Must-Have Features in Feedback Analysis Software
So much is in flux and in constant change right now, and keeping track of customer needs is more important than ever. Thankfully, customers are telling businesses what they like and what they don’t like through a multitude of channels.
This feedback is a goldmine of insights into what drives key business metrics such as spend, adoption, churn and loyalty.
8 Key Questions to Ask a Feedback Analysis Software Vendor to Help You Buy a Solution That Delivers True ROI
Are you trying to find a great feedback analysis software solution?
Then you might have been overwhelmed by the huge number of options out there. Whether it’s a DIY tool, a customer feedback management solution, or a text analytics provider, they all claim that customer feedback analysis is easy. After all, there is no shortage of data!
But when you dig deeper, you are likely to be disappointed. Why? Feedback analysis is a deceivingly hard problem to solve, and very few solutions are truly great. In this guide, we’ll help you differentiate those who over-promise from those who actually deliver.
Why Pay Attention to Feedback Analysis?
So much is in flux and in constant change right now, and keeping track of customer needs is more important than ever. Thankfully, customers are telling businesses what they like and what they don’t like through a multitude of channels. They contact the contact center or support when things don’t work. They leave reviews about brands on multitude of sites. They reply to surveys. They talk on social media.
This feedback is a goldmine of insights into what drives key business metrics such as spend, adoption, churn and loyalty.
However, customer feedback management solutions have been notoriously bad at strategic analysis of the feedback. The majority aren’t doing more than displaying just numbers on dashboards and possibly word clouds from survey responses.
Consequently, decisions are still made based on partial, often incorrect, information, anecdotes and gut instincts. Critical customers' needs are undiagnosed and ignored.
So, how can you prevent poor decision making from happening?
How can you help your team have the right data at the right time, in an easily understandable format?
Whether you are going for an all-in-one or a best-in-class solution, you need to be clear about what your providers can and cannot offer, and what you can or cannot miss out on.
We have put together the following questions to help you choose a feedback analysis software solution.
Questions to Verify Feedback Collection Capabilities
Question 1: What types of feedback sources do you support?
Ideally, your provider should support ALL feedback sources. This includes internal sources such as surveys, contact center, support tickets, complaints, & CRM notes. As well as external sources such as review sites, forums & social media.
By focusing only on one source of feedback, e.g. surveys, you are limiting yourself to the customer segments who are more likely to use that source and the context they are providing it. From this limited perspective, you lose the full picture of your customer’s experience.
Question 2: Are you able to differentiate between feedback vs. non-feedback?
Your ideal solution should have custom cleaning tools that filter out non-feedback text such as irrelevant chatter or social media posts mentioning your business but without providing feedback.
Depending on the source, feedback may be mixed up with other text that needs to be filtered out. For example, a live chat conversation lists not only problems, but also greetings, discussions and solutions. These need to be excluded from the analysis, and many DIY solutions don’t provide this capability.
Questions to Ensure Sufficient Text Analytics Capabilities
Question 3: How do you discover all themes in feedback that are relevant to my products and services?
You want to find feedback analysis software that creates a taxonomy of themes closely tailored to your business. This taxonomy needs to be evolving all the time as new themes emerge in feedback.
A long list of themes will become unmanageable, so it needs to be organized into a taxonomy.
Themes must not be industry-wide, but specific to the things your customers are saying. Every business and the issues its customers might have are unique. This is especially pronounced in technology companies or those going through digital transformation.
Question 4: Can I edit the taxonomy or the themes myself?
Make sure you can bring your domain expertise into the way theming is done. You should be able to continuously reorganize the taxonomy with ease.
Nobody knows your business as well as you do. What matters changes over time. The analysis should be able to be flexible and adaptable.
Questions About Visual Reporting Capabilities
Question 5. Is it possible to filter by customer segment? Can I combine multiple filters?
You want to find feedback analysis software that has the capability to easily slice and dice the data. For example, you might want to select one or more filter values and combine two filters to create a customer segment.
This will help answer complex queries such as; “what do customers who have been with us for less than 3 months and who have purchased both product A & product B say about the integration we recently implemented between these products?”
Question 6. Is it possible to quickly understand changes in metrics over time?
The ideal answer: Yes, we have the functionality that can show you why any metric of your choice (NPS, CSAT, etc) has increased or decreased. This will make it easy to explain changes in score over time.
Questions to Guarantee the Right Reporting Functionality
Question 7. Can you create dashboards that report not just on metrics, but also on what’s driving the metrics?
Solutions like PowerBI and Tableau make it easy to create custom reporting with any number of filters and widgets. But when it comes to feedback analysis software, widgets that uncover the “why” behind satisfaction or NPS metrics are the real money-maker. By making sure your reports can easily refer to themes in qualitative data, you’ll make it easy for others in the company to truly understand and relate to feedback.
Question 8. Is it possible to aggregate feedback into a single picture explaining how the company is doing overall?
This functionality is incredibly valuable! You want a solution that can aggregate not just different scores into a single metric, but also different kinds of datasets: live chat, complaints vs. online reviews.
Having multiple different dashboards make it difficult to focus the company on what truly matters.
These are just some of the questions we recommend to ask when looking for feedback analysis software.
Depending on whether your company is a small business or a large enterprise, your requirements might differ.
All the best on your quest for actionable insights!
Originally published on Insights.