Customer Feedback: How to Get it, What to do With It
Customer Feedback: How to Get it, What to do With It
Getting customer feedback is necessary for any business that wants to understand the needs of its customers and what it takes to satisfy those needs.
This feedback is particularly true for the financial services industry. We can only provide superior products and services for our customers if we understand how they view those products and services in their lives. We must deliver those services to meet their expectations and continue to loop back to ensure they are pleased with the results.
Many companies work diligently to get customer feedback across many channels but don’t effectively digest and synthesize the information into usable insights that improve and advance company objectives.
Let’s take a quick look at the possible feedback channels for the mortgage industry, how to mine those channels for insights, and how to disseminate this information to improve processes effectively.
Customer feedback channels
There are both active and passive channels that you can leverage to get the information you need.
An active channel would be asking your customers to fill out a customer survey, which is truly a must-have.
Setting up focus group sessions is a way to dig more deeply into the experience of current or past customers or the expectations of random consumers. This kind of feedback is proprietary to you and is not visible to the public. The feedback from these listening sessions helps a company make informed decisions.
Whether it is a customer survey or a focus group, it’s essential to understand what you are trying to find out ahead of time. What are your objectives in gathering this data?
Do you want to create a more robust training program for your staff? Do you want to assess why customers opt for one product over another? Do you want to analyze customer pain points in the process and determine whether communication, speed, or intervention is the most effective solution to solve the problem? Each objective may require a different approach.
Passive channels include online reviews and feedback through social media channels. This information, while helpful, may be more geared towards the marketing end of your business and, of course, should be monitored to understand what the general public is seeing.
A rich source of information in the mortgage industry is the constant questions, messages, and feedback you receive from customers throughout the mortgage application process. The customer’s voice in real-time can provide insight into their thinking processes.
At Certainty Home Lending, one of the most valuable sources of information we receive is through our loan officers and our processing teammates. Our team members are our #1 asset, and we encourage and welcome their feedback in the belief that there is only one more reliable source of information about our customer experience than the honest conversations between our loan officers and their clients.
Once we gather the information we are seeking, the hard work begins. How do we mine feedback to enhance our goals and objectives?
Evaluate, Disseminate, Implement
The first task is to evaluate the data. You are not looking for a one-off complaint or an unreasonable demand for some extraordinary service but rather for emerging trends and patterns. Often, customers provide the best insights for improving services that leaders inside the company may not have considered.
The second step is to package and disseminate this information for the department that will implement the change, whether that is the marketing department, which can capitalize on feedback from customer verticals, or the human resources department, which will implement new training protocols.
And finally, speed to execution is critical, and leadership carefully monitors and follows up on the actual implementation of the plan to determine – through further customer feedback – if the changes have been effective.
At Certainty Home Lending we encourage our loan officers to be entrepreneurial in their mindset – offering them strong feedback channels for making suggestions and strong support across all departments to constantly make improvements that enhance the lives of their customers and their personal success.