3 ways customer feedback software can improve the customer experience

What is customer feedback software? Imagine a magical place where you can see and have insight into all customer feedback in one, central location—whether that feedback came from email, phone calls, chats, or even social media comments. This enchanted, centralized forest of feedback and user suggestions enables support agents to interact with online customers on active support channels and to work together within a single software solution. Both customers and agents can offer knowledge.

And feedback is power. Feedback can be measured to see which channels are the most popular and which need to be optimized to meet your company goals. The magic of customer feedback software is that you can gather feedback from every support channel to measure, analyze, and improve your company’s customer satisfaction with feedback software and management tools. Below, you’ll find other ways in which customer feedback software can help your business.

3 ways customer feedback software can help your business

1. Provide trusted and transparent support at scale

Customers want accurate, real-time support, but that can be challenging to provide at scale. By leveraging your customers and product experts to provide many-to-many support, you have support that can be used time and time again. When users or agents answer questions in a support community, they help to create a user-generated knowledge base full of information that can help others. This ability to reach many users at once can be particularly helpful when dealing with emerging issues, new features, or product updates, as customers often have lots of feedback or similar questions. Particularly savvy companies will take insight from great responses to frequently asked questions and integrate those answers into their official knowledge base.

Empowering your customers to connect with each other enables them to directly help each other, share tips and tricks, inspire and learn from each other, and codify best practices for issues as they emerge. With the right feedback software, moderators and support agents can hang close by to ensure conversations move in a productive direction, and needs can be escalated to them to enable more complex support when needed.

2. Improve self-service with crowdsourced and expert content

If customers want to talk about your product online, they’ll find somewhere to do it. It’s easy to turn to social media or third-party forums, which can be a breeding ground for slanted or bad advice. By providing a forum for your customers to have these discussions, you can see what they’re saying and actively moderate it to ensure the correct information is being shared and responded to. Customers will appreciate the company’s participation in these discussions, and it can set the right tone for others to follow. Furthermore, your users will let you know if an article isn’t helpful or doesn’t fully answer their questions. This is actually a great opportunity to use their feedback to improve upon your existing content. By monitoring the community and hearing their concerns and issues, you can enhance existing documentation to create a better customer experience for them.

Involving customers and product experts in the creation, ranking, and maintenance of knowledge also ensures your help-center represents a wide variety of viewpoints and aligns to your stakeholders. In addition to being more thorough, it is also more useful, since it is created from the customers’ perspective, optimized for findability and easily organized into intuitive topics and threads.

If your company offers help resources like a knowledge base or help articles, a forum can be a great place to share them in context. Your customers’ questions, discussions, or feedback can be directed towards the appropriate resources, via links or by sharing the content itself, to provide the answers they’re looking for. It’s a great chance to familiarize customers with your available support and receive insight and feedback on how effective it is.

An added bonus: when your self-service support gains prominence, SEO value increases. This means your help articles and community discussions become easier for customers to search for on Google. Support teams can take advantage of this by linking out help articles within community threads and contributing to engaging discussions with helpful solutions.

3. Build a better business with the help of your customers

Your business is successful when your customers are happy, so why not take the opportunity to understand how you can make things better for them. A community forum is a perfect way to engage customers, solicit customer feedback to gain insights, and build trust and transparency. Your support teams can be more proactive, collaborating with customers to develop best practices for emerging issues. And your internal teams will better understand the impact of their decisions on customers, benefitting from an active and engaged community that can provide quick feedback into what works and what needs more work.

By paying attention to and evaluating the conversations that happen in your community and the feedback given, you can gain insight into the product development your customers want to see. Accordingly, you can even improve your product roadmap based on that feedback. By owning your own community, you can more easily pull insights and engage with your customers about their feedback.

Customer surveys, analytics for agents’ performances, and overall customer satisfaction (CSAT) or NPS® rates—all the important customer feedback—can be compiled through feedback software. Agents can review the data to improve processes that align with company goals, like when volume spikes occur to prepare for busy service times or which support channels are the most efficient for interacting with customers.

Feedback software that can improve the customer experience

Feedback software can expand and improve your customer support by empowering customers to connect and collaborate with each other. It also empowers teams to easily solicit the help they need from an active and engaged community, creating a channel to harness customers’ expertise, aggregate best practices and promote feedback. With the right feedback software, you can create better customer experiences by creating a trusted and transparent resource that is relevant to a wide variety of end-users and can be leveraged across self-service channels. Because customer feedback is the most important feedback.

For companies that want to empower their agents and the way they utilize feedback, Zendesk provides the management tools support teams need to measure and analyze customer feedback. Manage, build, and grow your community with the right tools and resources to engage your members, organize and optimize your content and grow your community. Insight is key.

Learn more about Zendesk’s customer feedback software here.

Net Promoter and NPS are registered U.S. trademarks, and Net Promoter Score and Net Promoter System are service marks, of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.