What is frontline feedback?
people management
BPO services
frontline feedback
people management
BPO services
frontline feedback
Published on Thu May 15 2025
Updated on Fri Aug 08 2025
8 minute read
Businesses like yours can gather valuable feedback and information from a variety of sources, including internal metrics, customer satisfaction surveys, and more. The odds are you’ve been ignoring one key type of feedback all this time: frontline feedback, which has the power to help you streamline and improve your customer experiences across the board.
What exactly is frontline feedback, how does it work, and why is it so important? Read on for the answers to these questions and more.
Frontline feedback explained.
Put simply: Frontline feedback is any feedback you recover from the “frontline” of your business, that is, your frontline workers and employees. Imagine that you run a retail operation with a brick-and-mortar storefront and an online shop. Your employees interact with your target customer base every day. They greet people at the door, answer questions, help customers pick up products, and check out those customers when they’re ready to make purchases. Those are your frontline employees. They, more than any other cohort in your organization, interact with your target customers all the time. Is it any wonder that they have valuable feedback to share about your operations, your target customer base, and much more? Frontline feedback is the feedback you get directly from those frontline workers. It can include:
- Comments or complaints from your frontline workers regarding your business operations, working conditions, or customer base’s mindset
- Suggestions from your frontline workers regarding new operations or procedures
- Survey answers from questionnaires handed out to your frontline employees
How is frontline feedback different from other feedback types?
Frontline feedback, in short, represents feedback that is given by people who directly interact with your consumers almost daily. There’s a time and a place for unbiased, scientific data. However, when you are trying to craft meaningful, delightful customer experiences for your target audience members, scientific data isn’t necessarily appropriate. Instead, subjective data from the people who experience your CX processes is very likely to be valuable to your brand. Frontline feedback is different from other feedback types in a few key ways:
- It comes from your frontline workers, who have first-hand experience regarding things like how your processes work, how your customers respond to changes or products, etc.
- It’s oftentimes subjective and “raw.” It can take skilled analysis to understand the best conclusions to draw from frontline feedback data sets.
Why is frontline feedback important?
Frontline feedback is important because of who it comes from and what it describes. Let’s take a closer look.
Your frontline employees interact with customers all the time.
First, frontline feedback is important because your frontline workers (such as cashiers, janitors, customer support staff, salespeople, etc.) are the ones who interact with your target customer base. You might be very skilled at running your company, but you can’t deny that you handle the majority of the executive tasks. In any given workweek or work month, you may not directly interact with one of your company’s customers at all.
Your frontline employees are different. They interact with your customers 24/7, so they’re in a great position to receive customer feedback directly, as well as understand what your customers like and dislike. That information can be invaluable as you seek to continually curate and improve your CX/customer journeys throughout your organization
Frontline workers experience some similar pain points as customers.
Next, your frontline workers may experience many of the same pain points or friction points as your customers.
For example, say that you roll out a new mobile app that allows customers to redeem loyalty points through your loyalty program for discounts, free shipping, and other perks. There’s just one problem: The mobile app’s interface is unintuitive, and it’s difficult to know how to redeem the loyalty points without an in-depth tutorial.
Your customers know this, but now, luckily, so do your frontline employees. Those frontline employees might have to help those customers redeem their loyalty points at the checkout counter, slowing down the checkout process for everyone else in the store.
When you receive the same feedback from both your customers and your frontline employees, it’s a surefire sign that the feedback is legitimate, and you should take steps to address it ASAP
How to collect frontline feedback.
You can collect frontline feedback from your most important workers in a few smart ways. Here are some examples.
Ask frontline team members regular questions.
Don’t hesitate to do the legwork and simply ask your frontline team members regular questions about their experiences. Ask them things like:
- How have customers responded to our new initiative or products?
- Is there anything you’ve noticed in our customer base over the last few weeks?
- How have certain operations helped or hindered you so you can do the best job possible?
How to use frontline feedback.
However, collecting frontline feedback is just the start. You need to leverage that data smartly to see major improvements in your brand, customer satisfaction, and other important metrics.
Identify shared points/reports.
As you look through all of the data you’ve gathered from frontline feedback, like survey responses, letters from your employees, and more, try to identify if there are any shared pain points or points of interest. For example, if all of your survey respondents among your frontline employees say that customers are frustrated with not being able to find specific products, assume that the feedback is legitimate.
Shared pain points or notes of frustration are more than likely accurate, even if your other data doesn’t support the same conclusions. Frontline feedback is valuable because it’s “on the ground” and derived from the most important data source of all: your target customers
Draw themes from disparate data.
Similarly, try to draw themes or thematic conclusions from all the data you gather. If, for example, your frontline workers note that there has been a rise in customer complaints regarding a specific element of your business, take them seriously.
On the other hand, if frontline feedback is largely positive because of a recent store initiative or new product line, listen to that as well. Themes can help to paint a picture of the overall or broad customer sentiment your brand has cultivated. They’re invaluable when deciding what to do next on a large scale, such as whether to expand, go forward with a new product line, and more.
Ask employees how they’d solve pain points.
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