Feedback trackers are powerful tools for understanding your customers’ and employees’ thoughts, helping you enhance your business with real insights.
Keeping tabs on feedback lets you identify areas for improvement, build trust and boost overall satisfaction. It also ensures you seize valuable opportunities to strengthen confidence among your customers and your team.
In this article, you’ll learn what feedback tracking is, why it matters and how to use feedback tracker software – including a CRM like Pipedrive – to streamline your efforts.
What is feedback tracking?
Feedback tracking is the process of collecting, recording and analyzing feedback to gain insights and make informed decisions. The input could be customer opinions, employee suggestions or user feedback – each providing valuable information that can help you improve your products, services and operations management.
Here’s what this might look like for a small e-commerce business using Pipedrive as a feedback tracker:
You can organize feedback into easy-to-manage cards, making it simple to prioritize what’s important. This setup helps your team stay on top of things and promptly addresses every piece of feedback.
6 ways to collect and track feedback
Companies track feedback in a range of ways, including:
Manually. Some businesses rely on pen and paper to collect feedback through comment cards or face-to-face interactions. Tracking comes relatively cheap, although analyzing the feedback requires manual effort and may involve some human error.
Spreadsheets. Many smaller organizations use spreadsheets to track feedback. Feedback tracker Excel sheets let you enter data and create visualizations. As feedback volume increases, managing documents can become more challenging.
Feedback tracking software. Instead of sifting through piles of customer surveys and feedback forms, feedback trackers provide a centralized platform. These tools offer real-time dashboards, analytics and reporting to quickly turn feedback into actionable insights.
Online surveys and forums. Another method is to use online survey tools like Google Forms to gather feedback. They provide easy ways to analyze responses and are generally more scalable than other options, leading to higher participation rates.
Social media monitoring. With the rise of social media platforms, you can track feedback by monitoring brand mentions, comments and customer stories. Tools like Hootsuite aggregate your social data, giving you insight into customer sentiment.
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools. CRM systems like Pipedrive include features for tracking feedback as part of their customer interaction management capabilities. You can use them to correlate feedback with customer data for a holistic view.
Each tracking method suits different business needs and scales. The choice depends on the size of your organization, feedback volume, available resources and how deep you want the analysis to be.
5 reasons feedback tracking matters for small business owners
Feedback tracking helps you unlock valuable insights that drive improvement and innovation. Here are five significant benefits of feedback tracking for small business owners and startups:
1. Improved customer satisfaction
Listening to users and addressing their needs and concerns is a powerful way to enhance customer experiences. Feedback tracking helps you identify key pain points and swiftly adjust, creating a sense of trust and loyalty in your customer base.
For small businesses, improving customer satisfaction drives growth by generating repeat business and positive word-of-mouth.
2. Enhanced products and services
Regular user feedback provides a product roadmap and guide for service improvements. It highlights what’s driving customer acquisition and retention and what’s pushing them away. With this insight, you can guide product development, innovate smartly and stay ahead of market and sales trends.
Enhanced product and service offerings help attract and retain customers, setting small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) apart from competitors.
3. Informed decision-making
Data-driven decisions are more likely to succeed than navigating by guesswork. Feedback tracking gives you actionable data that helps you plan strategically. It ensures that your business choices align with customer needs and market realities, driving healthy business growth and profitability.
Informed decision-making helps smaller companies allocate resources better, minimizing risks and providing a better pathway to grow sustainably.
4. Increased employee engagement
Feedback tracking isn’t just for customers. Employee feedback is equally valuable and can help create a more engaged workforce. Collecting and acting on feedback to managers shows your commitment to a positive work environment, boosting morale and productivity.
As a result, engaged employees tend to have lower turnover and a stronger connection to the company.
5. Stronger risk mitigation
Timely feedback can be an effective early warning system for business issues. Proactively managing feedback allows you to address potential problems before they escalate, mitigate risks, protect your reputation and maintain customer trust during crises.
More substantial risk mitigation safeguards small businesses against potential setbacks, ensuring long-term stability.
4 free sales feedback templates
How to use Pipedrive as a feedback tracker
Pipedrive’s CRM tool is a powerful choice for tracking feedback, especially if you already use it to manage your customer relationships.
You can also track feedback in Excel by manually updating a spreadsheet, but managing feedback from multiple channels can be time-intensive and challenging. Unlike a spreadsheet or typical customer feedback tracker templates, Pipedrive simplifies feedback tracking.
If you already leverage Pipedrive for CRM purposes, integrating feedback tracking can save time and unify your data management.
Here are some of Pipedrive’s key product features that enable efficient feedback tracking.
Customization and flexibility
With Pipedrive, you can customize pipelines, stages and fields to capture specific feedback information, including customer sentiment, issue types and product suggestions. Rather than being constrained by a one-size-fits-all approach, you can create a feedback tracker to meet your needs.
Here’s a quick look at Pipedrive’s pipeline view:
How it works:
Custom pipelines and stages. Pipedrive’s customizable pipelines let you define the exact journey feedback takes from receipt to resolution. You can create specific pipeline stages for your feedback management workflow, ensuring consistency across the board.
Custom fields. Create custom fields within deals or contacts to capture precise details like feedback type (suggestion, customer complaint, praise) or priority (low, medium, high). Sort, filter and analyze feedback according to the criteria that matter most.
Tags and filters. Assign labels and apply filters based on custom fields to streamline the feedback management process and allow team members to focus on specific types of feedback or issues.
Example: A customer contacts you with feedback about a recent online purchase experience on your solar solutions store. Use customized fields to record details like product category, delivery time feedback and customer sentiment.
Create a pipeline for feedback to travel through stages like “Feedback Received”, “Analyzed for Patterns” and “Improvements Implemented”. Your team can quickly see if multiple customers face similar issues and, if so, refine the online buying process.
Activity and task management
Pipedrive’s Activities feature includes task management functionality to help you organize and execute follow-up actions for feedback. It ensures that no piece of input is left behind, attaching action items within your workflow to drive your team towards resolution.
Here’s a sneak peek at Pipedrive’s Activities feature:
How this tool works:
Task assignment. You can assign activities to specific team members, clarifying who’s responsible for addressing particular feedback. Tasks can range from sending follow-up emails to implementing changes based on feedback insights.
Activity scheduling. Schedule activities and goals like meetings, calls or check-ins related to feedback. Set these to repeat if necessary, so your team pays ongoing attention to tricky or recurring feedback issues.
Reminders and notifications. Pipedrive offers built-in reminders and notifications to alert your team ahead of task deadlines or meetings. Use these to keep feedback management on track and prevent issues from slipping through the cracks.
Example: Say you’re a tech solutions company just receiving feedback about bugs in your latest app update. You can create tasks in Pipedrive and assign these issues to developers, scheduling follow-up meetings to track progress and clear deadlines.
Data visualization and reporting
Pipedrive transforms raw data into intuitive data visualizations. You can generate reports, see feedback trends and make better decisions for your customers and employees.
You can use Pipedrive to:
Get clear dashboard views. Pipedrive provides customized dashboard views to see feedback metrics at a glance. These dashboards offer visual representations of data through charts, graphs and tables, making it easy to spot patterns and anomalies.
Generate custom reports. Create reports focusing on specific aspects of feedback, like support team response times or customer feedback types. Schedule these to run automatically and keep stakeholders informed with up-to-date insights.
Analyze trends. Compile quantitative data over time and identify feedback trends, whether recurring complaints or growing satisfaction following a service improvement.
Example: If you run an e-commerce store, you can set up custom fields to categorize common feedback issues like “delayed delivery”, “product quality” and “pricing concerns” for different product and customer types. Use the reports created to monitor trends in feedback volume, helping you prioritize and address the most critical concerns.
Here’s how you could document feedback issues in Pipedrive:
Contact management
Pipedrive’s contact management features give context to feedback within customer profiles. You can link feedback to specific contacts and get a comprehensive view of customer interactions and history, which is crucial for relationship-building.
Here’s an example contact within Pipedrive:
With feedback associated with profiles, you can tag and segment users based on criteria like feedback frequency, satisfaction levels or specific interests. Then, you’ll be able to filter and analyze feedback within key customer groups or demographics.
Example: Say you run a small hotel chain and a customer informs you about specific room preferences. You can add these preferences, alongside previous service requests, to their profile in Pipedrive. Next time they visit, you can check their profile, offer a room they’ll prefer and enhance your guest’s hospitality experience.
Automation
Pipedrive simplifies feedback management by reducing the manual tasks you need to perform. The platform can automate responses and actions, enhancing efficiency and maintaining high customer engagement. Simply set up a workflow like this one and you’re ready to go:
Here’s how Pipedrive can help:
Automated workflows. Set up workflows where specific actions trigger automatically when you receive feedback. For example, Pipedrive can automatically categorize feedback, move it to a new pipeline stage or assign tasks.
Automatic responses. You can configure automated responses like confirmation emails and follow-up communications. When customers send input, they’ll get timely responses and see that you take their feedback seriously.
Reminders and escalations. Set up reminders for team members who haven’t addressed feedback within a specific timeframe. Likewise, configure escalations for urgent issues to ensure a team member deals with them on time.
Example: Imagine your digital marketing business offers an online subscription service, and a customer submits feedback about a billing issue. You can set up Pipedrive automations to tag the feedback as “Billing,”, assign it to the finance team and trigger a personalized acknowledgment email to reach the customer with the next steps. If someone doesn’t resolve the issue, the manager will receive a reminder to escalate it.
Integrations
Pipedrive supports integrations and APIs for various third-party tools, including email marketing tools, customer support systems, survey platforms and more. With these integrations, you can capture feedback from multiple channels and automatically pull them into feedback pipelines.
Some of Pipedrive’s key feedback-tracking integrations include SurveyMonkey, SurveySparrow, Zonka Feedback, Postcall, Facebook Messenger, Gmail and Google Docs. You can view the entire range of integrations in Pipedrive’s app Marketplace.
Example: Say your tech consultancy receives client input through email, social media and online surveys. You can integrate Pipedrive with Gmail, Facebook and SurveyMonkey to funnel feedback automatically into your CRM. Regardless of its source, you’ll capture feedback in real time and can monitor and respond across multiple platforms without missing a beat.
7 best practices for feedback tracking
Now that you’ve seen how to use Pipedrive as a feedback tracker, let’s look into seven best practices for effective feedback tracking. Use these helpful tips as a checklist to enhance your processes, whether you use Pipedrive or another tool.
Centralize feedback data. Combine all feedback into a single CRM database to streamline management. Centralization means quick access, better organization and fewer chances of losing track of feedback.
Categorize and tag feedback. Implement a tagging system to sort your feedback by type, urgency and source. Use this system to filter and prioritize feedback, addressing the most pressing issues first.
Set up alerts and notifications. Establish alerts for new or critical feedback so your team can respond quickly to the most important problems. Alerts keep your team on their toes, preventing minor issues from becoming serious obstacles.
Review and analyze trends. Schedule consistent reviews to analyze feedback for trends and recurring themes. You might find strategic insights or feedback patterns that guide product management and service enhancements.
Develop a closed-loop system. Create a process where feedback loops back to action plans and informs customers of the outcome. It’ll show customers that their input drives change at your company, enhancing customer engagement and trust.
Integrate feedback with KPIs. Line up your feedback metrics with key performance indicators (KPIs) to see how they impact business goals. As you track changes, you’ll be able to see how your feedback management tactics benefit your overall growth strategy.
Ensure team accountability. Assign specific team members to track and manage feedback. Clear responsibilities will ensure that your team handles customers appropriately, resulting in consistent and effective responses.
Implementing these feedback-tracking practices paves the way for continuous improvement, leading to more informed decision-making and stronger customer relationships.
Final thoughts
Effective feedback tracking ensures your business stays on a steady course to success. By viewing each piece of feedback as an opportunity, you can make strategic decisions, boost customer satisfaction and drive growth.
You can streamline and enhance your feedback processes with the right tools – like Pipedrive. Start a free 14-day trial to see how Pipedrive’s CRM solution can help you act on customer input and navigate your business to new heights.
