Customer feedback can be a powerful set of data for businesses. You hear directly from your audience—their concerns, compliments, and opinions. It can fuel changes to your operations in response that could lead to greater customer loyalty. But how do you automate customer feedback?
With automated feedback, you can collect responses in a streamlined manner. It reduces manual work and boosts efficiency. To achieve this, you need a robust tech stack that supports customer feedback workflows.
In this guide, you’ll learn why automating feedback matters, how to do it successfully, and how to turn responses into insights.
Why Automating Customer Feedback Matters
A collect feedback workflow often requires a lot of manual work. It can be complex and time-consuming. Feedback automation doesn’t remove human intervention entirely. Rather, it accelerates the process and eliminates repetitive processes.
In a time where businesses seek efficiency without impact on processes, automation delivers on this pursuit.
The idea behind automation is to gather more feedback at scale without further straining your staff. It has many other benefits as well.
Benefits of Automation: Speed, Scale, and Accuracy
There are three primary advantages of automated feedback:
- Speed: Automation quickens the pace of receiving feedback and responding to it. You don’t have to scroll through every comment and reply manually.
- Scale: As your organization grows, expect more feedback. With automation, you can manage a higher volume without putting more work on staff.
- Accuracy: Automated workflows eliminate risks of human errors.
Why Manual Feedback Collection Falls Short
When stuck with manual feedback workflows, you’re going to encounter challenges:
- Delays in processing feedback push stale insights, which may be irrelevant.
- Manual analysis invites bias into the process, which can dilute learnings.
- Errors are more prevalent in manual feedback collection.
- Unstructured data formats make aggregation difficult.
- It can become costly to manage feedback manually.
- Data security can become a concern when you have disconnected workflows.
Key Workflows for Collecting Feedback Automatically
In determining how to automate customer feedback, start by defining the workflows that will enable it.
In setting up workflows, they will cover the entire lifecycle of feedback. To begin, you will need to:
- Establish triggers. Choose which events would prompt the request for feedback.
- Use a feedback tool that allows for creating, sending, and collecting feedback.
- Design the feedback form, ensuring it’s clear and concise and captures the right information.
- Configure the automation rules. This step includes sending feedback requests, categorizing the information received, routing it to the appropriate group, and assigning priority levels to address feedback.
- Automate responses to the feedback.
- Implement automated actions for follow-up.
- Track the workflow and improve it as you gather more data about how it’s working.
These workflows have specific roles in three areas of automated feedback.
Post-Purchase and Transactional Surveys
This would be a trigger event. After the purchase or transaction, whether online or in-store, an email or text sends. It would ask them to comment on their experience. It could be a multi-question survey or one that asks a single question like an NPS (net promoter score).
In-App and Website Feedback Requests
People are using your app or are on your website, which could also be a trigger. You could set this to pop up based on their behaviors. Some examples could be duration, visiting specific pages, or retargeting returning visitors.
Automated Email Feedback Campaigns
You can also create automated emails based on a number of triggers that would land in someone’s inbox. The campaign would kick off for a person once they complete an action and opt in to receive email messages.
Scenarios for this effort include:
- An email sends once a customer receives a product, asking them to review it.
- Transactional events trigger emails, requesting feedback on something specific. These could be things like if checkout was fast or if their in-store interaction was friendly and helpful.
- A customer contacts support for help with a problem. An automated email would send after the event, inquiring about the experience and if their issue was resolved.
Each of these situations would warrant a personalized email. It would mention the customer’s “action,” so it seems relevant versus a generic message.
Benefits of automated email feedback workflows:
- Save time by reducing manual work.
- Boost efficiency with processes that start with triggers.
- Ensure you have every opportunity to solicit feedback and don’t miss chances for engagement.
- Personalize messaging by using specifics and formatting the email to look one-to-one.
- Improve your ability to adapt to customer preferences and options, which can lead to greater loyalty and minimize churn.
FROM ONE OF OUR PARTNERS — Why Customer Retention Management Is More Important Than Ever
Tools to Automate Customer Feedback
Technology drives collect feedback workflows. It’s crucial to assess options and choose tools that enable automation and scale. There are several categories to evaluate. Let’s look at each.
Survey and NPS Tools
These platforms allow you to create, send, and analyze NPS or other surveys. Some typical features include:
- Survey creation for email, web, in-app, or text message
- Automation capabilities to send requests at trigger events
- Follow-up workflows to route feedback and address it when necessary
- Reporting and analytics to track and monitor NPS scores and other trends to enable data-driven actions
- Integration options to connect to other reputation management solutions
Popular survey and NPS platforms include SurveyMonkey, Delighted, Qualtrics, and Qualaroo.
CRM and Support Platforms
The second category of automated customer feedback includes those that act as a customer relationship management (CRM) and/or customer support.
Customer feedback is a secondary functionality of these platforms. CRMs are the single source of truth for customer information. They hold transactional and interaction history.
Most likely, a CRM would integrate with a survey tool. It would send information on who to request feedback from based on defined triggers.
Customer support systems primarily manage tickets from those who need help with the company’s product or service. It records valuable information that can be useful in improving processes or the product itself.
These applications can also trigger follow-up feedback surveys. They can collect data on the experience and whether the agent resolved their issue.
Examples include HubSpot Service Hub, Salesforce Service Cloud, and Dynamics 365. There are also dedicated support platforms like Zendesk and Freshdesk.
Workflow Automation Tools
Workflow automation tools may be part of a survey, CRM, or support platform. They can also be standalone systems that connect applications.
Customer feedback and experience solutions can support the entire lifecycle of customers, including:
- Collecting feedback through automated requests
- Sending follow-ups after the initial communication if customers don’t respond
- Categorizing feedback by type
- Escalating responses that indicate probable churn and high dissatisfaction
- Analyzing the replies to identify patterns and root causes of negative feedback
Some options include AskNicely, Hotjar, SurveyMonkey, and pulseM.
Tools that connect platforms to create a seamless workflow and share data may be a good option for those with existing software. Companies would not need to disrupt the process, only enhance it.
Examples of these include Zapier and Microsoft Power Automate.
Best Practices for Automated Feedback
Defining workflows and the technology you’ll use to start them provides the foundation for automated feedback. Simply having these does not always equate to success in terms of receiving feedback.
To increase the responses you get, these best practices will come in handy.
Ask at the Right Time
Reaching customers at the right time to ask for feedback has a great impact on response rates. Determining the right time for your business involves many factors, as outlined in Harvard Business Review. They suggest this approach.
Calculate how long, on average, it takes customers to post reviews historically. Make this your default time period.
Their analysis also includes insights into two other time-related feedback requests. First, they found that immediate reminders don’t work for younger customers. Sending these can “undermine their sense of autonomy online.”
Second, the appropriate time to send a feedback request has much to do with how soon after the purchase, the buyer uses the product or service. Some services rendered align with an automatic trigger for review. Others may need more time.
Keep Surveys Short and Actionable
Attention spans are short these days. If you want people to respond, your survey should be brief. With NPS surveys, there is only one question. Other experience surveys may be two or three questions.
The ask has to be convenient for the customer as well. You don’t want them to go through multiple clicks. The message should clearly state why you’re asking for feedback (e.g., they just had a service or interaction with support) with a link to take the survey. You may even be able to embed it in the email so that they can take action immediately.
Automate Responses and Close the Loop
Next, you want to automate responses to the feedback. The response could be general, stating you received the reply and appreciate it.
You could also segment responses based on their content. For example, if someone gives a low NPS score, the follow-up could ask them to tell you more about why they rated you so low. It could also prompt them to reach out to support to discuss further.
If the feedback was positive, the response could be appreciative.
The second part of this advice is closing the customer feedback loop. The customer feedback loop means taking the insights from responses and taking action. The action could be to improve products, services, or interactions.
Feedback means very little if you don’t use it. By transforming data into action, you also show that you value what customers have to say. You can even point out changes you make directly from customer reviews.
Common Challenges to Avoid
In automating customer feedback, you may face some issues. Avoiding them will make your program more successful.
Over-Surveying Customers
Survey fatigue occurs when you ask too often for feedback, and customers just ignore you. You’ll need some parameters about survey frequency to prevent this.
Survey fatigue can also describe people dropping off from surveys when they feel they are too long or cumbersome. Customer experience research revealed that 67% of people will not complete long surveys. Your best approach to avert this is to keep surveys short and sweet.
Failing to Act on Feedback
One of the biggest mistakes in the feedback ecosystem is to ignore it. If you are just collecting it so you can have reviews on your website, you’re missing the bigger picture.
The best way to learn about customer experiences is from your customers. What they offer to you can shape your company’s future, from adjusting services to improving customer service. Close the loop to ensure you don’t miss these opportunities.
FROM ONE OF OUR PARTNERS — 3 Tips for A Useful Customer Survey
Putting Feedback Automation Into Action
So, how do you put feedback automation into action? We’ve discussed how they foster the customer feedback loop, but what does that look like practically?
Turning Responses Into Insights
Customer feedback can actually drive business growth! Here are some examples of how to use it:
- Uncover churn risk based on answers and sentiment. Then, put together proactive outreach, such as offering a special promotion to them.
- Identify a service with low scores. Understand what’s not working from the customer responses and revamp it.
- Look for patterns of dissatisfaction with brands you use in projects. If it’s not performing well, cut it.
- Seek out any expectation gaps from customers. Do they complain about things like technician arrival or appointment confirmations? These are easy fixes when you use a platform for customer engagement.
Sharing Data Across Teams
Another essential part of action is visibility. All stakeholders should have access to these learnings. It will help them make improvements in their departments.
It’s a good idea to have regular meetings with groups to discuss the latest feedback. You can talk about how it impacts services, operations, and customer experience.
Consider a customer feedback “task force,” where everyone has a role to play in closing the loop.
How Do You Automate Customer Feedback Collection? Start Here
In this guide, you’ve learned a lot about how to automate customer feedback. Each organization will have a unique path. To take action, review this checklist.
Quick-Start Checklist for Automating Feedback
- Determine your goals for feedback automation.
- Identify the repetitive tasks that are currently holding you back.
- Evaluate current workflows and existing gaps.
- Define the trigger events that will initiate a feedback request.
- Build out the workflows necessary to automate this function.
- Review potential tools and decide which ones to use.
- Craft the messaging that will accompany the survey.
- Launch your program and monitor it for performance, making changes as necessary.