Customer Feedback Templates - How to Make Your Customers the Boss, Ambassador & Beast
We show you the advantages you achieve for your business with customer feedback templates.
- What is customer feedback?
- Why is customer feedback important?
- What types of feedback are there?
- What is a customer feedback template?
- What are the advantages of a customer feedback template?
- What components should be included in a feedback template?
- What else should be considered in a customer feedback template?
- How can the collected data from customer feedback be evaluated?
- Which tools can be used for a customer feedback template?
- Your clientele shows you the way
"Listen to your customers" is certainly not new advice. But what importance does customer orientation really have in your company? Do you know the mood of your clientele? Do you know what they think of your new product?
With the help of customer feedback, you're no longer in the dark. We show you which tools make enlightenment particularly simple.
What is customer feedback?
Customer feedback is opinions, evaluations and comments that customers give about a product, a service or a company. It is the direct and occasionally unfiltered feedback, that customers give after their experience with a company or a product.
Why is customer feedback important?
There are significant examples:
- In 2012, Apple brought its Maps app to the market, but with errors in both the visuals and the route planning. Disappointed users were the result.
What did Apple do?
The company reacted quickly, collected customer feedback and then made improvements. The users regained trust in Apple and the Maps app became a competitive product.
- A notable example is also the trade giant Amazon, who for many years has placed particularly great value on customer feedback.
Amazon knows that the feedback of its customers plays a decisive role in the purchasing decision of consumers.
Amazon uses the feedback not only to emphasize the credibility of products, but also as a tool to evaluate sellers and monitor the quality of customer service
Customer feedback is therefore important in order to determine whether your product fits. Let's take a closer look, then customer feedback helps you in the following areas:
- Improving the customer experience
- Identifying strengths and weaknesses
- Product and service development
- Increasing customer satisfaction
- Customer retention and loyalty
- Competitive advantage
- Identifying customer needs and expectations
- Optimization of customer service
- Adapting products and services to customer wishes
- Early detection of problems or flaws
- Market research
- Improving product quality
- Personalization of offers
- Reduction of customer complaints
- Increase of revenue and profit
- Promotion of word-of-mouth and recommendations
What types of feedback are there?
Your customers can express their opinions and experiences in various ways. Here are some common types of customer feedback:
- Verbal feedback: Personally in the store, on the phone or in customer conversations.
- Written feedback: In the form of e-mails, letters or comments on social media.
- Online ratings and reviews: Opinions and ratings on products or services on online platforms, review portals or social media.
- Surveys: Specific questions that your company itself initiates.
- Feedback forms: Through specially designed forms (usually in electronic form) your company can also retrieve opinions. More on this in a moment.
- Focus groups: For this, you invite special groups of customers to receive feedback in a moderated discussion and gain deeper insights.
- Customer complaints: Complaints from customers are also considered as feedback. These can be obtained through various channels such as telephone, e-mail or customer service contacts.
1. Short form surveys:
Image: Short feedback
Image: Feedback form
Image: Feedback via Rating Score
2. Surveys through detailed questionnaires
Image: Authors: Lena and Michael Busch familienleicht.de via Typeform
Image: Author: Academy German POP via Mailchimp
What is a customer feedback template?
A customer feedback template is a prefab electronic document that you use specifically to collect feedback from your customers. These templates provide you with a structured basis, to collect relevant information in the form of consistent data that you can easily compare and analyze.
A suitable tool provides appropriate templates and elements that you can add in a modular style or fit with your design.
Image: Customer feedback template
What are the advantages of a customer feedback template?
By using a template, you ensure that you receive uniform information from all customers. The standardized questions and categories ensure a homogeneous structure, which is necessary for comparing the feedback received.
The template saves you also time and resources, because you can use it over and over again or adapt it.
A well-designed template helps your company to cover particularly essential topics on which you currently want to focus.
The feedback becomes comparable, so you can identify trends, patterns or recurring problems and react to them.
Also, you give your customers a professional impression. You show that your company cares about their opinions and experiences and is willing to improve products or services based on customer wishes.
What components should be included in a feedback template?
The template for your customer feedback can contain various elements, depending on the specific needs and goals of your company. Here are the most important components, that provide a good basis for your feedback template:
- Contact details: Section where users can give their personal information such as name, e-mail address, or phone number. If needed, you can respond to the feedback or ask for clarification.
- Questions or rating scale: A set of questions or a rating scale that allows your customers to express their opinions or experiences. So questions about satisfaction, product quality, customer service, usability or other relevant aspects.
- Open comments or suggestions: A free text area where your customers can give more detailed feedback. Here, opinions and other comments can be entered freely.
- Permission to use the feedback: A consent clause where the customers give their consent for your company to use the feedback anonymously, for example for improvements or in marketing materials.
What else should be considered in a customer feedback template?
Keep it short and concise. This is probably the best advice for creating customer feedback templates. But there's more:
Ask logically!
If you ask if your customers own pets and their answer is "No", they should not have to answer any further questions on this topic, but skip them.
Make it as easy as possible!
Keep the form as short as possible. Too many questions lead to users not completing the form until the end.
You know your customers!
Nothing is more annoying than retrieving data that is already available. Therefore, personalize the form and only have your customers give the information that you don't know yet.
Stay true to the channel!
If you have a shop app, then integrate the customer feedback there. It's no use sending your customers an e-mail if that's not their preferred channel.
Provide a consistent rating system!
If your users can give a rating through a predefined scale, keep this scheme. Changing the scale or its logic leads to confusion or incorrect information.
Automate as much as possible!
Are there dependencies on each other? If a certain number of feedback forms has arrived, inform my colleague ... Define important workflows and you save time.
How can the collected data from customer feedback be evaluated?
When evaluating the collected data from customer feedback, you can use different approaches. First, you can analyze the quantitative data by looking at the frequency of certain answers or ratings to recognize patterns. This gives you insights into general customer trends.
Image: Qualitative Evaluation (Trustmary)
In addition, it is important to consider the qualitative aspects of feedback. Read through the comments and opinions of customers carefully to recognize important topics, concerns and moods. This qualitative data gives you deeper insights into the customer experience and shows possible areas for improvement.
For large amounts of unstructured text data, you can also use text mining techniques to automatically discover important information and patterns in the feedback comments.
Another approach is the comparative analysis, where you compare customer feedback over different periods of time. This gives you insights into changes and trends in customer feedback and lets you better understand how your measures affect the feedback.
Finally, present the results of your data analysis in summary reports. These reports contain the key insights and recommendations, that were gained from customer feedback. They serve as a basis for internal decision-making processes, product improvements and communication with customers.
The evaluation of customer feedback is a continuous process, that provides valuable insights and enables you to adapt your products and services even better to the needs of your customers.
Which tools can be used for a customer feedback template?
There are various tools that can be used for creating and managing customer feedback templates. Here are some examples. You can find more in the OMR Reviews. There you will also find more Helpdesk tools, tool descriptions, and extensive feedback.
The tool enables you to have an efficient management of customer feedback, automated workflows and a seamless integration of customer data for informed decisions to improve the customer experience.
Salesforce Service Cloud offers a user-friendly platform for creating and customizing customer feedback templates and enables seamless integration of feedback with customer data.
The software offers a variety of benefits associated with customer feedback, including a seamless integration of live chat, email, and user data, to enable personalized and timely responses to feedback and improve the customer experience.
Freshdesk offers a user-friendly platform for managing customer feedback, including ticket management, automated workflows, and integrated reporting. This allows you to track feedback efficiently, edit it, and gain important insights to increase customer satisfaction.
Front offers a powerful platform for managing customer feedback by merging email, chat, social media, and other communication channels into a single inbox. This allows you to quickly capture, prioritize, and process feedback to ensure effective customer communication and improve the customer experience.
The software solution manages customer feedback, including ticketing, automated workflows, and integrates CRM functions. With the seamless linking of feedback with customer data, you can derive personalized and effective measures to optimize the customer experience and build long-term customer relationships.
Your clientele shows you the way
You don't want to plan your range past your customers: So you need their opinion. Customer feedback gives you the right insights to understand customer needs, improve customer satisfaction, drive innovation, strengthen customer relationships and gain competitive advantages. Therefore, put your customers at the helm. With a suitable tool, you quickly configure existing templates and play them out where your customers are ready for it.
Margit Kustor-Neubauer ist enthusiastische Texterin und freie Redakteurin bei OMR. Mit Background in Online Marketing, Medien und Kommunikation konzipiert sie seit 15 Jahren Content im Einklang mit Zielgruppe und USP. Dank ihrer Expertise und Kreativität schraubt sie die Ergebnisse von Websites und Newsletter nach oben, bringt Redaktionskalender zum Glühen und Blogs zum Überlaufen. Mehr über Margit gibt es unter MKN Textdesign.
