How to use AI for customer feedback management in 2024 

A business is much more for and by the customer than the customer is for a business. And most businesses spend a lot of money on market research, third-party surveys, mystery shoppers, and focus group discussions to understand their market. But the most valuable source is first-party customer feedback, directly from customers. However, most businesses today struggle with the sheer volume of customer feedback that they get across channels and locations.

While processing vast data is challenging, leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) for customer feedback management can be a significant advantage. 

This blog post explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can make a difference in customer feedback management for your business. 

What is AI-driven customer feedback management?

AI-driven customer feedback management is collecting, monitoring, and analyzing customer feedback from various channels but leveraging AI technologies to automate, simplify, and scale the processes. 

Why must businesses use AI in customer feedback management?

Customer experience is the key to success much more than any product or service innovation a business delivers. And you can deliver the best customer experience if you know what your customers want. 

AI can help businesses scale their customer feedback management with: 

Automation

Collecting and processing customer feedback is a continuous process. But managing it manually can strain business resources and make the process prone to manual errors. You may miss some customers if you rely only on employees to manually send review requests, reply to them, and send surveys. 

Automating review and survey requests, responses, and categorization with AI can help businesses process large volumes of data without error. 

For example, you can create predefined conditions such as transaction completion, purchase order generation, or customer login to send feedback requests. 

Personalization 

The art of customer feedback management is much more than sending requests and responding with a thank you to all those who write to you. Customers expect personalized services and are likelier to provide feedback if they feel addressed personally. 

Using AI for customer feedback management, you can send personalized review requests (by mentioning what they purchased, for example), address customers by name in every automated response, and respond to them in their native language with built-in translation capabilities.

AI makes all this possible without hiring a large team or spending hours on this. 

Scalability 

As your business grows, you serve more customers, and the volume of customer feedback also dramatically increases. Local businesses amass a ton of feedback from different channels like reviews, surveys, social media messaging, text messaging, and so on. 

As you grow and expand to different locations and markets, the volume poses a challenge in feedback management. 

Using AI to collect and manage customer feedback, you can scale your business without a large investment. AI-driven solutions like Birdeye can help collect, respond to, and act on thousands of feedback messages without additional resources. 

For example, you can remove bottlenecks by automatically assigning all 1-3 star reviews to the respective store managers who can work on them. So even with 50+ locations, your customer feedback is actioned upon to improve customer experience. 

Processing high volume of data

All business owners want to know what customers feel about them. While most businesses invest in customer feedback collection, the volume that eventually comes in makes managing the feedback judiciously a challenge. 

Most businesses end up only acting at customer complaints and surface-level data that comes from the feedback. 

But, an AI-driven solution like Birdeye can not only help collect high volumes of feedback, but also segregate them into predefined categories, and take actions per the business’s requirements. This eliminates processing delays, missing the bigger picture, and streamlines customer feedback management. 

7 ways to use AI for customer feedback management

AI-driven customer feedback management solutions can help businesses streamline their customer feedback management processes in many ways. Almost every business process can benefit from the intervention of AI (Artificial Intelligence). Here are some ways to use AI and automation in your feedback management process: 

Customer feedback collection 

Businesses can use AI to collect customer feedback across various channels such as review sites, Google, Facebook, internal surveys, and social media. With AI, you can be proactive in feedback collection and constantly have access to information to improve your business processes. 

AI-driven solutions can help:

• Send automated review requests and surveys to all customers who interact with you. 
• Prompt customers with negative survey responses to elaborate on their concerns so that you can take action on them. For example, if a customer rates you a low score on an NPS survey, AI can modify the following question to understand the reason behind the score. 
• Send automated reminders to customers who have yet to write a review or complete a survey. 
• Launch a chatbot that collects customer feedback if the customer does not want to write a review or complete a survey. 
• Customize surveys based on the customer profile to ensure increased participation. 

Review management 

Multi-location businesses often have dedicated profiles for each location on review sites. This means that they have to deal with high review volume and often spend time reading and analyzing the contents. 

With AI-driven customer feedback management solutions like Birdeye, businesses can: 

• Quickly categorize reviews as negative or positive. AI solutions use NLP to gauge sentiment and identify the review’s sentiment. 
• Generate an appropriate and personalized response to the review. 
• Rephrase review responses to save time in proofreading and editing activities. 
• Translate non-English reviews to understand the contents and respond in the same language. 
• Identify reviews with customer complaints and auto-assign tickets to the concerned department. 
• Automatically summarize reviews to quickly understand what’s working and what isn’t

Customer feedback analysis 

Customers leave a lot of hidden gems within the many lines of customer feedback. Techniques like keyword analysis can help, but it is important to also look at many other factors to analyze feedback in its entirety. With AI feedback analysis solutions like Birdeye, businesses can:

• Analyze the entire contents of customer feedback and accurately determine what the core message is
• Identify overlapping trends to understand recurring issues and flag those
• Understand employee performance, store performance, and the success/failure of a product or service

Learn more about how to gain actionable insights from customer feedback with AI with our blog post. 

Automated survey responses 

Surveys are usually one-way communication channels that make customers unwilling to complete them. But if businesses tweak them to look like two-way communications, they can significantly improve survey performance. 

To do so, businesses can use AI to:

• Launch pulse surveys where each question is generated after a response and is linked to the previous response. This takes the form of a conversation rather than a questionnaire. 
• Send personalized responses to customers who took the survey by including their name, the survey topic, and a quick note on the impact on the business. Drafting this manually would take a lot of time, but AI can help speed up and scale the process. 

Customer feedback summaries 

Customer surveys are usually long and contain much information that helps validate and contextualize the survey responses. But, not every piece of the survey response is always essential. Sometimes, a compact summary can do wonders. 

With AI-driven customer feedback solutions like Birdeye, businesses can generate concise summaries of survey responses for quick reference. Birdeye also allows businesses to regenerate summaries to their satisfaction. 

24/7 Availability for feedback collection 

Sometimes, customer feedback comes at an unexpected time. While your customers leave reviews and fill out survey responses, there is nothing like capturing customer feedback when they are in the middle of an interaction, i.e., via chatbots. 

As much as businesses need to seek out feedback proactively, there must also be a process to collect feedback when it unexpectedly comes from customers. 

Using AI-driven solutions such as Birdeye Webchat can help businesses be available 24/7 and collect, analyze, and respond to customer feedback when it comes in. Birdeye also provides a unified inbox for every customer interaction, so this stays in with other messages, review responses, and social media conversations. 

Monitoring social media feedback

Customers like to air their opinions on businesses on social media without any constraints. This makes it very important for businesses to monitor these channels and collect feedback. 

Social media is vast, and keeping track of all brand mentions is pretty challenging if not for AI-driven solutions like Birdeye Social.

Birdeye can help:

• Analyze any conversation that mentions the business and understand the sentiment 
• Identify customer feedback posted by customers on social media and bring it to the attention of the business
• Monitor specific keywords to understand overall customer sentiment on a topic. 

How did Birdeye help businesses with AI customer feedback management? 

Real-life examples always help cement the effectiveness of any solution. Here are three businesses that leveraged Birdeye’s AI-driven solutions to grow and scale faster:

Waterstone Mortgage 

This business always valued the power of customer feedback but needed a process that allowed them to scale feedback collection and management. With Birdeye, Waterstone mortgage: 

• Switched the paper surveys to automated digital survey requests to every customer who signed loan papers with them in the last 24 hours. This increased their survey response rate to 39%
• Now sends customized surveys based on customer profiles to accurately capture meaningful customer feedback
• Uses survey feedback to open conversations with customers and learn how to make them happy. This avoids negative reviews and boosts the reputation of the business. 

Hughston Clinic

This healthcare service provider had been in business since 1950 but with less than 100 reviews. Birdeye stepped in to help them automate review requests and help them improve their feedback collection process. 

The business increased its review volume across websites by automating review requests to customers who responded to their surveys. While it looks small, it dramatically increased its review volume to 8000+ reviews. 

With Birdeye’s AI capabilities, they also send a customized review response to each review, boosting the value of their listing and improving customer experience. 

Black Bear Diner

While Black Bear Diner had a healthy presence on 200+ listing sites, they struggled with managing the high volume of feedback they received across the many locations they operated from. 

With Birdeye’s AI-driven feedback management system, they implemented a system that assigned the ticket to the local branch manager for every negative review. This categorization broke down the volume and made it easy to work on the feedback they were receiving. 

Black Bear Diner also uses Birdeye’s Natural Language Processing ability to identify top-performing restaurant locations from reviews, surveys, and other feedback channels. 

FAQs about AI in customer feedback management 

Leverage BirdAI to streamline customer feedback management 

Most secrets for your business success can be found in customer feedback. Customers like to share opinions and feel valued when you work on their opinions to improve their experience. Managing the customer feedback you receive is an essential step in gaining actionable insights from it. 

Birdeye helps you leverage the power of AI-driven solutions across various feedback channels such as review sites, surveys, webchat, and social media. These solutions are built specifically for local businesses to truly make the most of the feedback they receive without manually processing the data.