Guest Post: The Power of Visualizing and Sharing Customer Service Feedback Data

This week we feature an article by Elliott Sprecher, a marketing communications manager at JotForm. He writes about visualizing customer feedback in order to motivate your business to succeed.

There are thousands of articles about the importance of customer service to your business’s success. You can read just as many articles about the importance of customer feedback in operating your business successfully.

But there aren’t as many sources that tell you how to aggregate and distill that all-important customer service feedback to an entire organization — much less in a way that’s digestible and creates actionable insights.

In many cases, relaying information about customer service feedback comes in the form of “We need to do X, Y, and Z better,” or “People love our customer service; keep it up!”

In other words, it’s often only the high-level takeaways from customer service feedback that are communicated to your support team (if at all). And much of the time, that’s for good reason. You don’t want to inundate team members with survey data. After all, when faced a bunch of numbers on a scale chart, how likely is it that your eyes will gloss over?

That said, it’s important to give your support team the full picture when it comes to feedback—the good, the bad, and everything in between. Every piece of feedback can be a critical stepping stone to empowering your customer service team to succeed, which, in turn, will improve your customers’ experience. The trick is to disseminate that information in a way that allows your support team to absorb it holistically without feeling overwhelmed.

Data visualization isn’t a new concept, but it very well could be a new way for you to share customer feedback with your internal teams. Rather than simply listing the results of a customer service feedback survey in binary numbers on a sliding scale, demonstrating what those numbers look like in proportion to each other in a pie chart or a graph can be a much more effective way to communicate the data.

Visualizing data makes it more comprehensible and accessible — while accurately representing all of it. Instead of simply telling your team, “We’re doing pretty well with customer service,” you can show them just how well they’re doing.

And seeing the actual data can be a big motivator.

Of course, it’s important to take into account the kind of feedback you’re asking for. Most of the time, customer service feedback is as simple as “Were you happy with your service today?” or “Please rate your service on a scale from 1 to 5.”

All this is well and good, but you may reap greater dividends by broadening your poll questions and grading customer satisfaction on a few more criteria or indicators. Though you shouldn’t include more than four or five questions, to avoid exhausting customers, the more questions you have and the more nuanced those questions, the better picture you’ll gain of your customer service success and the happiness of your customers as a whole. This can make relaying the data trickier, but using a convenient online tool can help.

The next time you conduct a customer service feedback poll — even if it’s as simple as “Were you happy with your service today?” — don’t stop when you have feedback that seems to show you’re on track, and leave it at that. Try presenting it in a way that visually tells the story behind the data. Then share it with your team. This is the result of their efforts, after all.

You might be surprised by the effect it has.

Elliott Sprecher is a marketing communications manager at JotForm. He informs organizations about the best ways to acquire and disseminate data to positively impact business. 

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes article: Going Remote: When The Office Is Optional–Or Even Obsolete