Mastering the Customer Feedback Cycle in the Age of AI
Customer feedback is one of the most powerful tools your business has. When used correctly, it helps you understand customer insights, improve products, and strengthen loyalty. But without a system in place, feedback can easily become overwhelming noise. This guide will help you master the customer feedback cycle in the age of AI, from collecting feedback to taking action, to truly improve your customer experience.
To illustrate how this might work in real-life, we’re going to be following the story of Frank, a customer who didn’t receive the one-time passcode to log in to our imaginary product. Frank is one in a sea of customers with a problem, and we’ll highlight how a well-built Voice of the Customer (VoC) program can ensure his problem is understood and addressed for long-term solutions.
Step 1: Building an Experience Taxonomy
What is an Experience Taxonomy?
An experience taxonomy is a framework for categorizing the different parts of the customer journey. Imagine it like a map that breaks down your customers' experience into stages and touchpoints. By creating this map, you can more easily track feedback, identify patterns, and improve customer satisfaction.
How to Create an Experience Taxonomy
Map the Customer Journey
Start by identifying the key stages of your customer journey, from when they first discover your brand to post-purchase or renewal. Break each stage down into specific touchpoints. For example, the "Logging-in" stage could include touchpoints like "Receiving a one-time passcode" or "Using single sign-on." This approach to customer journey mapping ensures that no stage of the journey is missed.Define Categories and Subcategories
Create broad categories for each major part of the journey, and then divide those into subcategories. For instance, under the category "Checkout," you might have subcategories like "Adding Payment Info" and "Applying Discounts." Writing these as actions from the customer's perspective helps make feedback clearer.Develop a Tagging System
Turn these categories and subcategories into a tagging system that helps you label all customer feedback. Tags like "Checkout → Adding Payment Info → Error" make it easy to analyze and sort feedback effectively. This tagging system becomes essential for efficient customer feedback management and identifying common issues.
Types of Customer Feedback
To truly master the customer feedback cycle, it's important to understand the different types of feedback that customers provide. These can include:
Questions: This type of feedback often comes through support interactions and indicates parts of the journey that might be confusing.
Pain Points: These are situations where a customer experiences issues with your product or service, or has a problem that your product could potentially solve. For example, a customer might be frustrated with the difficulty in canceling their membership.
Bugs: A specific type of pain point, bugs are instances where a product or service is not working as intended. Separating these from other pain points helps with prioritization.
Enhancement Requests: This type of feedback represents customer preferences that aren’t currently met by your product or service. For example, a customer might want a product in a different color.
Understanding these different types of feedback helps you categorize them more effectively and get them to the internal teams who can take action.
Step 2: Collecting and Analyzing Feedback
Gather Feedback from Multiple Sources
Collect feedback from everywhere your customers interact with you: surveys, support tickets, social media, comment boxes, focus groups, and direct calls. By capturing feedback from all these sources, you get a full view of the customer experience. Make sure all feedback is tagged based on your experience taxonomy to streamline feedback management.
Managing Feedback as You Scale
When feedback volume grows to more than 2,000 pieces a month, AI feedback solutions can help. AI tools like Enterpret can categorize feedback based on your taxonomy and help identify common drivers behind customer feelings and issues. This allows you to speed up the process and focus more on using the insights to improve customer experience.
Scaling by Feedback Volume
Less Than 2,000 a Month: Use manual tagging or a part-time contractor to manage feedback effectively.
Between 2,000 & 5,000 a Month: Implement AI-assisted tagging with human oversight to ensure accuracy.
Over 5,000 a Month: Invest in a dedicated Voice of the Customer (VoC) Analyst & Program Manager to oversee the entire feedback management system.
Enhance with Data
As you analyze feedback, it’s important to combine it with other data to give you a richer understanding. Data can help segment feedback by demographics, such as age, location, or customer type, as well as business data like lifetime revenue. This context helps identify differences in sentiment across customer groups, making insights more actionable and assisting in prioritization.
Let’s check in with Frank: Since Frank didn’t get his login code, he clicked on our chatbot to get help. He’s greeted by our AI agent, who suggests he check his spam folder. Frank finds the code and is able to log in. Problem solved, thanks to AI. This interaction transcript goes into our feedback system and is tagged based on the experience taxonomy. It’s enriched with data such as the customer’s operating system, email platform, and product usage history.
Step 3: Creating Actionable Insights
Generate Feedback Records
Create detailed feedback records that show the issue, its impact, and where it occurs in the customer journey. A feedback record combines all the different customers who may have experienced the same issue, providing a sense of size, impact, and priority.
Use Feedback Management Tools
Tools like Enterpret or Canny can help you create and manage feedback records easily. These customer feedback management tools provide AI-based analysis, track recurring issues, and generate insights for different teams within your company.
Turning Feedback into Actions
Based on the feedback records, determine actionable steps your teams can take. For example:
Product Improvements: Launch new features or fix bugs based on customer suggestions.
Process Changes: Update support procedures if recurring feedback points to delays or gaps.
Training Opportunities: Retrain teams on processes where customers report consistent issues.
AI tools can help prioritize these actions by enriching them with data, ensuring that issues with the highest impact are resolved first.
Let’s check back in with Frank: While Frank’s problem is solved, we want to ensure this doesn’t happen to others. As the feedback enters the system, it’s added to the record with other customers who’ve had the same issue. Enriching the feedback with data reveals that the problem is common for customers using Outlook. In the last 30 days, 1,718 customers using Outlook faced this issue.
Step 4: Sharing Insights with Internal Teams
Feedback insights are valuable only if they drive real change. The next step is making sure the right people in your company see the insights and understand what actions they need to take.
Choose Your Delivery Format
Product Teams: Use tools like Linear or Jira to send feedback records so teams can easily add them to their backlog.
Other Departments: Tools like Asana or Notion are great for sharing collaborative records across departments, ensuring everyone has visibility.
Quick Alerts: Set up Slack notifications for immediate, informal updates. But remember, Slack is not ideal for long-term tracking.
Prioritize and Communicate
Always prioritize feedback based on its impact on both the customer experience and business objectives. Clearly communicate the urgency and value of each feedback record to internal team members so they understand the customer perspective and what matters most.
For Frank’s issue: Enriching the feedback data revealed that customers facing this problem used our product 13% less than others, impacting product engagement metrics. The feedback record is shared in Jira with the product team, and the product manager prioritizes the issue since it’s affecting key metrics.
Step 5: Communicating Resolutions to Customers
Your customers want to know they’re heard—especially when they share feedback. Communicating updates not only shows appreciation but also builds trust and improves customer loyalty.
Notify Customers When Issues Are Addressed
Whenever you solve an issue, inform the customers who initially reported it. This could be a personalized email or an announcement as part of a larger release note. Make sure customers see that their voices make a difference.
Create a Transparent Feedback Portal
Consider building a public feedback dashboard using tools like Pendo.io or Canny.io. This allows customers to track their feedback, see progress, and know when their suggestions are being worked on. It’s a powerful way to build transparency and trust, and ultimately improve customer loyalty with feedback.
For Frank’s issue: The problem with customers not receiving emails via Outlook is resolved. Frank receives an update letting him know that he shouldn’t encounter this issue again. He is thanked for his feedback and invited to log in again.
Real-Life Examples: Success Stories
Thumbtack: Leveraging Salesforce
I built a feedback system that Thumbtack used in Salesforce to create detailed feedback records and track issues. This system helped us identify a pain point with our B2B customers looking to pause their profiles while they went on vacation or took a break from work. This system resulted in the launch of Vacation Mode, which allowed customers to easily set themselves as away.
Gather: Using AI for Feedback Insights
Gather adopted Enterpret, an AI-powered feedback analysis tool. It helped Gather combine multiple feedback channels and turn raw comments into actionable insights that led to tangible product improvements. I used this to share feedback records across the organization.
Conclusion
An effective customer feedback cycle helps you move from simply listening to actually acting on what your customers need. Start by building a solid experience taxonomy to organize feedback, then use the right tools, like AI feedback solutions, tagging systems, and feedback dashboards, to analyze, manage, and communicate it.
Remember, the real magic is not just in collecting feedback but in using it to drive product changes, improve services, and show your customers that they matter. By mastering the customer feedback cycle, you can create a culture that values your customers’ voices, continuously improves customer experience, and delivers an exceptional experience.
