Feedback Is Everywhere—Are You Listening?

The Ultimate Guide to Omnichannel Feedback Collection

Intro

Customer feedback is everywhere. Customers share their thoughts and feelings through traditional surveys, app store reviews, and mobile apps or websites. Since every customer has unique behaviors and preferences, it’s essential for organizations to provide feedback opportunities across the spectrum of these channels.

However, many organizations struggle to collect feedback that they can act on from multiple, let alone all, customer touchpoints.

That brings us to the topic of this guide: omnichannel feedback. 

In this guide, we:

  1. Explore the concept of omnichannel feedback and discover how to effectively collect and analyze customer feedback across various channels.
  2. Dive into the challenges and opportunities presented by a changing feedback landscape.
  3. Learn what strong omnichannel feedback programs look like and discuss the benefits these programs provide to organizations.
Section 1

What is Omnichannel Feedback?

Omnichannel feedback refers to a comprehensive approach to collecting customer feedback across multiple channels. This strategy enables organizations to gain a better understanding of customer sentiments and experiences, regardless of how or where the customer chooses to share their feedback. Customers have unique preferences for how and where they share feedback, so meeting them on their preferred channels is key to gathering the best insights possible.

Research indicates that 51% of customers expect organizations to solicit their feedback across all channels. However, without an effective omnichannel feedback strategy, many organizations only capture insights from about 1% of their customers. This means they’re missing the voices and opinions of 99% of their customer base!

An effective omnichannel feedback program offers several key benefits:

  • A holistic view of the customer journey
  • Comprehensive insights
  • Data-driven innovation
  • Faster, more confident decisions

Core Customer Feedback Channels

Traditional Online Surveys
Mobile Apps
Websites
Chatbots and Message Centers
Social Media
App Store Reviews
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Introducing Alchemer

Collect customer feedback anywhere and everywhere
Alchemer gives you easy and practical ways to collect feedback during moments that matter, whether they happen in a survey, on your website or app, or in a third-party channel. 
Section 2

The Customer Experience Landscape is Changing

Over the past few decades, organizations have undergone significant transformations, largely driven by digital innovation and the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence. No industry or department has been untouched by these changes and technology isn’t the only thing evolving. Customer demographics, behavior, and preferences are also shifting.

Amid all this change, omnichannel feedback collection has never been more critical, attainable, and impactful.

A Digital-First Feedback Landscape

At Alchemer, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about Digital Transformation and its impact on CX. More than 65% of customer interactions now happen virtually rather than in-person, up from 25% pre-2020. (McKinsey & Company).

With so many interactions taking place digitally, organizations need a feedback strategy that spans the entire customer experience. Organizations that have tools in place to collect and analyze feedback from mobile apps, websites, and app stores are seeing a much higher ROI from their CX programs.

Business is Fundamentally Changing
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of business is now conducted entirely online

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of all web traffic now comes from mobile devices

0 %

of retail purchases take place online in 2024

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of shoppers shop online at least once a week

Sources: IBIS Worldwide, Statista, and Forbes

Demographics are Changing and Customer Behavior With It

Customer behavior is also changing, and organizations must evolve their strategies to ensure that every voice is heard, no matter the customer’s age or typical behavior.

Millennials now make up the largest share of the U.S. population at 22% and combined with Gen Z are over 40% of the population. As older generations age, this large buying group will only become more important.

These younger generations are highly tech-savvy and accustomed to interacting in real-time through social media polls, chatbots and message centers, or mobile app surveys. For them, feedback is not just a transactional exchange, it’s a two-way conversation!

As customer behaviors and expectations continue to evolve across generations, the importance of omnichannel feedback programs will only grow. Organizations that embrace a multi-channel approach — one that spans from digital to traditional — will be able to better serve the needs of a diverse customer base.

Personalization Is Now the Expectation

Personalization is no longer just a nice touch, it’s an expectation. 71% of customers expect personalization and are 78% more likely to make repeat purchases from organizations that personalize messaging and experiences.

Personalization is more than just great Netflix recommendations or highly targeted ads. It’s about recognizing your customers as individuals and meeting them where they are, with relevant interactions that feel valuable for the end-consumer. That’s where targeting and personalization come together.

Effective targeting allows you to deliver personalized experiences at-scale. It’s about knowing when and how to engage customers, while triggering feedback requests based on real-time actions. For example, target customers with a feedback request after they’ve had a positive interaction with customer support or ask for input on a product they’ve recently purchased.

By using data to guide when and how you ask for feedback, you greatly increase the likelihood that the questions are relevant and timely, making experiences feel more personal.

Section 3

What Does an Omnichannel Feedback Program Look like?

The need for an omnichannel feedback strategy is clear. Let’s look at what a successful omnichannel feedback programs requires:

  1. Clear program ownership
  2. Omnichannel feedback integrates into other systems
  3. Centralized analysis process

Clear Program Ownership

By nature, wide-ranging feedback programs touch a lot of departments including customer experience (CX), marketing, product, and support. Establishing clear ownership and defined roles for each component of the program is essential. Clear ownership helps ensure accountability, facilitates effective communication, and enables teams to work together.

Different approaches to ownership of omnichannel feedback programs have their pros and cons. For instance, when marketing leads the program, it can ensure feedback aligns with brand messaging and customer engagement strategies but may overlook operational issues like product functionality or support quality.

If customer service takes charge, the focus will likely be on service-related feedback and issue resolution, but it may miss insights from pre-purchase or product experience.

A cross-departmental approach brings broader perspectives and ensures feedback is acted on across the entire customer journey, though maintaining alignment between teams can be challenging.

Many organizations choose to appoint a senior leader, like a Chief Customer Officer, to over-see omnichannel feedback programs. This role coordinates with key departments like marketing, customer service, product, and sales, ensuring feedback is shared and acted upon consistently.

Whatever approach you employ, it’s important that the department, team, or leader communicates with marketing, product, customer service, and everyone in-between, because everyone benefits from understanding what customers want, need, and struggle with.

Customer Feedback Integrates Into Other Systems

The most successful omnichannel feedback programs leverage integrations with other critical business systems. By connecting feedback tools with CRMs, marketing automation tools, and product management platforms, organizations create a seamless flow of information and put feedback in the hands of those that can act on it. Connecting customer feedback to operational, behavioral, and transactional data enhances the ability to understand the full customer journey, take personalized action, and make targeted improvements.

Alchemer’s Integration Story

Alchemer knows that every organization, and department within, has different processes, software platforms, and goals. That’s why we’ve made it easy for organizations to connect feedback data into their platforms and processes in a way that makes sense for them, putting feedback in the hands of those who can take action on it.

For example, whenever an Alchemer survey is completed automatically push that feedback into your CRM to update customer records. Or automatically update an Excel doc or Google Sheet every time you receive feedback!

Icons of popular business tools and software, including Salesforce, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Tableau, Oracle, Power BI, and Alchemer, representing seamless integration and collaboration for enhanced workflow solutions.

Centralized Process for Analysis

Far too many businesses collect customer feedback and then let it sit. To truly leverage feedback as fuel for your business, it must be analyzed critically to uncover what customers want, need, and feel.

In omnichannel feedback programs, direct feedback (like surveys or support tickets) and indirect feedback (like social media comments or app store reviews) require different analysis methods.

  • Analyzing Direct Feedback: Direct feedback is explicit and structured, allowing for faster analysis of specific issues or sentiments. Quantitative data from rating scales can be easily tracked and trended over time, while open-ended responses can be processed using text analytics tools to identify common themes.
  • Analyzing Indirect Feedback: Indirect feedback is unsolicited and often unstructured, necessitating more sophisticated analytical approaches. AI-powered open-text analysis tools are essential in extracting key themes and trends from indirect feedback, while also capturing the context and nuance of the feedback provided.

A centralized analysis process ensures that both direct and indirect feedback are considered together, providing a comprehensive, unified view of customer insights. Platforms like Alchemer, which can collect, consolidate, and analyze all open-text feedback in one place, enable teams to prioritize actions based on a full understanding of customer sentiment.

Omnichannel Programs by Team

While the best feedback and CX programs are cross-departmental and have clear ownership, there are unique benefits for each team across your organization.

Successful omnichannel feedback programs help marketing teams gain a clear understanding of customer sentiment and engagement across their website and app. By tracking customer behavior and identifying loyal users, marketing teams can segment their audience and create more personalized, relevant campaigns. Indirect feedback from review sites is especially valuable for marketers because it often reveals new trends and insights about competitors—without ever having to ask customers directly!

These insights allow marketers to refine their strategies, ensuring they meet customer needs and enhance overall engagement with the brand.

Product teams benefit immensely from omnichannel feedback programs, as they provide valuable insights into how customers are interacting with products. Feedback from app reviews, surveys, in-app prompts, or website forms helps identify pain points, missing features, or usability issues that customers are experiencing. Open-text feedback, both direct and indirect, is particularly valuable because it often reveals issues or suggestions that product teams might not think to ask about.

This information is crucial for prioritizing product improvements and aligning development with customer needs.

For instance, when launching a new product version or feature, collecting immediate feedback through in-app surveys or post-purchase emails helps the product team assess customer satisfaction and iterate quickly.

Omnichannel feedback helps CX teams get a comprehensive view of the customer journey across all touchpoints. Whether through chatbots, customer service interactions, or post-interaction surveys, CX teams can pinpoint areas where customers are encountering friction or feeling delighted.

How do I Manage All of This New Feedback?

The days of all feedback coming from a survey or two are over. Now feedback is everywhere and as organizations adopt omnichannel strategies, they often find themselves inundated with more feedback than ever before. For example, short one-click in-app feedback prompts have an average response rate of 90%, while in-app surveys typically have a response rate around 13%.

In-App Response Rates
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One-click in-app feedback prompts

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In-app surveys

Managing this volume effectively is, at times, daunting, especially if teams lack the necessary resources to analyze and act on feedback.

To tackle this challenge, organizations should employ AI-driven analytics tools that can sift through large amounts of data, highlight key insights, and prioritize feedback that requires immediate attention.

Here’s how AI makes omnichannel feedback programs more impactful:

  • Aggregated Insights: AI enables organizations to view feedback from various sources in a unified dashboard. A holistic view of feedback helps organizations identify overarching trends and sentiment shifts, allowing for faster, better-informed decisions.
  • Generative AI Summaries: Advanced AI features distill vast amounts of feedback into concise summaries. These summaries provide actionable insights, highlighting key themes and areas for improvement, without overwhelming teams with data.
  • Sentiment Monitoring: With AI, organizations can track changes in customer sentiment in real-time across different feedback channels. This capability allows organizations to respond promptly to shifts in customer perceptions, enhancing the overall customer experience.

Remember, successful omnichannel feedback programs depend on collaboration among different teams. Each department, be it marketing, product development, or CX, has unique use cases for omnichannel customer feedback, along with their own desired outcomes.

Establishing regular cross-team meetings and integrating feedback into other business systems helps ensure data doesn’t stay siloed, insights are communicated effectively, and that action plans are aligned across the organization.

Turn Noisy Text Feedback into Actionable Insights

With feedback coming from everywhere in today’s omnichannel world, managing the volume can be overwhelming. Alchemer Pulse helps you sift through large amounts of feedback, turning noise into actionable insights. Powered by AI, Pulse instantly analyzes open text feedback across all channels, highlights key trends, and helps you prioritize what matters most. Custom dashboards, real-time sentiment tracking, and automated alerts help you act on customer feedback faster and smarter, no matter where the feedback is collected.

Section 4

Benefits of Omnichannel Feedback Programs

Holistic View of the Customer Journey

Capturing feedback across all touchpoints provides a comprehensive understanding of the customer experience. Think about it, would you feel more confident making business decisions with a comprehensive view of the customer journey, or just a glimpse of it?

Each feedback channel provides unique insights into different stages of the customer journey. By analyzing feedback from diverse sources, organizations identify pain points and strengths at every stage, from initial awareness to post-purchase.

This holistic view enables organizations to map out the customer journey more accurately.

Insights Necessary to Improve Every part of the Customer Experience

Omnichannel feedback programs allow organizations to gather insights that are essential for refining every aspect of the customer experience. This information is crucial for tailoring products, services, and communications to meet customer needs effectively.

Whether it’s enhancing product features based on app feedback, improving service quality from support interactions, or refining marketing messages based on social media sentiment, omnichannel insights empower organizations to make informed adjustments that elevate the overall customer experience.

Data-Driven Innovation 

The aggregation of feedback across various channels fosters a culture of data-driven innovation. By systematically analyzing customer input, organizations can uncover trends, anticipate market shifts, and identify emerging customer needs. This proactive approach to innovation helps organizations stay ahead of competitors and adapt to changing consumer demands.

Additionally, utilizing advanced analytics and AI tools enables organizations to distill vast amounts of data into actionable insights, driving strategic decisions that fuel product development, marketing strategies, and overall business growth.

Faster, More Confident Decisions

With an omnichannel feedback program, organizations can make faster, more informed decisions. By having access to a wealth of data from multiple sources, teams can quickly identify what’s working and what’s not.

The confidence that comes from having a comprehensive understanding of customer sentiments helps teams advocate for changes with stakeholders, leading to a more cohesive approach to customer-centric decision-making.

Where Do I Start? 

Omnichannel feedback programs aren’t built overnight. It’s a gradual process that builds over time:

Start building out your survey strategy

Begin by focusing on traditional online surveys. Develop well-crafted, targeted surveys that capture essential customer feedback.
Learn more about Alchemer Survey

Incorporate digital channels

Expand your feedback collection to include digital touchpoints. Implement in-app surveys, website feedback forms, and message centers.
Learn more about Alchemer Digital

Level-up your analysis tools

Invest in AI-powered analytics tools to process and analyze feedback from multiple channels.
Learn more about Alchemer Pulse

Add feedback automation and integrations

Implement automation to streamline your feedback processes and integrate insights across your organization.
Learn more about Alchemer Workflow

Continue iterating and improving

Regularly review and refine your omnichannel feedback strategy. Use the insights gained from your various channels to identify areas for improvement in your products, services, and customer experience.

Summary

Let’s put it all together

Today, omnichannel feedback collection is not just an option—it’s a necessity for organizations.

1. Embrace Omnichannel Feedback

Organizations must collect feedback from a variety of channels—email, apps, websites, and social media—to gain a comprehensive view of customer sentiment. With new technologies and evolving customer behavior, omnichannel feedback collection is more critical, attainable, and impactful than ever before.

2. Personalize Every Touchpoint

Every piece of feedback you collect should inform a more personalized customer experience. From personalizing surveys and targeting the right customers to segmenting feedback by customer behavior, personalization allows you to build deeper insights and better products, services, and marketing strategies.

3. Navigating the Volume Challenge

As feedback channels multiply, managing the sheer volume of data becomes a challenge. However, with the right AI-driven analytics tools, businesses can centralize feedback, identify key insights, and act quickly to address customer concerns or enhance experiences.

Remember customer feedback is everywhere! It’s time to start listening and Alchemer is here to help.

Alchemer is a true omnichannel feedback platform that gives you easy and practical ways to collect feedback during moments that matter, whether they happen in a survey, on your website or app, or in a third-party channel. Ready to learn more?

Alchemer has decades of experience helping brands turn feedback into action.

In this article

Customer feedback is everywhere. Customers share their thoughts and feelings through traditional surveys, app store reviews, and mobile apps or websites.

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