Leveraging Customer Feedback Loops for Ecommerce Growth

Ignoring customer feedback is one of the fastest ways to destroy a business. It can damage a reputation and result in lost revenue. 

One report found that US firms lose about $1.6 trillion every year because of actions customers take after a poor experience. 

Listening, on the other hand, is the key to business growth.

A major mobile telecom operator found this out the hard way. After losing a large chunk of business to its competitors, the CEO listened in on calls to the company’s support center.

The feedback he gathered was enough to develop changes that completely transformed the business. After three years, customer churn rates dropped by 75%, and revenue doubled. 

In ecommerce, there are countless opportunities for gathering feedback. There are surveys, behavioral data, customer conversations, and more. So, how can your company gather, track, and action all that feedback without missing out on key insights? 

With customer feedback loops.

Feedback loops ensure your company gets the information it needs to fuel meaningful changes that drive growth. This guide looks at how feedback loops work and how you can create an effective one for your business. 

What Is a Customer Feedback Loop?

When your customer service team finds out customers don’t like a new change to your product, what do they do with that information?

Is it shared internally?

Is there a process for analyzing the feedback to find ways to improve the customer experience (CX)? Who develops initiatives to improve CX based on the feedback?

Do you test those initiatives? And when your company implements changes based on feedback, how do you let your customers know?

A customer feedback loop addresses all these issues and more. Whether a feedback loop is focused on a service, a product, or CX in general, it’s the process of:

• Gathering insights from customers
• Sharing those insights internally
• Determining what feedback to act upon and how
• Actioning changes based on feedback
• Communicating those changes to customers so they benefit
• Assessing the results and making improvements based on those results 

There are several types of customer feedback loops, but they all have the same general process. The differences lie in what the feedback is for or where it comes from. 

Product feedback loops are designed to determine what customers think of a product. 

A customer service loop relies on feedback from customer-facing team members, such as call center agents and anyone looking at customer emails and chat queries. 

Customer feedback loops are generally focused on the customer experience. That includes what customers think of products or services and how they feel about interactions with your brand. 

How to Create Customer Feedback Loops in Ecommerce

You can set up a feedback loop in seven steps. Here’s how to get started:

Choose Your Feedback Channels

Ecommerce companies can draw from several digital channels to gather insights on what customers want, including website data, online reviews, and email surveys. You can also collect feedback from customer service channels, including online chats, customer emails, and phone calls. 

Gather Feedback

Customer service agents can manually collect and organize feedback from customer support channels. However, tools like sentiment analysis software, heat maps, automated surveys, and more can also gather feedback, organize it, and generate reports or analytical dashboards to help your team track it.  

Analyze and Create an Action Plan

Once you gather your feedback, you need a process for assessing it and determining what feedback to act on and what to do about it. 

Create a system for sharing feedback internally. Assign roles to communicate customer feedback to the appropriate stakeholders. 

After sharing, a designated team should review the feedback and create solutions to help your ecommerce company better meet customer needs. 

Implement Improvements

Whether you're switching to a more reliable shipping provider, improving your checkout page, or making other changes, be sure to put your plan into action. Additionally, identify the customer experience metrics you'll track to measure the impact of your improvements.

Communicate to Customers

Letting customers know you’ve implemented changes is vital to closing your feedback loop. Send out promotional emails, announce them on your website, or use social media to share the news of how they stand to benefit from the changes made. Doing this also demonstrates that your business listens to customers. 

Track the Results 

After implementing changes, keep track of metrics that reveal customer sentiment. Look at the churn rate, the number of customer complaints, and online reviews to understand the impact of a change. 

Keep Collecting and Implementing Feedback

Once you have a customer feedback loop in place, keep it going. Continue to gather, analyze, and action feedback so you can continually improve the customer experience. 

Best Practices to Make Feedback Loops More Effective

Here are best practices to help your business get more out of implementing feedback loops. 

Close Your Loop

To effectively improve the customer experience and drive growth, you need a process that ensures information flows seamlessly from the customer to your internal team and back to the customer. Without this, feedback can't be transformed into meaningful improvements.

Assign clear roles for gathering feedback from each channel, sharing it, analyzing it within your internal systems, and communicating back to customers. This prevents an "open loop" where valuable insights get lost.

When you close the loop, you continuously enhance your products and customer experience, resulting in higher revenues, increased customer loyalty, and all the benefits of a customer-centric ecommerce brand. 

Opt for Quantitative and Qualitative Feedback

Qualitative feedback is expressed as words.

“I wish you would bring that product back.” “Your prices are too high.” “I can’t find what I need when browsing your website.”

You can get this type of feedback from customer support channels and email surveys with open-ended questions. 

Quantitative feedback is numerical data. For example, the net promoter score (NPS), is a score from 1 to 10 that looks at how likely a customer is to recommend a brand. The customer affect score (CES) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT) are other types of quantitative feedback. 

Focus on Meaningful Feedback

If you try to act on all the feedback you receive, you might make changes to your customer experience or products that don’t align with your business or don’t suit certain customer personas. 

That’s why it’s crucial to filter feedback carefully. Prioritize it based on how many customers are impacted and how quickly you can implement meaningful improvements.

Get Feedback on Your Feedback Process

Ask your team how they believe your feedback loop could be improved. Do they see any areas where your loop could be closed? Are there complaints from customers that are being overlooked? 

Invite feedback from your team regularly to continually improve your company’s loop. 

Set Up Your Ecommerce Site for Customer Feedback Loops

A big part of gathering, analyzing, and tracking customer feedback in ecommerce happens through your ecommerce website and third-party software that integrates with your site. 

Ecommerce platforms like Optimizely, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, and Adobe Commerce have built-in processes for tracking behavioral data and understanding the user experience. They can also integrate seamlessly with tools that automate many of the feedback loop communications, helping to streamline the process of gathering feedback and making it easier to become more customer-centric. 

The web development and customer experience experts at Guidance can help you ensure your ecommerce website is leveraging customer feedback loops to improve CX, boost loyalty, and drive revenue growth. Contact us today to learn more.