There’s more to customer feedback than an NPS rating. And creating ‘actionable feedback’ needs to show more than a numerical number. Here’s how we re-structured our customer feedback to deliver actionable insights which played a major role in product, marketing, and positioning.
Be pro-active in getting feedback
Being pro-active for us meant calling our customers to have an in-depth conversation and draw out as much information as possible. It’s fairly simple, but unfortunately, many of us are not prepared to call our customers in the first place — it’s out of the what many would call their, ‘comfort zone’. We started calling as many customers as we could, if they didn’t have time to go through the survey, we would make sure we would reschedule for their convenience. I realized customers who I reached out too really appreciated the personal attention.
For a customer whose contact numbers we didn’t have or did not respond, they would be put in an email sequence. The email sequence would be a 4 step process where at the very end we would incentivize them by giving a $5 Amazon voucher — inevitably the response went up by 40%. I’ve seen other organizations with very large customer bases to incentives by adding customers into a prize draw.
‘88% of our customer base responded to our feedback questionnaire.’
A few email tips on increasing the response rate
- Be personal and introduce yourself. Please avoid writing in ‘template’ format.
- Elaborate on the benefits of providing feedback (remember the feedback is for their benefit as much as yours).
- Give a quick insight into how long the feedback form will take. We realized this increased response rates.
Our limited scope
Here’s an example of a question we were asking in our earlier survey. At first, I thought these questions were great, it would us how well our on-boarding experience was coming along, right? After analyzing the results, it was obvious we were missing a crucial element.


Notice how unspecific and therefore unhelpful this question is. If we had scored 10/10, we might not have a problem, but what if our average score was 7/10? Well, there was some work to do.
All we know is that customers are having difficulties with on-boarding, but we still have no idea ‘why’. Are the customers having a hard time implementing the product? Is the on-boarding process not lining up with what they are trying to achieve? Did we not provide any social proofing?
Numerical numbers do not allow the customer to really express what was good or bad about their experience. And we cannot analyze their pain point.
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