👋🏼 Hello Novel Community,

Hope you're enjoying the summer so far! Here in Atlanta, it's sunny ☀️ & hot 🔥, but perfect weather for the pool and a few games of pickleball. The rest of our team in LA is catching the West Coast waves 🏄🏻‍♂️ and enjoying many of the hiking trails across Southern California 🥾. 

In my attempts to avoid the extreme heat, I've taken up some light reading -- which serves as the inspiration for this week's Journey Newsletter. While we won't cover the science of receiving feedback, as Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen do in their book: Thanks for the Feedback, we will explore the intricacies of how customer feedback plays a role across the product lifecycle.

You’ll walk away from this read with 3 actionable ways to organize & apply customer feedback. Enjoy :)

Cheers,

Grant

TL;DR

Customer feedback has become one of the primary drivers of long-term growth. And for good reason. Customers who are asked for feedback drive more profitability for your business and are less likely to churn than those who aren’t.

While this is true, it's also important to understand that customers don’t always tell you the entire truth. Given this, there are three areas we'll explore to set you up for success:

• The best ways to collect customer feedback

• Ways to read and track customer behavior with data

• How to turn your customers into your advocates

Building a good product supported by good marketing is only half the job. A lasting commitment to cultivating a customer-centric culture and sharing the feedback across the company plays a vital role in propelling your business forward.

⬇️ Read on to learn how to effectively organize & apply customer feedback.

Thanks for the (Customer) Feedback 🙏🏻

Collecting customer feedback 🔂

There are hundreds of survey tools to collect feedback from customers. Here, we’ll talk about the most popular and effective ways to ask customers for feedback.

1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score

A customer satisfaction score indicates how satisfied a customer is with a product, service, or their interaction with a company.

There’s a simple formula to calculate the CSAT score:

CSAT score = [Number of satisfied customer ratings – Number of Not Satisfied ratings] %

The greatest advantage of using satisfaction surveys is that it is very easy to implement and doesn’t require much effort from respondents.

"This is great, Grant, but when do I use CSAT to collect customer feedback?"

It is useful to periodically measure the level of satisfaction with your customers as they move throughout their journey. For example, you can send out a CSAT survey after onboarding them, after a product or feature has been launched, or after a customer support conversation.

2. Long & Short Form Surveys

Customer feedback surveys are the most common way of completing the feedback loop. It usually includes sending a set of questions through email.

The one thing to keep in mind while sending email surveys is to not get carried away and ask too many questions. The more questions your customer survey has, the less time your respondents spend, on average, answering each. 

In other words, the more questions you ask your respondents, the more likely they will “speed” through it, and the quality and reliability of your data will suffer:

There is, however, no ‘ideal’ length for a survey. Anything between 5 and 10 questions is a decent number.

To keep your surveys short, a good rule of thumb to keep in mind is: only ask questions that fulfill your end goal. Ensure that every question serves a clear purpose. If you do not intend to use the information, do not ask that question. The aim is to collect customer feedback and not to have them write an essay.

"So, how should I deliver my customer survey?"

While this will vary based on your product or service, the most effective ways to distribute your survey includes email, in-app widgets, community boards or via SMS.

💡 Did you know? One piece of negative customer feedback can lose a company as many as 22% of its customers.

3. Community Boards

Community boards allow users to collaborate on ideas with not only the company, but also with other users.

These boards allow users to create feedback posts that can be upvoted or commented on by other users. Top posts that have been upvoted or highly commented on can help you discover what the majority of your users need.

The best thing about community boards is that ideas that had been suggested by some customers became popular ideas among others who hadn’t thought of the benefits those ideas could bring.

With so many tools out on the market, community boards have also taken shape in the form of community forums, through tools such as Slack & Discord.

Regardless of the community approach that you take, it is important to make the board very easy to navigate. Users should be able to add new posts & search for others with ease.

Results will take some time to develop, so don't get discouraged. Many think that the feedback loop is instant, and while this may happen quicker for some than others, most users want to acclimate themselves with your product for an extended period of time before voicing their opinion. Patience is key 🗝

Data tells the 'real' story 📈

There are quite a few critical aspects related to your product and brand that can be uncovered without having to ask your customers any questions. This is where data analytics come in. Analytics provide you with useful insights about your website, product, and customer journey that can help you improve the customer experience at every touchpoint.

Seeking explicit customer feedback might help to a certain extent, but the problem is that most visitors will not remember what appealed to them the most before they went ahead and purchased the product.

Monitor how customers behave on your website: which areas do they view the most, which links do they click the most, and where do they drop off. This analysis will tell you:

• Which areas of your website are interesting and convert the most

• Which areas of your website are of high friction

• How your customers behave at every stage of their journey

• Which elements do customers engage with the most before purchasing your product

Now that I have collected the data, what do I do with it?

• Optimize your conversion path:

  • Lower your bounce rates

  • Prevent leakages in your funnel

• Incorporate trends and gaps into your product roadmap

• Leverage A/B testing tools to further mine your findings

Turn your customers into your champions 🏆

Customer satisfaction is the primary indicator of how happy they are with your product. Gathering feedback will help you quickly identify the happiest of your users.

The next step is to nurture them into advocates. Get them excited to brag about your product and recommend it to friends and colleagues. Contrary to popular belief, most monetary rewards do not motivate advocates. Do simple things – thank you notes are a great start.

Here  is a great read on "17 Ways to Turn Customers Into Brand Advocates" which has some awesome ideas to turn your customers into advocates.

Imagine a world where most of your new customers came from business referrals. This can be achieved only when you know who your advocates are.

There's no better time than now to start capturing customer feedback - it's directly correlated to your bottom lime!

🐣 Twitter Tip of the Week

❤️ Enjoy this piece?

Share The Journey newsletter with another marketer on your team.

All you need to do is copy and paste the link 😀

See you next Thursday!

Grant