What do customers think about organic food? What do they like about the newly built store? Why do some customers feel đ, while others feel đŠ ? These are questions that Coop, the Swiss Retailer wanted to find out!
Asking customers open questions leads to the most effective results. But the real question is how to analyze thousands of open answers in the most effective way?
Caplena analyzes 50,000 open feedbacks for Coop, quarterly. Its cutting-edge machine learning software creates an unparalleled depth of insights. Understanding the drivers behind customer loyalty and satisfaction enables Coop not only to improve its products and services but also to draw conclusions about its strategy and goals.
Sorting through feedback from customer surveys is no simple task. You must organize, assess, filter, and understand the transcribed thoughts and opinions of your customers, spelling errors, etc. But for companies with particularly large customer bases, the analysis of mass feedback is a particular challenge.
Large retailers, for example, might collect tens of thousands of customer surveys each quarter. These surveys might ask customers about how they feel in the store, how they are treated by employees, and what they think about a storeâs pricing, quality, availability of new products, and more. In any case, survey questions can range wildly. Factor in the likelihood of thousands of customers using different terminology and talking about different products, and you have a wide range of possibilities on your hands.
Not to mention that even medium-sized retailers are strapped for time and resources â making the task of effective analysis challenging at best, near impossible at worst.
However, analysis of mass feedback can be performed efficiently and accurately, given the right tools and strategies. The result? Insights that help businesses measure impact, assess customer satisfaction/loyalty, and make significant improvements. Hereâs how one major retailer in Switzerland was able to efficiently assess mass feedback from a customer survey.
Coop is a Switzerland-based retail and wholesale chain that dates back 150 years to when it was just a tiny co-op. Today, Coop has more than 2.5 million members, operates approximately 2,300 locations, and employs more than 90,000 people. In fact, Coop is so large that itâs responsible for the sales of more than half of all organic food in Switzerland. It has even been called the âWorldâs Most Sustainable Retailerâ â selling a variety of products, textiles, and food that are deemed sustainable.
Needless to say, Coop is large, powerful, and clearly successful. Still, this chain demands lots of customer feedback to optimize operations, adopt best practices, and most importantly, continue to please its massive customer base.
Because Coop is so large, it procures an enormous quantity of customer feedback every business quarter: feedback generated from 50,000 surveys collected at various locations. Traditionally, Coop has left the analysis of survey feedback to individual branch managers, without much oversight. Coop has continued to gather valuable feedback but has simply lacked the time, resources, and processes to analyze that feedback in the most effective way possible.
Other potential solutions? Coop could simply shelve the feedback and wait for a free moment (yeah, right đ ). Or, the brand could pick out a small selection of feedback to analyze manually, but that wouldnât give accurate insight into common trends or themes, or show rates of improvement over time. Or, it could look for a strategic solution that would help to successfully analyze their feedback, take advantage of customer insight, and make improvements to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty (and profits).
To find a solution for processing customer feedback on behalf of Coop, Swiss Market Research Institute LINK found Caplena â a natural language processing (NLP) coding software that uses augmented intelligence to effectively analyze customer feedback without tedious manual work. Here were the results of Coop and Caplenaâs game-changing partnership:
Caplena uses machine learning to auto-complete the analysis of feedback so that humans donât have to.
Now, Coop has the ability to handle its 50,000 pieces of feedback every quarter in a manner thatâs timely and efficient. After all, feedback that was given even six months ago can become quickly irrelevant. For example, a new product can bring in a whole new subset of customers. Changes to various store locations can significantly impact customer satisfaction. Seasonality may also affect customer feedback. For example, the holiday season will most likely raise sales and points of contact with the customer.
With Caplena, Coop can now respond to feedback rapidly, measuring up-to-date levels of customer loyalty. This timely insight also allows them to measure the impact of various business decisions on overall customer loyalty.
Caplena uses augmented intelligence to effectively code feedback responses, making them organized, clear, and actionable. The Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology developed by Caplena is able to understand and identify the natural human language, even with misspellings, slang, and different forms of the same word.
To effectively address misspellings, Caplena processes on a syllable level instead of the âmostly usedâ word level.
Because Caplena uses an advanced A.I. that has âlearnedâ from a vast amount of industries and a vast amount of feedback, it has an advanced understanding of general speech that gives it âhuman-likeâ capabilities. For example, the German word for âfreshâ can mean either âfreshâ as in âfreshly-baked,â or âfreshâ as in âcoolâ (temperature-wise). When a customer says, âThe bread is fresh,â Caplena knows that it means âfreshly baked.â And when a customer says, âItâs too âfreshâ for me in the store,â Caplena knows it means âcold.â
âWe could barely distinguish between human and automatic coding. The system really understands our customersâ answers,â said Coop.
Using Caplena provided by LINK, Coop was able to measure an increase in customer satisfaction with the store atmosphere. âThe increase from 5% to 9% was so large that we were able to rate the implementation of new store design as a complete success,â according to Johanna Mäder, Market Research Project Manager at Coop.
Departments within Coop that were already close to the customers, such as customer management or marketing, moved even closer to their customers.
Caplenaâs automatic coding simplifies the distribution of open-ended responses, making customer feedback and insights more accessible to the entire company. The result is deeper insight across multiple departments, potentially producing improved practices for the entire corporation.
Working with Caplena for the first time, Coop said, âThe team closely supported us throughout the entire process so that we were able to complete the project⌠within just two weeks.â
âEffectively translating the ever-increasing amount of feedback into actionable insights is a major challenge for us. In our toolbox, Caplena is an important analytics tool that enables us to benefit from the new possibilities of digitization.â
Surveys that give customers an opportunity to provide open-ended feedback offer unparalleled insight into customer loyalty and satisfaction. Open-ended feedback also helps build valuable relationships with customers by showing them that you value their thoughts and opinions.
Caplena uses an advanced form of augmented intelligence to effectively code open-ended responses and turn feedback into actionable insight. Using Caplena, youâll be able to filter and organize customer responses into valuable categories, such as âPricing Positive,â âCustomer Service Negative,â or âUsability Positiveâ â all without manual work.
Customer feedback is an invaluable resource to your business. By gathering and assessing the sentiment of your customers with an NPS survey, youâll learn what theyâre actually thinkingâŚwhat your strengths areâŚand where youâre falling short. But collecting and evaluating feedback is only half the battle. Following up on customer feedback is essential to actually converting customers into brand advocates. In other words, itâs how you close the loop on your NPS process.
Your customer feedback is not just potential material for glowing testimonials to place on your website. Itâs actionable advice to make your business betterâŚgenerating a higher NPS and a higher number of promoters. In order to effectively follow up on feedback, you may want to group your survey results according to these NPS categories: Promoters (9 or 10); Passives (7 or 8); and Detractors (6 or below).
Itâs always encouraging to read feedback from promoters. Your promoters are living proof that your product or service has achieved its aim: To make someoneâs life a little better, whether thatâs with your natural health supplement, life-coaching business, or accounting application.
Once youâve finished enthusiastically sharing positive feedback with your coworkers, stakeholders, and friends/family members, start the process of assessment and evaluation.
This involves sifting through potentially thousands of surveys to identify common keywords, organizing feedback based on positive and negative responses, and then identifying themes that provide insight. For example, you may see that many of your promoters commented positively on your pricing. Gaining this insight lets you know that your pricing is a strong point, and you may want to think twice before changing it. A lower price point may generate a higher retention rateâand ultimately, produce more profits.
Although your passivesâ ratings did not ultimately factor into your NPS, you may still want to consider their feedback as actionable advice. Did any passives offer concrete opinions or strategies on how you might improve your product, service, or customer experience? How did they rate specific aspects of your business? Looking at where you fell short of (or barely met) their expectations can help you understand why some customers are contentâbut not thrilledâwith your business.
Now for the bad news: Feedback from your detractors. Take a look at what your less-than-satisfied customers have to say about your product or service, and filter out common themes. While there may always be the odd irrational customer, many of your detractors may share feedback with you that helps you highlight and hone in on your weaknesses and blind spots. For example, you might identify a common trend of dissatisfaction with your online customer support. Considering that this trend has potentially turned a portion of your customer base into detractors, youâll want to take immediate action to improve your support.
Following up on your survey feedback isnât limited to acting on the advice youâve been given. Youâll also want to follow up specifically with the survey takers themselves, including all three subsets: promoters, passives, and detractors.
When customers take the time to fill out a surveyâand provide open-ended feedbackâyouâll want to make the effort to thank them. Include a âThank youâ page or email to follow up immediately on the survey. You may even want to include a special promo code as a gesture of gratitude.
Beyond a generic âthank youâ page, you may want to go the extra mile and personally follow up with a subset of satisfied survey takers. Make a phone call, mail a handwritten note, or send a personal email to respond to their specific feedback. For example, if a survey taker was pleasantly surprised by the personal care shown to her during a support phone call, make a follow-up phone call to continue ensuring that sheâs satisfied with your product or service. Following up with promoters will help you to make sure that they are thrilled with your brand (and willing to talk about it with others).
Ideally, youâll want to follow up with detractors via phone call, to communicate your concern with their dissatisfaction and investment in making things right. Even large companies like Charles Schwab and Apple make an effort to contact every detractorâideally within 24 hours of the NPS survey. Demonstrating this kind of willingness to make things right could even turn a detractor into a promoter.
Ask survey takers who showed particular enthusiasm for your brand to share the good news with friends and family. You can make this easy by providing social media links, or even offering a promo code or bonus for every referral they make. The whole point of NPS is to boost customer advocacy, right? Take this opportunity to encourage promoters to become your marketing mouthpieces. If your product or service has significantly improved their lives, theyâll be happy to make recommendations to others.
Personal follow-up could become a key for you to raise your NPS and convert more customers into promoters. Even though you may not be able to do this with a huge portion of your customers, the excellence and commitment that it demonstrates could convert into a better reputation (and generate positive online reviews and word-of-mouth marketing).
Following up on your feedback involves your stakeholders as well as your customer base. Different departments within your business, as well as investors and partners with your company, will want to know concrete details about how your customers are responding to your product or service.
Take a look at how your open-ended feedback and NPS have changed over time. Ideally, youâll have seen increased customer satisfaction and more enthusiastic feedback. Create a report with this information to show invested stakeholders how your product or service has improved in customer satisfaction and loyaltyâand how their investment is paying off.
If youâve identified common themes in your open-ended feedback that concern specific departments (such as design, marketing, or tech support), youâll want to find a way to deliver this information in an actionable way to responsible stakeholders. Ideally, NPS feedback should help your team members honestly assess performance within their respective departments, and make changes if necessary.
In order to properly close the loop on your NPS process, youâll need to be able to organize, filter, and assess open-ended feedback produced from your follow-up question (i.e. Please explain your answer, or What could we be doing better?). However, organizing and evaluating open-ended feedback can be a massive challenge, especially on a larger scale. Using an AI-powered tool like Caplena can eliminate hours of labor from this task. By applying natural language processing (NLP) to the survey results, such as text poll and SMS surveys, to efficiently sort and identify keywords, Caplena makes it easy to assess feedback from promoters, detractors, and passivesâŚand make better decisions about the critical step of NPS follow-up.
Nowadays, every company or business needs a customer survey. A customer survey â especially an easily accessible online survey â can give owners a greater understanding of what makes their customers happy, and what makes their customers unhappy. What sentiment do your customers reflect? It can provide valuable insights into improving a product or service, give feedback on a new feature, or let owners know how theyâre performing in the area of customer service, price, quality, and more. Most business owners and entrepreneurs would agree with all of this.
The trouble is, where do you start with creating a customer survey? Designing a survey that customers will actually engage with and that will provide valuable insight is no small feat. What kinds of questions will you ask? Which metrics are you looking for? Will you include open-ended questions?
While the options can seem overwhelming, keeping your core motives in mind is key to success. You need to accomplish two things: Feedback that will provide you with the insight you need to improve your product or service and grow your business; and continued customer engagement with your survey.
Thankfully, there is a solution: A 2-question customer survey.
Including just 2 questions on your customer survey might seem a little foolish, at first. It might feel like a waste of time, to go through all the effort to create a customer survey, engage with your customers, and then ask only 2 questions. You may have a list of 10-15 questions (or more) that youâre dying to ask your customers and feel that 2 questions simply wonât cut it.
Trust us on this one: When it comes to customer surveys, less is more.
All of your burning questions about a product update, frequency of use, a particular feature, price, and what customers love (and hate đŹ) can be answered in 2 basic questionsâŚ
The first question youâll want to ask is for NPS.
Many people confuse NPS with CSAT â customer satisfaction. But the core distinction between these two metrics is that NPS measures how likely a customer is to actually recommend your product or service to a friend or family member, not simply how satisfied she or he is with your brand. NPS is a key metric because it helps you predict and understand how word-of-mouth marketing will benefit â or detract from â your brand.
Your question to gather NPS feedback might be something like this:
How likely are you to recommend __ to friends or family?
Then, give customers a scale of 1â10 to choose from â 10 being âextremely likelyâ and 1 being ânever.â
Finally, youâll calculate NPS by subtracting the number of âdetractorsâ (those who rated you less than a 7) from âpromotersâ (those who rated you a 9 or 10). Anyone who rated you a 7 or 8 is considered âneutralâ and will not factor into your final score.
% of promoters – % of detractors = NPS
By industry standards, an NPS above zero is considered okay. But ideally, youâll want to aim for 50 or above (anywhere above 70 is fantastic). Detractors tend to have far more influence on your brand than promoters do, and youâll want happy, enthusiastic customers to far outweigh the unhappy few who will badmouth your product or service onlineâŚand potentially influence hundreds or even thousands of potential customers from ever giving you a chance.
Your NPS is a powerful indicator of not only how satisfied customers areâŚbut how they act as either positive or negative leverage for your brand.
Following up your NPS score with an open-ended question gives your customers an opportunity to explain their answer to the previous question, and to give you additional other feedback that may prove useful. Here are some ideas for open-ended questions you might want to ask:
By asking one of the friendly questions above â or something similar â you give your customers an opportunity to share their own creative feedback with you. You also build valuable relationships with your customers by showing them you care about and value their personal opinion.
In any case, keep your question simple! Simple questions produce straightforward answers, with authentic, high-quality information.
Most importantly, gathering customer feedback this way helps you to gain insight into driver analysis â in other words, the factors that have the biggest impact on customer loyalty and satisfaction, such as price, customer service, design, and usability.
For example, your customers might be thrilled with the design of your product, but disappointed with your customer service. This can cause a significant dip in overall customer satisfaction, an insight that you can gain from asking an open-ended questionâŚbut not simply asking for a score.
If analyzing open-ended feedback seems intimidating, hang with us for just a minute â weâre getting to that part soon. đ
One of the greatest challenges of designing an effective survey is keeping survey-takers engaged. Unfortunately, even when your customers respond to your survey, they may get bored, frustrated, or simply lose interest and abandon your questions, which leaves you without the valuable feedback you need to improve your product or service.
A 2-question survey effectively reduces churn rates by keeping your survey quick and easy. When customers only have two questions to answer, theyâre less likely to abandon your survey, and probably more likely to engage with your survey in the first place.
Not only that but customers like answering open-ended questions!
In fact, a recent study was performed where customers were asked eight open-ended questions about vastly different topics, ranging from what customers liked/disliked about their spouse to what they liked/disliked in a mobile carrier. Despite its considerable length, 90% of the respondents reported enjoying the survey because of the open-ended questions â because they were able to use their own language to give their opinions and explain their preferences.
Analyzing your open-ended feedback can be a challenge. It could take an entire dayâs worth of labor to sift through hundreds â or even thousands â of open-text responses. And while conventional NLP software or survey analysis can help, youâll still have to take the time to define rules by hand in order to account for typos, misspellings, and other mistakes.
Caplena can help you save time, money, and the extra effort of coding and understanding open-ended responses. It effectively performs analysis with a combination of human intelligence and artificial intelligence, relying on both to produce accurate, valuable insights for you. First, Caplena can be used to understand the open-ended questions on an in-depth level. Then, it âsplices and dicesâ the results in an easy-to-understand visual chart that shows what factors are more linked to happy or unhappy customers â identifying that critical correlation analysis that will help you to understand whatâs really affecting your overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.
If youâre currently using a longer customer survey (or no survey at all), consider integrating one of these simple 2-question surveys into your site. You may be surprised to find âhiddenâ drivers of success in your customer feedbackâŚand learn how to significantly improve your product, site, or business practices to boost outcomes.
Every effective entrepreneur, CEO, or business leader knows that asking for customer feedback is not an optional step to success.
As the saying goes, âThe customer is king.â Thereâs only one way to know what your customers really want and think: Ask them.
Customer feedback is about more than knowing whether your customers give your product three stars or five stars (although that is a valuable insight). Itâs also about gathering the information that can help you make critical decisions and improvementsâŚ.insights that only an objective, paying customer can provide.
Customer feedback can potentially:
Not only that, but customer feedback will help you gather and analyze insights to help you offer a product or service that is better than those of the competition. Knowing what your customers want, value, and donât like will help you continue to hone your product or service, make adjustments where necessary, and refine your vision and future plans.
The bottom line is: You need customer feedback.
But in a world where potentially hundreds of âasksâ are made of consumers and customers alike, how do you ask for feedback â and get an authentic, honest response?
You can gather customer feedback in a number of ways â such as with a mail-in survey or a phone survey. But the most efficient and popular strategy for collecting feedback is online.
One option for collecting customer feedback is to create an online floater. A floater is a box that âfloatsâ over your homepage instead of opening a new window. Using a floater has multiple benefits: It allows your customers to effectively remain on your homepage, and it doesnât clutter up their desktop with âpop-upâ windows. Floaters can be designed either as an overlay â appearing over the center of your homepage â or they can âslide inâ at the bottom corner of your homepage (typically the right-hand side). While a floater in the bottom corner is less intrusive than an overlay, the latter positioning may generate a higher response rate.
Floaters typically include a simple header, such as âHow are we doing?â and include the survey itself â such as a star rating that customers can quickly fill out. Or it might link to your customer survey on a different page.
Another strategy for asking customers for their feedback is to use a chatbot. Chatbots might use artificial intelligence to engage with and respond to your customers in an authentic way, generating human-like responses to their text. The option to speak to a chatbot will typically appear in the bottom corner of your homepage. If customers choose to respond to the initial request for feedback, they can then hold a âconversationâ with the chatbot, providing their opinion and satisfaction rating.
The advantage of using a chatbot is that it feels more personal to the customer than filling out a form. And of course, you can pitch your âbotâ as a real person, not as a robot. Using a face and name makes customers feel like they are authentically building a relationship with your brand or company.
A feedback box is an effective but perhaps underutilized strategy for collecting and analyzing feedback. Feedback boxes may appear at the bottom of a specific page, providing a field and a simple question for customers to answer, such as âHow can we improve your experience on this page?â
Finally, you may want to reach out directly to customers with an email campaign designed specifically to collect feedback. The advantage of using email to collect feedback is that it feels like a personal follow-up to a purchase or user experience, and lets customers know that you really value their thoughts and opinions.
Your email subject line should be warm and friendly, like âTell us what you think of _!â
Itâs not very complicated to build a feedback mechanism for your site.
The tricky part is to actually get customers to take the time to respond and be thoughtful in their answers. The more feedback you have, the deeper insight you will gain into customer behavior, customer preferences, and whatâs working and whatâs not. The more feedback you have, the more accurate your insights will be. For example, check out what we discovered about Adidas and Nike stores based solely on their customer feedback.
Just like making a sale, youâll need to be strategic in how you ask for feedback â and even in what you offer in return.
As mentioned above, one effective strategy for asking for feedback is to use a floater. But if your floater appears within the first few seconds of a customerâs experience on your homepage, chances are good that youâre only going to frustrate and annoy your customer base. If you choose to use an overlay, time the floater to appear just as a customer chooses to leave a page. Or, time the floater to appear after a customer makes a purchase, giving him or her a chance to respond to the buying experience.
An email campaign asking for feedback should not be sent immediately after a customer makes a purchase, but after an adequate amount of time to test out the product.
Just as with your marketing materials, youâll need to be strategic with the copy you use in collecting customer feedback. If your copy is too formal, lengthy, or complicated, customers will be turned off, and less likely to engage with your survey. On the other hand, if your copy is unclear or too brief, customers wonât know what you want them to do. Be friendly and straightforward. Your header might say, âTell us how weâre doingâ followed by a subhead, âRate Your Purchaseâ and an option for a star rating. Or, âWeâd love your feedback! Click below to tell us how weâre doing,â followed by an option for open-ended feedback.
Using warm, friendly copy will also set the tone for feedback â so that customers are likewise genuine in their responses.
Plus, itâs a less intimidating and quicker format for customers to use, increasing the likelihood that they will take the time to respond. The key is to ask one âratingâ question, such as âRate __ from 1â10â and one open-ended question.
An open-ended question gives your customers the opportunity to give their honest opinion, provide their creative insights, and voice complaints, concerns, or even compliments. Analyzing open-ended feedback can be challenging and time-consuming, but a text analysis tool like Caplena can help you organize your data and automate the process while giving you an in-depth understanding of the insights youâve gathered.
A final strategy to motivating customers to respond to a survey is to offer something in exchange for their time â a free report or discount code, for example. Offering an incentive also builds relationships with your customers, communicating that you are there to give back to your customers.
The value of your customer feedback strategy cannot be underestimated. Making an effective ask of your customers and collecting plenty of data are both critical to your understanding of what your customers want. More honest customer feedback translates to deeper insights into how customers are responding to features of your product or service, what can be improved, and what can be discarded.
Ultimately, feedback will help you make better decisions â helping you to become a better, more profitable, and more competitive business.