What is Customer Feedback?

Customer feedback is input that consumers provide to companies they do business with. It may be unsolicited - for example, a customer may file a complaint - but organizations often use structured methods to solicit and collect customer feedback. These methods can include surveys, focus groups, and interviews. Businesses may seek this customer feedback for product research, to identify website enhancements, to determine price sensitivity, and more.

Additionally, contact centers frequently collect customer feedback to determine what customers think about their service experiences. A common way to do that is by administering surveys immediately following a customer interaction. Contact center surveys can be delivered through multiple channels, including IVRs, email, and chat.

Industry-leading contact center survey applications are flexible enough that end-users can configure them to collect whatever customer feedback is needed. Common survey formats include:

• Consumer satisfaction (CSAT) - measures how a customer feels about the help they received.
• Net Promoter - determines how likely a person is to recommend a business.
• Customer effort - measures how much work customers have to expend to get help.

Contact centers can also use interaction analytics software to mine customer feedback from what customers said or typed during voice and digital interactions. Interaction analytics can sift through all contacts from all channels to identify key words and phrases that give contact centers more insight into what customers are talking about. Additionally, by analyzing conversational characteristics like voice pitch and volume, interaction analytics can determine customer sentiment. When combined with the customer feedback collected through surveys, this provides organizations with a more holistic voice of the customer.