An official website of the United States government
Here's how you know
A .mil website belongs to an official U.S. Department of Defense organization in the United States.
A lock (lock ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .mil website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Home : News : News
JBSA News
NEWS | April 3, 2018

Five ways to use feedback to strengthen your customer’s experience

By Jeff Champagne Interactive Customer Evaluation site administrator

With the explosion of social media feedback tools, there are now countless ways your customers can rate you what happened during their experience and how they feel about your organization, products and services.

Customer feedback is not a new concept. It is now much easier for the everyday customer to applaud your efforts – or voice their concerns – of your organization.   The tools we use today are different and more democratized.

So here’s the question: what is your organization doing with that real-time customer feedback? And, more consciously, are you using those ideas, thoughts and suggestions to strengthen their experience with your organization? Are you using your customer’s feedback to spark innovation within your organization?

Here are five actionable items that can help you start using customer feedback to drive performance and innovation for your organization.

Act now. Make sure you are doing something meaningful with your customer feedback and make sure the customer knows. Too often organizations don’t have a structure or initiative in place to leverage what their customers are telling them through actionable feedback.

Minimize customer effort. Through listening and observation, find out how many times your customers have to interact with you to get what they need. Understand their point of view regarding how had they are working to get what they need. This direct feedback can lead you straight to some feedback and concerns that could easily be solved or could create value for a much larger groups of customers.

Translate feedback into innovation. I’m not talking about starting a GoFundMe page here. I’m simply saying to use your customer’s observations, ideas and feedback to drive service innovation for your organization. Often customers have ideas you haven’t considered yet they are the ones using your service on a daily basis. Perhaps create a simple process where you can make the most out of the feedback by streamlining the process and forwarding it directly to the innovation leads for your organization.

Spot emerging customer needs. Use customer feedback to identify needs that haven’t been solved or even articulated yet. Don’t just take customer comments and feedback at face value – jump in. Give yourself the opportunity to solve a greater number of customer needs in the future. Some of your best practices can be found here.

Get emotional. Identify the emotional tone your customers convey when they talk about your service or organization. While the tangible elements of your customer experience most directly solve a customer’s need, the emotional elements build loyalty. Work to strengthen that by listening intently to customer feedback. Remember what Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author Maya Angelou said : “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”