How to organize customer feedback into actionable insights

Customer feedback may be your most valuable asset if your team wants to create meaningful, satisfying, and seamless experiences for customers.

Gone are the days of guesswork and creating product experiences based on assumptions. Advanced tools and platforms mean it’s simpler than ever to manage customer feedback from a range of sources and turn that data into actionable insights.

All this means that your team can use feedback to shape and curate your product experiences to fit what your customers want and need.

But how do you organize customer feedback to make meaningful changes?

Customer expectations are continually increasing. Research by McKinsey & Company shows that 71% of customers expect personalized interactions from companies. 76% are frustrated by a lack of personalization.

As these expectations grow, so does the need to gather feedback from your customers.

Unfortunately, you can’t read your customers’ minds. Relying on guesswork and assumptions can lead your team in the wrong direction. They might develop products that don’t fit a market need.

Understanding customer feedback and the “why” behind your customer’s thinking can help you decipher what will and won’t lead to a positive experience for them.

Feedback also helps you identify potential problems in your product offering, meaning you can create more satisfying experiences.

Ultimately, using customer feedback can help you provide more relevant products for customers, which will help boost your business’s bottom line.

Various types of customer feedback can help you deeply understand your customers, gain actionable insights, and ultimately offer more satisfying experiences.

Customer loyalty metrics

Discovering your customers’ loyalty can help your team understand whether your products offer true value. Low scores in this area will indicate that change is needed.

Customer loyalty metrics include the following:

• Customer retention rate measures the number of retained customers over a specific time period.

• Churn rate measures how many customers stop using your product in a given time period.

• Customer engagement measures how active your customers are with your products. This can include session time, website visits, usage, and more.

Customer satisfaction feedback

Exploring how satisfied customers are with your products is important to understand what you’re doing well and where there’s room for growth.

Types of customer satisfaction feedback include the following:

• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures the customer’s overall satisfaction after an interaction or specific experience.

• Customer effort score (CES) measures how much effort a user requires to achieve a specific result from your product offering.

• Reviews also help show how satisfied customers are with your offering and provide information about where you might do better.

Sales feedback

When customers purchase from your organization, are they satisfied and likely to purchase again? Understanding feedback around sales is essential for customer retention and loyalty. 

Helpful sales feedback includes the following:

• Sales interactions provide insight into customers’ feelings during and after a sale. Notes from the sales team, for example, can provide an understanding of how customers feel about purchasing from your organization.

• Post-purchase surveys help measure how satisfied a customer is after making a purchase.

• Re-order rates also provide a key indicator of customer satisfaction after a sale.

Customer service and support feedback

When customers have an issue or require answers to their questions, it’s helpful to gather feedback on their support experience. This can offer valuable insight into how customers feel about your organization when issues arise.

Customer service and support feedback include the following:

• Call center notes help build a picture of the customer experience when a query or issue needs resolving.

• Support tickets offer insight into the key issues your customers have and where dissatisfaction can occur.

• Follow-up surveys provide details on how customers feel once an issue has been addressed.

Customer preference feedback

What do your customers prefer when it comes to your products and offerings? Knowing this can have a big impact on your product cycle and which features you decide to prioritize.

Customer preference feedback includes the following:

• Focus group notes provide context on what potential customers do and don’t prefer from your products.

• Customer feedback forms or in-app mechanisms let your customers express their preferences directly after using the product.

• Product usage analytics help show what your customers gravitate toward and which features are used the least.

• A/B testing allows you to randomly present customers with two different versions of a feature or product and then measure which option statistically performs better in achieving a specific conversion goal.

• Social media polls on platforms like X, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn let you gauge customer preferences on specific offerings instantly.

• Feature voting allows customers to express their preferences for new features or improvements. This reveals their top priorities and helps guide product development.

With data available from such a wide array of sources—focus groups, surveys, social media comments, reviews, call center notes, and more—it can be tricky to know what to prioritize and how to organize customer feedback effectively.

Here are some ways to gain actionable insights:

• Categorize feedback.

• Understand the impact of the feedback on both customers and the business.

• Analyze the feasibility of turning the feedback into actions.

• Take into account the urgency of the feedback.

Categorizing and tagging feedback

When your team collects feedback, you’ll need to sort, categorize, and tag it to get a true overview of the data. This can help you avoid getting swamped with data and not knowing where or how to begin.

When categorizing feedback, it’s helpful to organize it by:

• Source: separate feedback from different channels for a good understanding of where different viewpoints are coming from.

• Sentiment: aim to group feedback based on whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral.

• Topic: organize feedback into groups of common themes to tackle each issue separately.

Use a centralized tool

There’s nothing worse than having a tonne of information but no easy way to access it, derive insights, and share it with others.

Manually working with data and attempting to keep it organized can be time-consuming and challenging. Having a centralized tool or platform helps simplify categorization and ensure you have all the data you need in one place.

At Dovetail, for example, we help you shift from overwhelming feedback to focused insights. With Dovetail, you can decode thousands of data points in minutes using simple categorization and tagging. Plus, all your data is housed in one easy-to-use platform for faster insights.

Consider impact and assess urgency

When organizing feedback, consider what impact it will have on your business and customers.

Consider important metrics, including customer satisfaction, loyalty, conversion rates, revenue, and competitiveness, to help you decide which feedback should be prioritized more highly.

You’ll want to prioritize the most urgent feedback over and above “nice-to-have” responses. For example, if customers are highlighting an issue with the shopping cart, that should take priority over a bug on a low-traffic page.

Considering relevance alongside urgency can ensure you organize feedback in a way that will have the biggest positive impact on customers and your business.

Having data centralized and organized will ensure you can analyze it to obtain actionable insights that will have a meaningful impact on your customers.

A best practice analysis typically involves collecting data from multiple sources and organizing and categorizing it. Once the data is prepared, there are a few main steps to follow:

1. Quantitative analysis: quantitative data involves data that can be measured. It relates to things like how much, how many, and how frequent. In quantitative analysis, your team will measure things like website visits, churn rate, engagement data, and conversions.

2. Qualitative analysis: qualitative data involves information that has qualities. It cannot be measured in numbers or quantities. At this stage, your team will review feedback qualities to tag themes, organize by sentiment, and use word clouds to group commonly used language.

3. Visualizing the data: it’s helpful to use graphs and charts to gain a visual view of the data and build a picture of the overall feedback.

4. Gain actionable insights: once the analysis has been performed, extract the meaningful and relevant insights that can be used to take positive actions in the organization. This occurs by interpreting the findings to drive meaningful action. Your team will focus on identifying trends, patterns, and key takeaways that align with user motivations and business goals.

From there, prioritize opportunities for improvement, validate hypotheses, and make data-driven recommendations to inform product decisions, strategy, and next steps.

This is where data transforms into concrete actions that can improve the user experience, optimize performance, and guide future initiatives.

Manually performing a feedback analysis can be a lengthy process. That’s why it’s helpful to rely on advanced tools and platforms to speed up and simplify analysis.

At Dovetail, we help you analyze data in minutes—not hours. Our AI-powered analysis can turn videos, recordings, documents, and feedback into shareable customer insights in moments. Use Dovetail to centralize your customer feedback, organize it efficiently, and extract the core insights for actions that will make a genuine difference for customers and your business.

The process of gaining customer feedback isn’t something that occurs once. For ideal results, the process should operate in a continuous cycle.

A customer feedback loop operates as part of a continuous discovery framework whereby your team continually gathers feedback from customers. This helps ensure that the voice of the customer is firmly and continuously embedded in the business.

A continuous discovery framework, as promoted by Teresa Torres’s book Continuous Discovery Habits, is commonly used by tech teams to perform proactive and ongoing discovery and learning. Those insights are then embedded into the product development process.

Customer feedback loops, as part of this framework, typically involve reacting and responding to feedback once a product or feature is on the market. They can help do the following:

• Highlight issues within products and features that need resolving.

• Engage customers to ensure they feel heard and seen.

• Increase customer loyalty and retention.

• Reduce customer complaints and negative customer reviews.

• Continually improve the business offering to maintain competitiveness in the market.

Keep these best practices in mind to maintain a cyclic approach to customer feedback:

Use the right channels to reach your customers

While it’s essential to gather feedback from various channels to gain enough valid data, it’s also important to ensure the channels you’re using are appropriate for your customers.

Asking a few key questions can help ensure you’re using the most relevant channels:

• Where can we find the majority of our customers?

• Is there another data collection method that would suit our customers better?

• Are we reaching customers at a suitable time for them?

• Have we considered both quantitative and qualitative data sources?

Manage customer feedback to improve your product or service

Once you see where potential issues or areas of friction are based on customer feedback, it’s essential to act and make improvements.

While you won’t necessarily make iterations based on every piece of feedback, understanding your customer’s sentiment deeply and responding to it effectively can significantly boost customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

Implement changes quickly

The faster you act when problems arise, the better. That way, you have less chance of customers switching to your competitors or telling friends and colleagues about their negative experiences. 

This is especially true if the feedback relates to high-urgency items that have a big impact on your customers.

Communicate changes to customers

Customers can’t read your mind. They’ll likely assume that your organization’s offering is the same unless you explicitly tell them it’s different. Ensuring that you communicate with your customers about updates, fixes, and new releases can help boost engagement and ensure customers can make the most of any new features or iterations.

The following best practice steps are useful for making the most of your customer’s voice and ultimately providing the best possible experiences:

• Defining clear objectives: any changes you make ought to link back to your overarching goals for the business. This helps your team stay on track and offer experiences that will satisfy those objectives.

• Prioritize data quality: data will only provide relevant insights if it’s high quality and categorized in meaningful ways. Keep in mind that using the right tools to boost data quality can make all the difference.

• Use one centralized system: teams operating in silos or data being gathered but ending up in multiple platforms with no cohesion can be very problematic. One centralized system will ensure that your data stays in one place and that everyone on the team has access to the information they need seamlessly.

• Create a feedback loop: rather than using one static system, collect customer feedback on a cyclic basis to ensure you continually make improvements for the benefit of your customers.

One core goal of product development ought to be creating useful, satisfying, and seamless experiences for customers. But to do this, it’s essential to bring the voice of the customer into the product development process.

Gathering customer feedback is one critical way to understand your customers’ perspectives and explore how you can develop better, more relevant experiences for them.

Organize data in thoughtful and relevant ways to get the most out of customer feedback. This will help your team deeply understand the information and gain actionable insights. Thus staying relevant in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Customer feedback can be gathered from a range of sources. Some of the most common ways include focus groups, surveys, call center notes, support tickets, social media comments, product reviews, usability testing, and analytics.

There’s not necessarily one best way to gather feedback. Instead, the right methods will be those that help you best understand your customers and deliver better experiences for them. These will relate to your business goals and will align with the communication methods your customers prefer.

Creating a customer feedback system involves core best practice steps.

1. Define objectives: any actions you take as an organization should relate back to your business goals and key objectives.

2. Choose feedback sources: not every feedback source will be relevant or necessary for your project. It’s helpful to narrow down the key feedback sources that will provide the right amount of information for the task at hand.

3. Gather feedback: the feedback-gathering process is made simple with one centralized platform to house, organize, and analyze data.

4. Categorize feedback: when organizing data, consider categorizing your customer feedback based on topic, source, sentiment, and priority to simplify the analysis process.

5. Analyze feedback: a feedback analysis involves assessing both quantitative and qualitative data for a true view of the information. This will enable your team to discover actionable insights.

6. Take key actions: once data is transformed into meaningful insights that explain customer motivations and behaviors, it’s crucial to act on those insights. Implement the necessary changes to improve the customer experience and address the pain points you have identified. Ensure that each action aligns with the overall strategy for enhancing satisfaction and engagement.

7. Repeat the cycle: an essential aspect of gathering customer feedback is creating a feedback loop to ensure change and improvement are continuous. This helps ensure that your customers are continually listened to and that your products meet their ever-changing needs and expectations.