By knowing what made unhappy customers, you can correct the frictions they encountered when doing business with you. When analyzing positive customer feedback, it’s possible to find the factors that lead to customer loyalty and to lure potential customers by appealing to them with these factors of customer satisfaction. Information is power so it’s important for businesses to learn how to collect feedback from customers the right way.
What is customer feedback?
Consumers share their opinion about a product, consumer service, digital marketing, or overall user experience through customer feedback. These customer engagements can be proactive or requested, and they both serve to increase customer satisfaction. There are multiple customer feedback tools and methodologies to collect customer feedback.
How you solicit and analyze client inputs is what’s important. Amassing qualitative data without asking the right questions and simply focusing on the positive feedback cannot be called customer feedback. For it to be considered as such it must be turned into quantitative data and have an impact on the company’s approach.
Why do you need feedback from customers?
You need feedback from customers because consumers are the reason it is possible to have an operating business! The satisfaction of those that come through your doors (or website) is how you secure customer loyalty. With customer feedback you can:
- Enhance and monitor customer service
- Improve digital marketing
- Improve customer engagement
Enhance and Monitor Customer Service
Feedback from customers can let you know if there are recurring issues in your operation, and if your employees are working diligently to assist customers.
Improve Digital Marketing
The feedback may provide experts with valuable information about customer preferences and purchasing behaviors. The data will come in handy for creative teams to devise techniques that increase customer satisfaction innovatively.
Improve customer Engagement
Running a business is difficult enough as it is, this is why all inputs must be employed to ensure its success. Cultivating a relationship with those who consume your products or services is often what distinguishes successful brands from those that stagnate.
Why is customer feedback important?
Steps to collect feedback without annoying the customer
Here are the steps to collect feedback without annoying your customers:
- Find patterns
- Connect with your customers
- Structure your feedback survey
- Timing
- Organize your feedback collection
- Reply to unhappy customers
- Open vote customer feedback
- Capture the voice of your consumers
1. Find Patterns
It’s possible to find patterns in customer feedback online. Nobody has to feel annoyed because someone requests feedback from them. By consulting the online reviews and feedback about your products or services, you can find more precise questions to ask future customers given that the overall customer experience was already analyzed.
For example, if most of the negative feedback online is regarding a single item amidst your products, requesting customer feedback from those who purchased said item is an opportunity to improve the product. Noticing patterns narrows the sample of data that needs to be evaluated, and demonstrates to your customers that you care about their user experience. Also, it takes less time to ask a single good question than multiple empty ones.
2. Connect with your customer
Making the communication feel personalized is one of the best strategies to influence customers. Addressing customers by their names is a starting point. This is the secret of generating positive customer feedback. Customers must feel appreciated for spending their time filling out your customer feedback survey. Perhaps reward them with free delivery or a discount as a gesture of gratitude.
If you give people a reason to thank you, they are more likely to reciprocate the favor and leave a review. The incentives you pick should encourage people to participate and complete your surveys. It also implies that you must consider relevant offerings.
3. Structure your feedback survey
Adopt the following steps when creating your customer feedback survey:
- Ask for feedback with a clear goal in mind. Identify the areas of the company you want to emphasize. Try not to bombard your customer and settle on a straightforward approach to phrasing your inquiries.
- The survey must have a user-friendly interface if it is collected online through an app. survey.
- Spend a considerable amount of time experimenting with different survey applications and software to determine which ones work for you. Before settling for one, remember to test them on different technologies. Most surveys are completed on smartphones these days.
- The key is to make it audience-friendly, no matter the origin of your audience. Try having the survey worded in various languages for customer satisfaction sake.
- The questions should be carefully written and neutral in tone.
4. Timing
Most people have had to experience those ill-timed messages at least once in their lifetime. The level of annoyance you feel when it disrupts your whole routine is considerable. The point here is that you should make sure to avoid being one of those companies that send out marketing texts at inappropriate times.
Considering your audience type, you might want to select and go for the most appropriate dates and time to hit send on those marketing texts or emails. Holidays should be a big no. There is no point in searching for the right time when you do not know the right way to ask for feedback. Design your feedback requests making sure that they do not interrupt what the client is doing when you send them.
Never opt for pop-ups that cover up the entire screen and avoid asking questions that have little to no relation to your product or services. Employ colorful schemes or animations that are consistent with your brand identity, as well as modest pop-ups that appear in the sidebar. By doing this, the customers can enjoy exploring your site searching for a desirable product or service without unnecessary intrusion. It enhances the overall user experience!
5. Organize your Feedback Collection
To cultivate customer engagement, it’s a good thing to have a readied platform that collects positive and negative feedback from proactive customers. By doing so you will limit the online bad press that can accumulate if you do not take responsibility for your users’ experience. If clients know that they are listened to when engaging with your brand, you will secure customer loyalty and better your operation.
Are you expecting customer feedback after each purchase? Perhaps try putting a link to the survey in the receipt. Customers can opt to engage or not and are not put on the spot. It might not ensure a high percentage of surveys filled out, but at least it does not compromise the connection your company shares with the client.
Furthermore, restrict the number of instances you request feedback to 2-3 emails and stop there. A happy customer who wants to interact with your company will fill out the first customer survey. Encouraging unengaged clients to do surveys will only upset them to the point where they will quit using your products or services.
7 Ways to Make Sure Your Customers Feel Heard
6. Reply to unhappy customers
You may strengthen your company image by reacting to unfavorable criticism immediately and non-robotically. It becomes an opportunity for PR as it signals to other potential customers that their concerns will not be dismissed if something happens, and the response can emulate what the brand is all about.
7. Open vote on customer feedback
Letting your customers participate in open feedback, where they vote on other customer opinions, helps the company sort out relevant feedback. Organizing the community linked by your product or interest is a phenomenal way of consulting multiple people through votes.
Once you have established a relationship with your satisfied clients, you can ask them more in-depth questions about your products or services. They may even have creative suggestions that you would never have thought of. They will become your most crucial contributors!
Capture the voice of your consumers
inBe is a secure technology platform where you can get access to customer feedback in real-time and keep records in a personalized and organized way. You’ll get access to reports that can modernize your business and focus your energy where it needs to be. Customer satisfaction is our utmost priority, and we’ve devised a proven methodology that betters just that.