Getting feedback can be daunting. By asking for others’ opinions, you’re inviting both compliments and criticism. One you always want to hear, the other can be hard to swallow – especially when you’ve invested so much into developing your product or service.

Even though it’s nerve-wracking, developing a customer feedback strategy is a hugely valuable exercise that makes sure your organization grows in the right direction.

The fundamentals of customer feedback strategy

Customer feedback strategy is your plan of attack for how to gather, analyze, and action customer feedback. When done right, your customer feedback strategy can be your lighthouse. It can guide you through murky, rocky waters of organizational uncertainty and steer you into the calm bay of success.

When customers tell us about their experience with our organization (whether that’s opinions, reactions, preferences, or complaints), they’re gifting us an opportunity to gain their trust and loyalty. If we make them feel heard, they won’t just see themselves as customers – they’ll feel like partners.

Making their feedback heard doesn’t exclusively mean making changes to our product or service. It can be as simple as sending a personalized email to thank them for sharing their thoughts.

Whatever action we decide to take, it’s vital to make customers feel like what they tell us will make a difference.

A well-executed customer feedback strategy brings many benefits:

• Strong market reputation 

• High-impact product/service advancements  

• Responsive content from marketing teams 

• Customer experience improvements 

• Brand loyalty and potential advocacy 

Listening to our customers and considering their feedback when making business decisions is a key element of success for every high-performing organization.

How to gather customer feedback

You should consider factors such as budgets, the team’s capacity, how quickly the feedback is needed, etc. when choosing a feedback method.

If you’re running low on time and resources, opt for a more passive method like:

• Social listening: With this method, you’re getting indirect feedback from your customers by checking what they’re saying about your organization on social media e.g. LinkedIn or Instagram.

• Customer reviews: This requires effort up front in the set-up phase and a long-term nudge strategy but, if done right, review pages can be the source of a consistent stream of customer feedback.

• Customer Support/Sales teams’ insight: Speaking to your customer-facing teams in your business gives you a goldmine of information when it comes to the needs, pain points, and opinions of your customers.

The major drawback of more passive methods is that you aren’t in the driver’s seat. There’s no guarantee that the information you want will come your way.

To take back control, there’s one solution: asking the audience directly.

One way to do this is with customer interviews. Whether held in-person or virtually, a customer interview is a great way of digging deep into your customer’s opinions. By asking open-ended questions and following up on their answers, you can get a clear picture of what’s going on in their mind.  While customer interviews have their merits, they also have some pitfalls. Interviews lack scalability, are very time-consuming, and can wind up costing a lot.

Want a method for getting customer feedback that captures lots of responses and is both cost and time-efficient? Look no further than a customer survey or poll. Customer surveys and custom polls give you insight like no other.

Here’s a couple of customer survey tools that will help you get the answers you’re searching for:

SurveyMonkey

Sleek, sophisticated, and data-driven, SurveyMonkey enables you to build high-performing surveys with ease. SurveyMonkey empowers even those with limited technical skills to create complex questionnaires and view insightful analytics from responses.

Additional features, such as accessing data collected in Excel, are available with paid membership. Several pricing tiers are available, depending on the volume and complexity of the customer’s needs.

Typeform

Typeform sets itself apart from the competition by prioritizing the user experience above all else. With a next-level onboarding journey, intuitive product features, and beautifully designed templates, it’s no wonder that Typeform has cemented itself as one of the giants of the survey space. Basic and Premium packages are available for single users, with enterprise deals also available.

Turtl

Turtl surveys, quizzes, and polls combine ease of user experience with high-level data analytics. In Turtl, you can create a survey experience that’s simple for the participant, and that leaves you with conclusions you can confidently transform into decisions.

Getting insight into your customers while giving them value through content – what’s not to love about that?

Gathering customer feedback through Turtl leaves you with actionable insights and high-level analytics that can be used to drive business growth.

“Turtl is a great example of a platform that really enables us to connect with our audience, hold them for longer, and showcase some of the things that we’re doing. We want to bring value to our audience…and [Turtl] brings a better standard of quality and speed to serving our customers’ needs”

Darren Carter, Marketing Manager at Morgan Sindall

Take a look at Morgan Sindall’s Turtl Doc which showcases how to weave feedback forms into content to collect actionable data and insights.

3 departments that benefit from customer feedback strategy

Soliciting feedback and then leaving it to gather dust in your database is a waste of your precious time. While it’s shiny and new, it’s time to put it to work. Here’s a couple of key areas whose performance can be leveled up using customer feedback:

Product

Using customer feedback to influence your product roadmap is a sure-fire way to take the right turn. A customer feedback survey will give you direct answers to burning questions like “What do customers enjoy about my product?”, “What do they want changed?”, and “What do they want to see next?”.

The feedback gathered should inform both your business growth and product-led growth strategies. By considering insights into customer preferences, pain points, and expectations during product development, you can create a product that’s sure to resonate with the market.

Listen to the needs and wants of your customers and you’ll be rewarded with brand advocates, high adoption rates, and an increased customer base. On top of that, surveys also help you to refine user experiences which further boosts customer satisfaction and encourages loyalty.

Remember, incorporating feedback isn’t a one-and-done type of thing. Make sure to regularly lean on customer insights for product-led expansion that’s sure to delight both potential and existing customers.

Marketing

Customer feedback and marketing are like peanut butter and jelly; they’re an unlikely pair but they work together so well.

When you make content that incorporates customer feedback, you’re showing your customers that you’re listening to them. You understand them, you know how they think, and you can help them to make their lives easier.

Customer feedback lets you crystallize your ideal customer profile and enables you to capture high-intent leads more effectively through your content. You don’t need to hypothesize what message will resonate with your target audience; using feedback, you can produce content that you know will stick. To learn more about how to nail your content marketing strategy, check out our Complete guide to B2B content marketing.

Sales

Don’t forget about your sales team too! Research from the Harvard Business Review shows that ‘linguistic mirroring’, where you speak to someone using the same language and communication that they do, is a great way to forge a connection. Use customer feedback language in pitches or client meetings to become even more persuasive. You’ll be guaranteed to build rapport and give your customers confidence that you truly get them.

“The backend for data and the analytics have been huge for us. To be able to track different users, downloads, reads, and views gives us insight into our audience and our potential clients which has been hugely beneficial to our sales team”

JeeYoung Wenglikowski, Senior Global Marketing Manager at KellyOCG

Using surveys and polls for internal feedback

There’s no denying that customer feedback is crucial for business and product growth. But is it only useful when it comes from the outside in? The short answer: No. Gathering feedback internally is the key to improving employee experience, engagement, and retention.

Responses from employee surveys and polls enable you to gauge your team’s mood on pivotal topics like job satisfaction, growth opportunities, and work-life balance. By understanding their frustrations and what areas need improvement, departments like HR can shape their strategy to react to these.

The result? Less guesswork for your HR and People departments and a display of care and consideration for your team.

Showing your employees that their feedback is valued fosters a sense of ownership and inclusion, leading to increased job satisfaction and company loyalty. On top of that, seeking out feedback highlights transparency and makes employees feel comfortable voicing their opinions and concerns.
And with this kind of company culture, you’ll have existing employees sticking around, as well as new talent banging at the door.

Want to easily collect feedback internally using an interactive, visually engaging format? Try using a Turtl Doc and including polls.

In just a few simple steps, you can create a poll to capture feedback. Then, use Turtl’s Analytics Dashboard to get data from the results.

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Check out the results in the Analytics Dashboard

With Turtl polls, you can enable multiple answers, as well as keep poll results completely private from readers. To learn more about this feature and how it can help you gather feedback and data, check out how to add Polls to Turtl in more detail.

Want to see a winning example of how to use polls in Turtl? Check out this Turtl Teardown by our CEO Nick Mason. He breaks down how Turtl user Standard Charter Bank used polls to up performance by 167%

Turtl takeaway

Feedback shouldn’t be feared, it’s the compass that guides you towards growth. Getting both external and internal feedback keeps us in touch with what’s going right and what needs some attention. Without it, we’re at risk of blindly throwing the dart and being miles away from the bullseye.

Input from our employees enables us to create a high-performance, positive work environment that retains talent. Having a solid customer feedback strategy means the difference between making customer-centric decisions with confidence and pursuing a development plan based on hunches and hypotheses.