Customer feedback methods
Customer feedback is information coming directly from your customer about their satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with your product or service. These comments are an important resource for figuring out how happy your customers are and how the business could improve its growth.
Gathering this feedback can come from online forms, social media, email feedback, letters, review sites, phone or even an oral short survey. Regardless, this feedback should be seen as a gift on how to run your business.
In this article, we will be talking about the importance of customer feedback and the different methods to collect customer feedback your company needs to succeed.
Why customer feedback is important for your business
Getting any sort of feedback should be seen as a gift. Feedback is an unbiased opinion of what your company is doing right, and what you can do to improve your business. If you want your customers to keep coming back while acquiring new customers, this is great information to have at hand.
Econsultancy did a survey on Digital Marketing Trends, and asked companies to state the single most exciting opportunity for 2019 for a business to grow. What did they find out?
Customer experience came first over anything else! You could have an amazing product, and great marketing but if the consumer isn’t treated well and has a bad experience, guess what… that customer is not coming back. If you are a business owner and have employees face to face with customers, you will want to know how business is being run when you are not around.
You might be thinking “How much of a difference can improve the customer experience make?” Well, check out this graph below!
You can improve your customer retention, satisfaction, and increase or selling ability year by year.
8 effective customer feedback methods
There are infinite effective ways you can learn from customers. In fact, 35% of marketers consider customer feedback the top analytic that they need to monitor. Since only 4% of customers actually give negative feedback, the fact that you are not hearing complaints does not necessarily mean that customers are totally satisfied. Let’s look at 8 different customer feedback methods you can use to improve your current customer service experience in order to get some good feedback.
Live chat with website users
Consumers love instant chat features, it enables them to be engaged in real time! Your support team can be accessible anywhere for instant answers, and you can convert up to 3x more potential customers just by enabling people to reach you directly from your website.
Site surveys for the win!
Provide a way that the customer can give user feedback onsite about new features or new ideas. A box with a note card next to it and ask “How are we doing?” If you can give some incentive for people to fill them out (like 10% off a product) do it!
Use SMS surveys
Everyone’s on their phone constantly. Make it super easy for consumers to leave you feedback through a text! 90% of texts are opened within 3 minutes, so you know it won’t take long before the responses come back. Setting up an automatic text to say thank you and politely ask for feedback.
Email for quick responses
Most people check their email on their phones 3xs a day. This can be very effective for sending a quick auto-responder email with a one-click feedback. Consumers are happy to give feedback emails and just need a little reminder to do so.
Call your customers
As crazy as it might seem, an old fashion phone call can do wonders. Using a phone number has a very personable feel to it. If there is a negative complaint and you have the ability to call as a follow-up, most situations can be resolved easily and the customer will feel satisfied and taken care of.
Record sales calls
For large businesses, that have customer support teams, recording phone calls can help the business as well as the employee. It doesn’t have to be a situation of “You said this wrong to the client” It could just be a way to understand what the customer needs and how the employee can improve their skills. It also gives the opportunity to ask open-ended questions to the consumer and get some quality feedback you might not get in a customer survey.
Social listening
Social listening is a process of monitoring different online conversations surrounding your brand. There are whole departments for businesses that take care of social listening making sure customer expectations are met. This includes social sites like Twitter and Facebook. Be on top of customer insights and make sure to dampen any situations that could hurt your brand. Express gratitude for those who are promoting and saying great things about you!
Review sites are powerful
This might seem obvious but being active on online review sites give your customer base a platform to communicate with you. Make sure create a profile on the following social sites and monitor your online reputation so you can respond to both positive and negative feedback from customers.
Conclusion
The bottom line is, customer feedback is extremely important for growing businesses. Making processes to gather reviews and feedback from as many places as you can help. Doing so will give you unbiased opinions on what you can do to improve, and what you are doing right.
Transform your local business with revolutionary AI-powered software