What if you used customer feedback as an employee coaching tool?

Customer feedback, because it is precise, allows you to identify and understand the opportunities for improvement specific to each channel or each employee. 

Here’s how to put customer feedback at the heart of your company’s employee training strategy:

1. Granularity: focus on individual events/interactions per employee to allow them to learn from what they did and try something different.
2. Timeliness: feedback transfer will be more effective if it is done immediately and without prior editing. If it is done too late, the expected impact is greatly reduced.
3. Grouping: It is also possible and advisable to group feedback by support channels in order to allow teams to optimize a specific experience (chat, store, customer service) or customer journey (subscription, purchase, repair, billing, etc.).
4. Follow-up: the employee, supervisor, or manager closes the loop by calling the customer back if they:

• Reported that they have an unresolved issue,
• Took the time to provide long, meaningful, and/or constructive feedback (ideas, suggestions, questions),
• Is so angry that the company needs to defuse that anger and repair the relationship,
• Is a high-value customer.
• Coaching: Supervisors review the feedback received by a team member and suggest practices that have worked for others.

Coaches help employees respond appropriately, separating customers who offer constructive feedback from those who offer aggressive feedback. You may have reached the point of no return with a customer. Remember, the goal is not to satisfy the customer at all costs; the goal is to create profitable promoters.

Engage managers, executives, and the entire group in customer recall to put continuous improvement of the experience at the heart of the corporate culture.