Customer Feedback: Know Its Significance, Plus 7 Different Ways of Collecting
When you are thinking about the collection of customer feedback, it is highly likely you would get overwhelmed as there are innumerable possibilities. As there are so many customers and numerous ways to connect with the feedback they give, it is rather tasking to know where are how to start?
Feedback is an effective guide that helps you with insights of the leadership team and can pave a path forward for each and every part of any company – right from product through the UX and also customer support. That is especially pivotal when one thinks about customer satisfaction. Innumerable customer feedback software is there that can help you understand your customer insights and help you to proliferate your business.
This blog will try to understand 7 ways of collecting customer feedback. Let’s look at everything you need to realize about the different methods:
Understand customer feedback:
Customer feedback is the information, issue, input, or insight that your community shares regarding their experiences with your services, product, or product. This feedback can guide the betterment of the customer experience further empower positive changes within any business – also when it is negative.
Significance of customer feedback
Customer feedback is highly significant as it serves as one guiding resource towards the growth of your business. All of us are trying to know what we are receiving from our customers in terms of business.
The 7 Highly Effective Methods for Customer Feedback
Before you have started collecting customer feedback, you will need to pinpoint why you are looking to seek their input. After identifying what outcomes you desire and sketching the process to get there, you need to set the groundwork for the prudent investment of you and your customer’s time.
If you do not have a clear intention, your feedback might not serve anyone. Write down the answers to all the questions and talk to the team before getting started:
- What portion of the customer experience would you want to improve? You need to target the aspect of the customer journey, which would benefit maximum from the customer insights.
- What do you plan for all the data you have collected? There isn’t any reason to collect customer feedback unless that would give you actionable changes. Let us say that your customer survey would reveal that you have a confusing UI. Ensure that you have the willingness towards investing in fixing the glitch before you collect the feedback.
- Which of the customer feedback software works ideal for your goals?
Using the right kind of customer feedback software you can get the best answer to the questions.
1. Survey for customer feedback
The development of a useful consumer survey could be highly challenging. There are loads of questions that you could ask your customers. The best part is: you can pick between surveys that are short sliders (that help you in targeting the specific issues) or the traditional surveys that are long sliders.
For all surveys that come with one question, you could use feedback tools so that you could understand the response of the customers who are active on your website.
For the surveys in longer forms, tons are options exist. Some software offers free spaces for all SMEs who have begun exploring the endless possibilities feedback provides.
In case you want your customers should follow through after completing one survey, some of the simple practices need to be followed.
- Ask only those questions that enable you to meet your goals
- Write open-ended questions that are thoughtful
- Create rating scales that are consistent
- Avoid mostly loaded or leading questions.
2. Customer contact applications and Email
The email could be one of the easiest methods of gathering customer feedback that is candid. This is the support channel for most of the companies you could use every interaction as one opportunity towards gathering feedback. To maximize the possibilities of getting a response from your customer, you need to do three following things:
Set absolutely clear expectations:
Sometimes the customers don’t provide significant feedback as they don’t feel the businesses care. Most of the customers may come willing to leave feedback if they gathered they would be heard and at what exact point of time they would receive a response.
Think about adding a short sentence in the emails you write that tells your customers how soon they could expect to hear back from you. This helps in setting expectations and building trust within your community.
3. Get email feedback
There are several customer feedback software your business can access to receive excellent customer feedback. It’s one clear process that ensures that no-slip happens. The software comes with advanced features that enable you in keeping a tab of your requests and those who requested, along with the ideas you have already passed on. This process also gives the employees a clear roadmap so that future interactions can be guided.
Usability tests
In order that usability testing can bring deeper insights for your company, you need to have high upfront planning. With a proper and clear strategy, you could look closely at the challenges customers are unaware of and hence, some actionable insights that will make their experiences much better.
Even if we associate most of the user testing with web-based products, the fundamentals would apply to all businesses.
4. Qualitative or exploratory interviews with customers
Do you feel direct translation would benefit from feedback received from customers? Yes, it would, as reaching out to the customers will directly open up conversations that wouldn’t happen otherwise.
When you receive qualitative stories from your customers, it brings out nuance and color to the quantitative data. These personal discussions and experiences help a team in understanding the feelings behind customer decisions and also the response from the community towards a business’ decisions or brands.
When you are conducting customer interviews, you need to create the opportunity to challenge all false assumptions that have surfaced over time. You need to keep the following tips in your mind while you sit down and talk to the customers:
- Begin an open-edge dialogue- While you are talking to the customers, it’s best to ask open-ended questions. These queries provide your questions a flexible opportunity so that you could dig into their experiences deeper. Moreover, they have less likelihood to be leading or biased questions.
- Become absolutely specific on the run: Begin your conversations coming with wider impressions also get detailed in your questions gradually as the dialogue evolves. Each piece of feedback they would provide is one opportunity for another specific one to follow.
- Work on active listening: So that you get insights that would help your team, you actually need to remain open and receptive. Always keep eye contact and give them back the prime takeaways you hear from the clients, maintaining the spotlight on your customers all along.
Never let your distance stop you. Use some of the latest customer feedback apps to speak to a diverse range of customers no matter which part of the world they are in.
5. Social Media
With social listening, you can get access to an untapped source of candid customer feedback. Receiving direct mentions or comments on social media isn’t the sole way for your business to collect feedback, there are many networks that come with tolling pools that are built-in. keeping a team that exclusively works on the feedback system is the best way to collect customer insights.
6. Utilizing analytics to catch up on on-site activity
Analytics can reveal what your customers don’t know regarding the ways to use your product. More specifically if you are selling a digital service or product, you can benefit highly by using your data analytics to understand how the users interact with your business. For instance, if you are offering self-service content as your customer service, you could easily see how many people visited your content.
For instance, if one of your articles has an average time of 10.0 seconds and a bad bounce rate, you need to understand that something isn’t sticking or working in your messaging. Using some of the customer feedback tools can help you receive insights about your searches that failed and the most frequently visited pages. All these metrics help you to improve your customer’s experience in self-service.
7. Receiving instant insights from website
If you are using an embeddable on-site widget you could collect instant customer feedback without having to ask the customers a single question.
You could use the popular customer feedback software to understand customer favorable also collect the data about which articles or content on your website was the most popular. This is rather valuable information to you.
Conclusion – Collection customer feedback is rather important
Customers have the ability to transform all the aspects of your company and make your business better if you carefully listen to the insights they provide. Think about the highly precise and urgent goals and begin with one simple, clear method to collect customer feedback before you expand to the more complex tactics like testing and analytics.
Customer support software is your ideal place where you can begin. Your support people could bring more value to your business when they take into account each interaction as one opportunity towards the collection of qualitative and quantitative feedback based on the real experience they have with your company.
Source: Customer Feedback: Know Its Significance, Plus 7 Different Ways of Collecting – Business 2 Community
Eelco Krikke