Customer Feedback is all about the information retrieved from the customers about their overall experience with your products, services and the organization. Customer feedback is an important aspect of every business as it helps to know the real customer insights that helps you in improvement.

After you obtain customer feedback using different methods and channels like online survey, SMS survey, email survey and kiosks; the question arises what to do with the feedback and how to utilize it towards fulfilment of organizational objectives. Here are some actions you should take after you gather customer feedback.

1. Read every customer feedback

As soon as you receive customer feedback, the first and foremost action is to read every feedback. You should go through each and every feedback and understand what customers need and expect from you. When you read the feedback in the form of comments, opinions and complaints of the customers, you will have a deep customer insight which will help you to serve the customers better and take you a step ahead towards your goal of profit maximization through customer satisfaction. A great way to do this is to use a feedback software that gives you a view to look at all your feedbacks through a feedback response inbox or set up real-time feedback notifications - configure an email to be sent to you as soon as you get a feedback. This way you will read every customer feedback, as soon as you get it.

2. View feedback trends

When you read all feedback continuously, you will be able to notice the feedback trends. Whenever you make a business decision like changing the prices of your products or services, adding or removing any feature from your products etc., you will receive some feedback from the customers, be it positive or negative. You should go through all the feedback and analyse the trends in your feedback reports.

In this way, you will be able to estimate which type of decisions enhance customer satisfaction and which are the ones that dissatisfy them. This will help you to take better business decisions in the future and will thus take you nearer towards success.

3. Recognize relevant feedback and irrelevant feedback

Customers are diverse and so is their feedback. Customers will share what they feel in the form of word of mouth, comments and answers of the surveys. It will contain a combination of types of feedback which may contain both relevant as well as irrelevant feedback. You need to recognize which feedback is irrelevant, and which are the relevant ones that can prove to be helpful in making better business decisions.

With the help of a customer feedback software, you can mark some feedbacks as important or urgent to drive more attention to those.

4. Make amends or corrections based on feedback

Collecting customer feedback can only be useful if you take actions based on the customers' feedback. Paying heed to customers' opinions and informing them not only helps to make the customers happy but also showcases your intent to satisfy the customers. This helps in building trust among the customers and increases customer loyalty.

With real-time feedback, you can easily enable your team to take action on feedback and close the feedback loop.

5. Rate employees based on feedback

When your customers interact with the employees, it creates a customer experience. Based on this experience, the customers provide you feedback. This helps you to have an idea about the employees' performance and the way each employee is dealing with the customers. On the basis of this, you can rate your employees.

6. Motivate employees and appreciate them for positive feedback

Customer feedback is a superb source to be utilized for employee motivation. With customer feedback, you get to know the position of your brand in the views of the customers and when you share it with employees, they get to know where they should improve and where they are doing perfectly fine. If you receive positive feedback for a particular client experience, you should appreciate the involved team or employee for this. This will not only motivate him but also the other employees to follow the best practices and satisfy the customers.

7. Respond to feedback

When you receive customer feedback in the form of comments, opinions or even complaints, you must respond to every feedback. This creates a very good impression on the customers and they feel being heard and respected. You should appreciate customers for sharing their feedback and should deal with different feedback in different ways:

• Thanking happy customers - If you receive good feedback from happy customers, do thank them for sharing their feedback and appreciating your work. This also encourages them to promote you further. (Learn how to get your promoters to promote you). 
• Dealing with unhappy customers - Received a bad feedback? Don't be disheartened! You can use this as an opportunity to change detractors into promoters. You should apologize first and then ask the customers how you can serve them better. Moreover, you must take corrective action immediately and do whatever you can do along with following the best practices to satisfy the unhappy customers and change their perception about your brand. (Learn how to deal with unhappy customers.)

Learn more about the Customer Feedback

• Why Customer Feedback is Crucial to a Startup Business?
• 3 Types of Metrics to Measure Customer Feedback
• 5 Must-Ask Questions For Customer Feedback Survey
• 5 Best Strategies to Respond to Customer Feedback
• 7 Reasons why you should take Customer Feedback