What is a Feedback Management System?

Customers want to be heard and businesses that are offering partnership and expressing to their customers that “We are listening” are showing positive results in boosting revenue, improving brand reputation and growing customer lifetime value and loyalty.

Customer feedback is a powerful source for identifying opportunities for improvement and innovation. It informs new strategies and roadmaps. It identifies features and enhancements that will have immediate impact on customer satisfaction.

Customer feedback helps solve important questions:

• Are customers getting the value they hoped for?
• Will they renew?
• What product enhancements can be made?
• What additional products and services could help?
• Are processes working well?

How does it work?

The flow of feedback can come from many different channels. Some sources such as online surveys, CRM notes and Customer Support tracking have well documented and established workflows. However other sources are less structured such as notes from a conversation at an event or an email communication to an account representative or even a casual conversation over lunch with decision makers.

These notes are often lost over time. Until that fateful day when the customer reaches out to inquire about progress. More often than not there is no accurate tracking on this progress which leaves the customer with the perception that their voice is not heard and their input is not appreciated. This will result in a negative impact on customer satisfaction.

As we begin to capture this feedback, certain challenges become apparent.

• How do we manage and track this data?
• How do we prioritize the requests?
• How do we track the progress of the request?
• How can we automate these workflows with AI and machine learning?

Solving for these challenges requires coordination of many business areas. Open communication and collaboration between sales, marketing, PMO, customer support, level-2 support and development teams. For some organizations this means the breaking of silos to allow for the prioritization and planning of a coordinated response to these recommendations and requests. This type of transformation requires executive sponsorship and governance.

Most importantly, a communication plan is needed to reassure customers that their voice has been heard and work is underway to meet their needs. Communication and service needs to be proactive and automated where possible speed responses. B2B customer expectations have changed in recent years as studies have shown that their B2C experiences outside of work have raised their expectations in response time and attentiveness.

A Feedback Loop system can solve for these issues and transform an organization into a customer-first service provider. Customers want to be heard and “We are listening” with a feedback loop that builds trust and inclusion. When companies succeed in building that trust, they are boosting revenue, improving brand reputation, and growing customer lifetime value and loyalty.