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Customer Feedback: Turning Textual Data into Actionable Insights

Contributing Author
7 min read
Dec 27, 2023
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​Customer feedback, particularly raw text, holds much information that can be turned into actionable insights. 

This guide explores turning textual data from customer feedback into meaningful and practical actions for improving products, services, and overall customer experience. 

Unlike general advice or in-app surveys, actionable insights are tailor-made for each organization and are derived directly from sales data or customer feedback. 

The goal is to mine the raw customer feedback for analysis and extract actionable data to guide decision-makers in making well-informed choices. However, raw data must be categorized based on common themes or topics to be helpful. 

In this post, you will learn more about turning textual data into actionable insights and the benefits, so keep reading!

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Actionable insights

Actionable insights are meaningful conclusions that can be drawn from data analysis. They help to clarify what actions should be taken or how to approach a particular issue. 

Organizations rely on actionable insights to make informed decisions based on data. It's important to note that not all insights are actionable. 

Simply having more information or data doesn't necessarily lead to actionable insights. Insights, information, and data are unequal and don't necessarily provide the same value.

In simpler terms, data refers to raw and unprocessed information typically presented in numerical or text form. It can be quantitative and qualitative, often found in spreadsheets or computer databases.

Why actionable insights are important

Actionable insights are crucial because they help in making strategic and well-informed decisions. Such decisions can bring positive outcomes for your business. 

Unlike general coaching or advice, actionable insights are tailor-made for you and derived from your sales data or customer feedback.

Data-driven organizations rely on insights to improve their products and services. Many progressive companies today aspire to be data-driven. 

According to Forrester, 74% of companies state this as a goal, but only 29% successfully generate actionable analytics. However, it's worth pursuing.

Businesses with data-driven strategies have been shown to have five to eight times the ROI as businesses without. Actionable insights are the missing link for driving business outcomes from data.

What is raw text gathered from customer feedback?

Raw feedback refers to customer feedback that has yet to be processed, analyzed, or understood. It can be gathered from sources such as reviews or social media posts. 

This type of feedback is excellent for getting insights that will help you learn more about customer feedback, for example, their likes or dislikes about your products and services. 

To get valuable information from raw feedback, you need effective strategies to make sense of the data. 

Text analytics software is the most efficient way to gather the data. It can turn unstructured text into helpful insights.

The main goal is to mine customer feedback for analysis and extract actionable data to help decision-makers make informed decisions.

How to turn raw text into actionable insights

Automated tools like sentiment analysis can gather customer feedback and analyze the data by identifying significant trends and insights. 

These tools save time and effort, making them essential for transforming unprocessed feedback into actionable insights. 

It's important to note that not all insights gathered from analyzing customer feedback can be acted upon. 

The unstructured data needs to be organized to be used. Here are some tips for converting raw text into actionable insights.

Find core issues

The first step in changing raw feedback into actionable insights is identifying the core issues.

For example, finding customer pain points. Feedback lets you look for common themes, patterns, and recurring topics. 

This helps you understand negative feedback and act quickly. By analyzing raw feedback, you can identify and prioritize which improvements will improve customer satisfaction the most.

For example, if you find customers love the shirts' material but want new design ideas, then you can make product improvements, which is actionable feedback.

After gathering data, most companies share feedback with the product team. Listening and acting are the best ways to build customer loyalty.

Customer sentiment

You need to understand customer sentiment to learn more about how people feel about your products, services, and brand. 

Negative reviews can help you find the root cause of unhappy customers' problems, allowing you to fix them. Using customer data gathered by text analysis, you can find areas to improve and create even more positive customer experiences.

Compare your competitors 

Comparing customer feedback against competitors can help understand customer satisfaction and loyalty by identifying potential branding improvements. Plus, it can be helpful to see what other brands are doing better or worse than yours.

Collect customer feedback and categorize

Categorizing raw customer feedback based on common themes or topics is one of the most effective ways to make sense of it. 

By collecting customer feedback and grouping similar feedback, you can find patterns and trends to help you learn what your customers think or feel.

Identify patterns and trends

Data visualization is a valuable technique that allows you to easily comprehend large volumes of feedback and identify opportunities.

Using data visualization software to generate charts and graphs, you can detect patterns and trends that might not be visible in raw customer feedback surveys. This will help you understand customer feedback.

Benefits of raw text for customer feedback strategy

Turning raw text from customer feedback into actionable insights has several benefits. It gives them valuable insight into their customer's thoughts or feelings, which can help them improve the customer experience. 

This allows them to collect feedback to focus on areas where they are excellent or need improvement for their customer satisfaction score.

It will enable them to stay on top of trends and plan for problems before they arise. Feedback can improve customer experience, and text analysis is the most efficient way. 

Why is customer feedback important?

Customer satisfaction is now more critical than ever because 89% of consumers will likely buy from the business again after a positive customer service experience. 

Even if the consumer had a negative experience, there is a 78% chance that the customer will do business again with them in the future. 

It is well known that it is more expensive for companies to draw in new customers than to focus on customer retention. 

Collecting customer feedback helps keep loyal customers

Trying to bring in new customers is 5 to 25 times more costly than keeping the ones you have. 

If you Increase your customer retention by only 5%, your profits can go up around 25% to 95%. 

You can have more loyal customers by having excellent customer service, and around 3 out of 5 customers think that having exceptional customer service makes them feel loyal to the business. 

How Amazon uses raw text 

Amazon is a massive data company that uses big data technology to improve the customer experience and optimize its supply chain. 

It is expected to reach 50% market share by the end of 2023. Amazon uses consumer data to drive sales, personalize product feeds, and implement dynamic pricing. 

The primary objective of this data collection is to sell more products. Amazon uses your personal information to personalize your product feed, and on a larger scale, it uses this data to identify shopping trends, top sellers, and consumer behavior. 

This data has proven beneficial for Amazon, as the Amazon Web Store accounted for around $13 billion in revenue from the total $21 billion in revenue generated by Amazon in 2020.

To achieve maximum efficiency, Amazon employs supply chain optimization. Amazon partners with manufacturers to fulfill orders efficiently and track their inventories using data. 

Additionally, Amazon uses big data to identify the nearest warehouse to a customer to reduce overall shipping costs.

Amazon changes its prices an average of 2.5 million times a day. The primary reason is that big data platforms assess a person's willingness to purchase a product. 

The goal is to set prices based on the user's activity on the website, competitors' pricing, product availability, expected profit margins, and more. 

Prices change about every ten minutes as big data processes and updates costs. In total, this has increased Amazon's profits by 25%.

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Conclusion

Unlike general advice or in-app surveys, actionable insights are customized for each organization and are derived directly from sales data, social media, online reviews, and other quantitative feedback. Simply having more data or information does not guarantee actionable insights. 

Organizations must categorize raw data based on common themes or topics to make it truly helpful in driving actionable decisions. Remember, the key to gathering these insights is through text analysis software.

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