Customer feedback analysis templates

As a business, gaining customer feedback is essential. Feedback can highlight core issues with your offering, drive better decision-making, and make sure you keep delighting your customers.

But how do you turn large amounts of feedback data into insights you can act on? That’s where customer feedback analysis can help. This can ensure the feedback customers provide can be heard and actioned across the company.

For a faster and more efficient process, customer feedback analysis templates can help. Here’s what you need to know about templates, why they’re faster than manual options, and how to access templates to get started.

Customer feedback analysis turns feedback from customers—which may come from multiple sources and in many forms—into something that can be understood and acted upon.

Customer feedback templates help to break down large amounts of information into usable insights that can allow clarity across an organization, drive important decisions, and lead to company growth.

When used well, a feedback analysis template can help to:

• Bring data and information into one place: customer feedback comes from a broad range of sources—surveys, call center notes, reviews, AB testing, and more—and collating that information is essential. Having one source of truth containing all the feedback ensures you don’t miss anything and you have one succinct place from which to begin the process.

• Identify trends: analysis templates can categorize and label large amounts of data to help identify core trends and themes.

• Prioritize issues: through seeing core themes and trends, it becomes simpler to prioritize issues for fixes or new-feature releases. Many customers, for example, may be providing feedback about a sluggish onboarding process. This can add weight to a proposal to management for investment in streamlined onboarding.

To succeed long term, stay competitive, and keep satisfying your consumers, customer feedback is critical. Receiving negative feedback may not be pleasant but, as Bill Gates said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Listening to customers is a critical way to ensure you’re offering the best possible customer experience. And delivering better customer experience (CX) is essential for revenue. 81% of 1,351 organizations, surveyed in 80 countries, for example, said CX is one important way to stay competitive—with 84% claiming a focus on CX resulted in a revenue increase.

In addition to boosted revenue and improved customer experience, customer feedback can have a broad range of positive effects. These include:

• Better product offerings: to deliver products that are not only easy to use but solve problems too, it’s essential to gain feedback from customers and bake that sentiment into the designs for truly customer-centric products.

• Higher NPS: the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a common way of calculating long-term customer satisfaction. Participants are more likely to be satisfied and recommend your products to others if you’re continually improving your offering for their benefit.

• Boosted brand loyalty: customers who feel listened to, while having their needs met, are more likely to stay loyal to your brand. Customer retention shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s been found, for example, that just a 5% increase in customer retention in the business can result in a 25% increase in profit due to repeat customers buying more over time.

To categorize customer information, it’s helpful to start with a few core methods. These will make it simpler to:

• Sort through the information

• Spot core themes

• Prioritize effectively

It’s also important to note that the right templates can automate this process.

Keyword analysis

Certain keywords will likely pop up throughout the feedback. Perhaps users frequently mention your app or website, or a certain feature or offering. By grouping feedback with these keywords in mind, it’s more likely you’ll be able to group different types of feedback efficiently.

Sentiment analysis

It’s also helpful to group different sentiments from digital texts, whether by positive, negative, or issue-based feedback. This will allow trends to emerge that you can address more succinctly.

Topic analysis

Topic analysis goes further than identifying just keywords. It looks at the feedback in relation to the broader context.

Analysis can help identify more specific issues. Rather than just looking at logins, payments, or onboarding, topic analysis helps dive into the precise issue. This could be a specific problem with login, a payment page request, or notes about the website documentation.

Manual feedback analysis can be clunky, time-consuming, and inaccurate—especially if you’re dealing with large data sets.

We recommend manual processing only for small amounts of feedback.

A manual customer feedback analysis typically has five main steps:

1. Collate customer feedback

This stage involves sourcing feedback from the various channels you collect from, for example:

• Support forum conversations

• Content from live chats

• Call center notes

• Support tickets

• Reviews

• Social media comments

• Survey results

Ideally, it’s best to collate all feedback into one place that acts as a source of truth. Dealing with issues in a silo may stagnate the process and overlook larger, more pressing issues.

If proceeding manually, you may like to use an Excel spreadsheet to analyze the data, although we’d recommend a more advanced platform that can give greater insights and efficiency.

2. Categorize the feedback

To get a deeper understanding of the messages from your customers, categorize the feedback. You can do this by using the analysis methods already mentioned—sentiment and topic analysis—to create helpful groups. This will help your team pay attention to common themes or patterns and will allow you to break the feedback into manageable groups for further analysis.

3. Conduct a cause analysis

To discover the root cause of a problem, it’s helpful to get more granular with the feedback. As you look through the themes and trends, ask questions such as:

• What is causing this particular issue?

• Are these issues related, or is there an alternate cause?

• What fix would resolve this?

Make detailed notes in your spreadsheet, or working platform, so that each piece of feedback is labeled with the issue and cause. This will help to put the data into smaller manageable groups that can eventually be actioned.

4. Prioritize the issues

Once you’re clear on the causes for all the feedback, it’s time to identify the most critical issues to be addressed first.

While there may be many issues raised, it’s highly unlikely you can solve them all at once.

Be efficient and consider which issue fixes will most benefit your customers and the business.

A problem with the shopping basket, for example, will be a much higher priority than a minor typo on a documentation page.

5. Turn issues into a report to drive change

Once the issues are prioritized, turn them into actionable insights. This is done by collating the analysis results into a series of actions that can be shared across the business for driving change.

This report should identify the issues, including priorities, label the core teams for action, and have detailed information about the proposed fixes. Other teams should be able to pick up this document and run with it.

While manual processes may work for smaller pieces of feedback, when gathering feedback from multiple sources, advanced tools are essential.

Manual processes are time-consuming and leave too much room for error. They also may not offer the insights that a platform designed for customer feedback can.

Customer feedback analysis templates can help your team understand large amounts of information and quickly turn them into useful insights for faster action as a business.

Templates remove the need for manual processes. They do the heavy lifting for you, setting up a workspace to show how to easily import, categorize, and analyze feedback. Labeling tools, highlighting, grouping, and channel options make feedback easy to understand.

When it comes to customer feedback templates, there are plenty to choose from. We recommend booking a product demo to understand the tool you’re using and to get the most out of it. At Dovetail, for example, we offer free trials and live demos to see how the platform can benefit you.

Ready to get started with customer feedback analysis templates? Help your team become more productive, accurate, and insightful with the following templates.

Customer feedback survey response analysis

One of the most common ways to gain feedback from customers is to ask questions through surveys. This helps your team get into the minds of customers to see what they enjoy about your offering and what they wished was better.

A customer feedback survey response analysis allows you to quickly analyze this information. This template helps teams to import feedback, categorize raw data, and capture helpful observations.

Start using the template

Product feedback analysis

To analyze whether your product is delighting customers, or needs optimization, product feedback is critical.

A product feedback template brings product information into one seamless place for deeper analysis, identification of core themes, and fast prioritization. In an agile method, using a product feedback template helps drive sprints for fast improvements.

Start using the template

App store feedback

One of the core ways to identify whether your app is performing well against competitors’ products is to analyze app store feedback. These ratings, reviews, and responses all impact whether future customers will start using your app.

The app store feedback template gathers this information to provide a structured approach to assessing and acting upon the data. Within the template, it’s also possible to affinity-map your app store reviews with Dovetail’s canvas view.

Start using the template

Mobile app feedback

User experience (UX) is critical when it comes to a mobile app offering—whether that relates to the design, content, or overall offering. To ensure you’re providing the best UX, gather feedback from customers.

The mobile app feedback template provides a logical and meaningful way of collecting user feedback and analyzing it so you can act on it as soon as possible.

Start using the template

Product onboarding feedback analysis

The onboarding process is likely to be your customers’ first interaction with your organization. And, as we know, first impressions last. Feedback can help you discover how your customers are finding your onboarding process and where you could improve.

To analyze onboarding feedback, we recommend using the product onboarding tagboard which integrates with a feedback template from Maze. You can share the Maze template with customers, gather feedback, then quickly import responses to Dovetail to analyze everything in one place.

Start using the template

Customer data can be complex to visualize without the help of advanced tools. Line charts, bar graphs, geographical maps, and pie charts can all help to bring a story to the data. Templates can also help with the simple visualization of data sets.

A request for customer feedback could come in many forms—through a survey, a follow-up email, or a prompt to review, among others. An example of a follow-up email could look like this:

Hi [customer name],

We noticed you recently purchased [insert product name] and we’d love to hear about your experience.

Feel free to respond to this email with your thoughts.

We value what you have to say—it’s all part of our commitment to deliver the best service for our customers.

Thank you,

[business name]