11 Jul 2019
Effective feedback categorization is crucial for identifying customer needs and addressing dissatisfaction. By analyzing and prioritizing feedback, businesses can make informed decisions and implement impactful changes.
Categorizing feedback allows a company to identify similar opinions and prioritize addressing points of dissatisfaction.
Analyzing received feedback enables a company to understand its customers' needs and desires
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On the other hand, it highlights points of dissatisfaction that the company must address. Feedback categorization indicates priorities for resolving points of dissatisfaction. Therefore, customer satisfaction management allows for making good, informed business decisions.
A significant challenge for companies that already gather feedback is how to extract insights that will improve operations. How to determine priorities from raw customer input, and how to implement improvements in business? Anyone who has ever read some feedback knows that each customer writes "in their own language" and in their own way, making it difficult at times to find feedback that highlights the same point of dissatisfaction.
Before you begin analysis, quickly review what customers are writing in their feedback. It will be enough to skim the first 50. You will see if the opinions are very scattered or if customers are highlighting the same things. If the opinions of these 50 customers are very scattered, you may need to review more to get a good feel. Pay attention to emerging patterns and keep them in mind for the next step: categorization.
Effective feedback categorization occurs in several steps. Each piece of feedback can be assigned a type and subject it refers to. Finally, it is coded to predict appropriate action:
Read what the customer has written and note the type of feedback it is. The customer may have highlighted a usability issue, suggested a new feature, pointed out a bug, criticized employees, complained about the price, etc. If the feedback cannot be classified into any of the above types, it can also be marked as general positive, general negative, nonsensical, or other. General positive feedback includes praise like "everything was ok," general negative feedback includes very non-specific complaints like "very bad experience," and nonsensical feedback is what you don't understand.
If you receive a lot of feedback that touches on a wide range of your business, it's good to also sort it by the subject it refers to. This will help you quickly filter out feedback related to a specific part of your business. The subject can be your product or service (individual or by group, possibly just a part of the product or service – depending on the company and offering), business premises, employees, departments, communication, etc. Assigning a subject is also useful if you want to forward only relevant feedback to individual colleagues.
The purpose of coding feedback is to "translate" the customer's opinion into an improvement plan. The code must be accurate and specific enough for you to understand what the customer meant. Try to be objective, even if you disagree with the opinion.
Of course, the code is what matters most. So why determine the type and subject of each feedback? Simply to make coding easier. If you omit assigning the type and subject (which is not wrong), you will have a harder time determining the correct codes. However, if you first filter the feedback to only those of the same type and concerning the same subject, you will arrive at the correct codes faster:
If the customer highlights multiple areas for improvement (or praises them), it is advisable to mark their feedback with multiple types or subjects, and most importantly, assign one code for each highlighted point.
It may happen that during coding, you assign different codes for similar highlights. Or that you assigned the same code, but now you see that based on what was written, it should be broken down into two more specific ones. Double-check and ensure that each point of dissatisfaction truly has its own code. This is important for the next step:
Sum up how many times each code appears in your customers' feedback. A code that appears only once or in less than 1% of feedback is likely not crucial for implementing changes. The more times a code appears, the higher its priority for implementation.
Because you have defined feedback types and subjects, you will be able to forward only the information relevant to their departments or responsibilities to the people in charge. Send them the appropriate codes and indicate their priorities. Your colleagues may decide to first implement an improvement that, at first glance, was not the biggest thorn in the customers' side. When implementing changes, of course, costs and the time required for the change must also be considered, which will be best assessed by those directly dealing with the "feedback subject." What is important is that they now have all the necessary information and can start planning improvements.