Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room

Jeff Bezos, CEO & Founder @ Amazon

As mentioned by the CEO of Hubspot, "feedback is the breakfast of champions." As we mentioned in another blog post about the dos and don't of customer satisfaction, customer feedback can give you a clear and robust competitive edge.

On the other side, you have your customers. They use your product or service every day.

Not listening to customer service satisfaction might be your most significant trouble.

That would result in a misalignment between your strategy and what the consumer wants.

Poor Product/market fit is the worst thing that can happen to you.

As customer service feedback is only a small part of the customer feedback strategy, some content might be missing, it's up to you to improve your knowledge over those challenges.

At some point, I must say that not all feedback should be shared. There's always a balance to find between product strategy, what customers want, and what customers really need.

“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

Steve Job, Co-founder @ Apple

What is customer feedback?

Customer satisfaction is the information provided by customers about their experience, with a product or a service.

The main goal is to share their level of satisfaction and help the whole organization to improve where there's the place to.

Considering customer feedback is essential if you're willing to head your product, and your company, in the right direction.

What is customer service satisfaction?

Customer service is the support and helps you bring your leads and customers. It aims at helping them to have a smooth and seamless experience with your company.

Offering fantastic customer service is crucial if you want to work on retention to grow your business.

What is customer service feedback?

Customer service satisfaction feedback is pure love on steroids for your company. It's all about combining the power of feedback with customer service.

Simply put, your customer service teams are the ones that are, most of the time, facing your customers, using your product, all day, every day.

If there is one team inside your company, you should listen to: it must be the customer service team.

It will enable what we call:" customer support driven development" to be applied within your company.

Never heard of support driven development? Here is a quick introduction.

"injecting humility, accountability, and responsibility into the development process by ensuring the creators are also the supporters. If I’m going to build this, how does it affect me later when I have to support the user?"

Kevin Hale, co-founder @ Wufoo

Support driven development is about the ability, for a team, a department or a company to fuel it's growth through customer feedback. customer support driven development brings the entire team around the customer and needs anyone within the team to handle customer support.

At Crisp, we've always been firm believers in the impact of support driven development.

Back in the day, Wade Foster wrote that blog post, and since then, aligned with multiple other companies, we decided to fuel our growth through customer service feedback.

Following this philosophy, everyone at Crisp is doing customer support, whatever his role.

Why is customer service satisfaction feedback valuable?

As some people might still doubt about why it is important, we've gathered some reason why customer service feedback is crucial for your company and your customers.

The fastest way to learn your product

Customer service helps you to learn and stay in touch with the product. Nothing teaches you faster what are the new features or how does that specific part of the tool works than getting in front of customers.

Bring solutions instead of building problems

Thanks to customer service satisfaction surveys, engineering teams can understand where the problem lies.

No disconnection between products, customer support, or engineering. Thanks to customer service feedback, you can close conversations faster and improve customer satisfaction.

Bring your teams around the same objectives

When different teams and departments aren't doing support, it's easy to decry the quality of their work. But if you have everyone doing support, you'll tend to look for and build the best solution from the first try.

If you don't, you'll be willing to jump into support and fix what's wrong.

Improve internal tools

Great thing happens when doing support is that you can automate tasks that are boring.

If engineers are doing support, or anyone within the company, they will find ways to make support much better and will build tools to improve.

How to gather customer service feedback?

Gathering customer service feedback can be done through different channels. Two main channels are commonly used by companies: Emails and chats.

Those two channels are great because they generally are the main channels through which customers get in touch with companies.

Gathering and sharing feedback from the customer service team is a critical process to improve the entire company.

Four teams can benefit from customer service feedback:

Product Team
Sales Team
Marketing Team
Billing Team

In fact, the entire company must help.

Here is how you can gather feedback through two different channels

Gathering feedback through live chat interactions

Using a live chat is one of the best ways to improve engagement with your website visitors.

Even over your software, it's the perfect way to build proactive support, sending messages to your customers before they engage with you.

Gathering satisfaction scores is one of the services a chat widget can bring to your company. Here is some use case you could use to centralize more reviews concerning your customer service.

Asking reviews after a conversation

When doing customer service, measuring CSAT is something healthy, and multiple chat software offer this feature.

Asking for a review is commonly done after the conversation has been resolved. The thing is, it can happen multiple time as customers might have several requests at the same time.

Gathering feedback through email

Compared to a live chat, email is an asynchronous channel that doesn't require as much reactivity as a live chat.

Using email to gather customer service feedback is one of the best ways to deal with reviews.

Usually, emails are going alongside customers' lifecycles, guiding him through different interactions the user is having with the brand.

Here are some events you could use to send a customer feedback request:

After an order has been made
After an order has been received
After a meeting with a sales rep (can be triggered through an activity over a CRM such as Pipedrive or nocrm.io, an action-based lead management tool).
After a webinar
After reading a document shared by the marketing team

Customer service satisfaction feedback is a hidden gem that can make your company even more powerful.

Using the right tactic can improve the average number of feedback you're getting but don't get it wrong.

It's not the number that counts, it's the quality of your feedback and your ability to take those into consideration to make your company better that will make the difference.

Using Customer Service Satisfaction feedback to improve user experience