedback is unstructured and decentralized — which makes it almost useless, says Suresh Vittal, a Boston-based senior analyst for Forrester Research.
"It is hard to make a successful business case to hire people to prepare old data to populate a new tool," Vittal explains. "It makes more sense to create a process to categorize and structure data as you receive it."
Step 1: Start with a clean slate
To manage customer feedback well, you must make the information quantifiable, says Sam Dharmasiri, general manager of ePartners International, a London-based Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in Microsoft Dynamics products. Provide your customers with user-friendly tools, such as feedback forms on your Web site that automatically return their comments in a structured form.
Ask your business strategists for metrics to guide which customer interactions to capture, Vittal suggests. For example, your company may want to track complaints about a specific product based on the reason for and the date of the complaint. (If you absolutely must save old customer feedback records, you can use these metrics to determine which customer interactions to prepare for storage in a central database.) Next, find the most likely sources of that feedback going forward — for example, for complaints, focus on your Web site and call center. Only then are you ready to evaluate tools.
Step 2: Choose tools that lead to structure
According to a December 2006 JupiterResearch study on customer feedback management, the most popular way to gather feedback is to use a Web-based survey. Surveys can be tailored to fit any potential business decision, and they generate data that is easy to tabulate and import into any analytical reporting tool, says study co-author Zachary McGeary, an associate analyst at JupiterResearch's New York City office. For example, you may ask customers to rate various parts of their transaction on a scale of 1 to 5, and then analyze the aggregate results.
Many third-party vendors offer customer feedback management applications that create and report on surveys. Or you can build your own online surveys with basic Web tools and feed the results into your customer relationship management (CRM) database.
Whichever you choose, Dharmasiri suggests selecting applications built on Microsoft .NET technology, which will allow for easier integration with your CRM and business applications. You may even tie the feedback management applications to your call center by asking operators to access the survey themselves and record customer answers.
You can build other feedback tools and processes in-house as well, says Ian Mapp, head of project management at Respond Group Ltd., in Milton Keynes, U.K., a provider of customer service software based on Microsoft technology.
Without any additional customization, you can spot and analyze patterns in customer e-mail using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007:
| • | Use filters to search incoming e-mail for keywords such as product names or the word "complaint" in order to direct messages to the appropriate customer support employee. You can do this in just a few clicks by creating a new rule for incoming e-mail, with the Rules and Alerts command in the Tools menu in Outlook. |
| • | Create templates for faster, more uniform responses to common customer comments, such as service requests or returns. Follow these simple steps to create a template in Outlook 2003, or these steps for Outlook 2007. By tracking these templates and their use, you can obtain hard data on how often certain issues occur, how long it takes your company to respond to them, and whether the responses you give are enough to resolve them. |
| • | Save all messages as Microsoft Office Word files and assign them "smart tags" (such as the product name, the name of the customer service representative who handled the issue, the type of feedback, and the date of resolution) so that they can be stored in a structured database. Learn more here about how to create and use smart tags with the 2007 Microsoft Office system. |
Step 3: Look for patterns
After you develop processes to gather and store customer feedback, you need a way to analyze and report on it. Consider these ideas:
| • | Import the results of your own or third-party online survey applications into your CRM solution using XML Web services, advises Roger Strain, a partner at Liquid Thought, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner based in Cape Town, South Africa. Your people can then view both aggregated and individual results from within the CRM system using a convenient Web interface (this functionality is available in Microsoft Dynamics CRM). |
| • | Deliver critical customer service information at a glance with dashboards based on the key performance indicator (KPI) functionality in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Nick Stillings, a Microsoft information worker specialist, has created a demo in which a Web form for a customer satisfaction survey populates a SharePoint List. The SharePoint List in turn drives a KPI applet that averages the satisfaction rate of all the surveys in real time and displays the results — in green numerals if it is above a certain level, in red if it dips below. The KPI feature is designed to be easy to use, even for people with no database expertise, Stillings notes. |
| • | Use the Business Data Connection (BDC) Libraries and Web Parts included in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to let users poll data from another source, such as an e-commerce database or the results of a third-party survey application, and present it on a SharePoint Web page. The BDC does not import the data, so there is no risk of incompatibility or redundant records, Stillings says. |
Step 4: Start to gather feedback internally
Finally, share the results of your efforts across your business, and ask employees how they think the company should act on them. An internal wiki or blog provides a collaborative environment where people in every department can view an analysis of customer feedback, make comments, and discuss possible next steps. In this way, you can capture strategy as it evolves and adjust your ongoing pursuit of customer feedback accordingly.
After that, the next step is simply to repeat the process. "If you want continuous improvement," McGeary says, "you need continuous feedback."
Fawn Fitter is a freelance writer in San Francisco, specializing in business and technology. A frequent contributor to Microsoft.com, she also has written for Fortune Small Business, Knowledge Management, and other publications.
