Journal

How to Use AI to Automate the Customer Feedback Experience

28 Jun
2023
How to Use AI to Automate the Customer Feedback Experience

By now, you’ve probably heard of how artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots can hold conversations with people at length while providing personalized responses. They can also work at lightning-fast speed!

(Case in point: just watch ChatGPT churn out entire paragraphs of email copy in less than a minute.)

And whaddya know, these are all aspects that go toward delivering a stellar customer feedback experience, too. Because it’s no secret that customers want personalized interactions and to be attended to fast.

So can AI help improve your customer feedback processes? Yes, it can!

Here’s how.

Benefits of using AI in your customer feedback processes

Manage large volumes of customer feedback data with ease

As your store and customer base grow, the volume of customer feedback will also naturally increase.

And at some point, trying to:

  • request for customer feedback,
  • sort through the responses received, and
  • respond to them all using human effort alone,

will become infeasible as you work to measure customer satisfaction.

That’s when it might be worth handing the reins over to AI. Working faster than any human can, AI can dramatically cut down the time needed to process your customer feedback data.

You’ll also free up your team to take on responsibilities that require more human creativity and brain power, too!

(We’ll share some ways AI can help speed up the managing of your customer feedback data below, so keep reading 👀)

Reduce customer feedback handling time

When customers provide feedback, you may not see it or have the capacity to attend to their feedback right away.

This results in  a delay in your customer feedback handling time—and the longer you keep customers waiting, the poorer an impression they’re likely to have of your store.

AI’s ability to respond almost instantly to customer feedback means you’ll be able to respond to customers and take any necessary follow-up actions sooner. ⚡

You’ll also close outstanding customer feedback issues promptly instead of building up a large backlog of cases (and a base of unhappy customers).

Personalize the user experience

When seeking customer feedback, a best practice is to be specific on the areas where you want input—such as the products your customers have bought or their experience with a certain payment method.

Thank you for your recent order of Bow Wow Dog Biscuits! What did you (or your furkid) think of them? 🐶

Personalizing your feedback request in such a manner makes your existing customer base feel valued as you’ve tailored your request to their unique experience. It also helps you get targeted customer insights on various store operations.

And while manually personalizing large volumes of feedback requests can be tedious and a major time suck, AI can be a helpful assistant here!

AI can keep track of your customers’ store activities, then automatically populate your feedback requests with such customer interactions as appropriate.

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How can AI enhance your customer feedback processes?

Create smart conversational chatbots

While AI chatbots are great for writing code or composing songs, they can also help your store collect customer feedback without your team’s involvement.

Setting this up involves programming an AI chatbot with natural language processing capabilities to talk to customers about their experience as if they were speaking with a human. Along the way, the chatbot can offer different preset options or topics to facilitate feedback-gathering.

Here’s an example of such a conversation to get you inspired:

A support conversation between a store’s AI chatbot and a customer who wanted to provide feedback on the store’s website experience

The AI chatbot has handled the entire feedback conversation like a champ!

The human team might get involved only when:

  • They’ve received the customer’s feedback from the chatbot
  • The chatbot is having trouble figuring out the customer’s input, such that human intervention is needed

Sort feedback into their relevant topic categories instantly

Since customer feedback can relate to a whole range of topics, sorting each piece of feedback into its relevant topic category can help you activate the appropriate internal processes for addressing them.

AI chatbots can help with such sorting in two ways:

The first involves providing topic options in feedback conversations, like the sample feedback conversation we shared above. Doing so lets customers select the most relevant topic bucket for their feedback.

Alternatively, AI can analyze the words and phrases customers have used in their feedback to instantly identify the topics to which the feedback relates.

  • For example, if a customer has used the phrases “missing order” or “haven’t received my order” in their feedback, then their feedback likely relates to late order delivery. AI can then sort such negative feedback into a “Delivery Delay” category or similar.
  • Alternatively, if a customer’s feedback included the words “broken” or “damaged,” they might have received their order in a damaged condition. This could then cue AI to categorize their feedback under “Damaged Order.”

And with the feedback categorized, it’s time for your human MVPs to take action!

Automatically send feedback to the right team members

After sorting your customers’ feedback into the right topic categories, AI can automatically send them to the appropriate team members.

So let’s say AI has categorized two pieces of feedback into the “Delivery Delay” and “Damaged Order” categories separately (as per our example above).

It can then dispatch the:

  • “Delivery Delay” feedback to your shipping team so they can look into the delay in delivery and  resolve the issue.
  • “Damaged Order” feedback to your customer care team for them to assess if they should issue a refund.

This way, you get  feedback to the team members with the best expertise to handle the matter as quickly as possible.

And with AI sending off the feedback immediately after categorizing it, there’s no lag between the categorization of the feedback and the delivery to the right team to slow the customer handling process down!

Send more effective customer feedback emails

If you’re sending emails to customers to seek their feedback, prep and send these emails to increase your chances of hearing back from customers.

AI can do a superb job of this, and this next section explores how:

How to improve your customer feedback emails with AI

Personalize your emails with your customer's purchases

Where possible, your customer feedback emails should contain info on the specific products they’ve ordered, such as:

  • The products’ names
  • Images of the products to jog your customers’ memory of what they look like

Including such details lets customers know which products you’re seeking feedback on so they can respond with relevant comments.

Just check out how this feedback email from Casper features the products in its customer’s recent order:

product review email from Casper

An eCommerce marketing platform like Sendlane will automatically pull the information and image of the product purchased, so you only have to set the request up once.

This way, your emails will display the exact product your customers have ordered instead of making vague references to their “order” or “recent purchase”!

Test customer feedback email variants to identify the best-performing one

The first customer feedback email design you come up with may not be the one that gets you the most customer responses. Come up with a few different designs, then get AI to help you test and narrow down the most effective one.

The version of this feature in our Sendlane email platform is called multivariate testing.

With it, you can test up to four different versions of your feedback emails—whether they have different subject lines, preheaders, content, or a mix of these!

Simply design your customer feedback email variants and set up:

  • The percentage of recipients who should receive these variants
  • The number of hours over which you want Sendlane to monitor your variants’ email performance
  • The factor that determines the winning variant—such as the email with the highest open rate or the one that brought in the most revenue
Sendlane multivariate testing feature

When your email is ready, Sendlane will send your email variants over the specified period and track their email stats closely.

It then automatically identifies the best variant based on the winning factor you’ve defined and sends it to the rest of your recipients for you. You won’t have to lift a finger.

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Level up your customer feedback processes with AI!

Be it automatically categorizing and sending customers’ feedback to your team members, optimizing your feedback campaigns, or something else, AI is an awesome piece of technology worth leveraging as you strive to improve the customer experience.

And you won’t need to build your own AI tools from scratch, as some of them can be obtained off the shelf.

As discussed above, Sendlane’s AI-powered email platform is perfect for helping you send personalized customer feedback emails that are most likely to get opened and engaged with.

It also offers other useful features that store owners (like yourself) will love, such as:

  • Email and SMS automations that help you automatically email and SMS your customers in response to cart abandonment, customer loyalty program sign-ups, and other common eCommerce events
  • A visual, easy-to-use email builder for designing gorgeous emails to keep your customers buying
  • Real-time analytics so you’ll get actionable insights into customer behaviors and your campaigns’ performance any time of the day

Try all these features on your store—and get ready to boost your customer satisfaction levels!—for free by signing up for a 60-day Sendlane trial here.

AI customer feedback FAQs

How can you choose a customer feedback tool for eCommerce?
How much should an AI customer feedback tool cost?

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