It is certainly no secret that the collecting and analysis of customer feedback could be really valuable towards the improvement of your product or your service. However, getting valuable feedback could often prove to be a tricky queer challenge for most of the business. This is because most customers are motivated by deadlines and goals, so it is not their responsibility that they would give your company feedback.
Many customers remain reluctant in filling out surveys or participating in reviews owing to the inconveniences these measures cause. Customers are always busy and most of them won’t have the time to show you your product flaws. Others could be skeptical of what questions you are asking and don’t feel really comfortable with providing honest feedback.
While seeking feedback, you have to consider the best way of approaching your customers. To help you with your business success, we have compiled a rigorous and extensive list of the methods that you could use to receive customer feedback:
Through sending a follow-up email
The most readily used method to request customer feedback is through email. The email is sent once a particular service is provided or when any purchased product was delivered to the customer.
In case you have stayed at a hotel or done online shopping, you have undoubtedly received requests to rate the experience.
Several providers can assist companies to automate the review receiving process, and many of them would ensure that these reviews are getting distributed amongst the most significant channels like the social media accounts, Google, TripAdvisor, and Yelp.
Initiate surveys via SMS
SMS is one highly powerful channel that can collect feedback from customers. In an era where customers are always engaged in mobile phones and Androids, SMS is one great method of communicating with the existing customers and their potential leads. As the open rates of the SMSs are higher than email, SMS is one strong alternative to use for those customers whose only phone numbers are known.
Add some feedback surveys within your WiFi connectivity
Cafes, hotels, pubs, and stores are now giving away free WiFi so that they can provide more customers in their locations. While this could be great for the customers, it also provides valuable conditions and opportunities so that you could gather feedback.
You may require customers so that they can create accounts to access the WiFi, and then use an email id to request prompt feedback. You could alternately ask how they are how their experience was when they come online. No matter what option you pick, exploiting the free WiFi so that you could ask for feedback could be a rather fair trading value for both your customer and business.
Create feedback cards made of paper
Some of the companies still prefer doing things in an old-fashioned way, by using questionnaires placed in simple pen and paper using customer feedback app. While this remains the most cost-effective method of collecting reviews, it could also come with many hidden expenses while collating plus understanding the given feedback.
To bring out meaningful actions from the feedback, you will often need to tabulate the responses in a spreadsheet and analyze them. This requires both significant effort and time. Factoring the salary of your junior staff who are spending only a few minutes of their day to enter their responses, may easily go beyond $500 every year.
Review the live chat transcripts
On-site live chats are getting highly frequent for customer service and customer support. Taking reviews of the transcripts from the chats and creating categories could help you understand and identify what are the inefficiencies in your business. Frequently used topics tend to be the problem areas for your business that could be improved. This not just helps with customer satisfaction also reduces the needed resources towards customer support. Even though qualitative transcripts of the chats could be really difficult to review, they would be the most direct review or opinion you can receive.
Take customer interviews
Interviewing of the customers may require to be exclusive to the major retailers or companies doing market research, primarily the one’s big budgets. Frequent plus loyal customers are usually very happy to provide feedback if you are simply asking them. It’s actually these customers who have invested the maximum in your business, your product, or your service.
Try to find certain segments that you are interested in also select various customers who would fit these profiles. So that you could increase your potential to succeed, make sure that your customer gets contacted by a real human being from your company so that they feel they are your valued asset. This will increase the chances of their remaining loyal and the possibility that they would provide you useful feedback.
Analyze your recorded sales calls
In case you have one outbound sales team, they are probably creating a huge number of sales calls on a daily basis. These logs could be invaluable not merely the training purposes, but also as the feedback of your product. While they may not be your customers till now, these leads usually give the maximum direct feedback of the product you are selling since they come with no vested interest. After all first impression will last for a long time.
Even when they haven’t done the complete trial of your product, listening to their feedback regarding your product with the help of customer feedback apps could help you overcome all hurdles that could be putting off other potential customers.
Record the replays of the website visitor session
Wish to understand how people use your website and why aren’t they converting? In that case, session replays could be the way of gathering feedback to overcome all these differences. Some of the providers record their user transactions with your website so that you can easily check your website from the viewpoint of the visitor and see those issues that you might not have noticed otherwise.
Monitoring channels in social media
Social media has ended up becoming an inexpensive plus efficient method of communicating with your target audience. Customers are quite actively participating in communities on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and it really doesn’t cost your business any effort or expenses to join in on the conversation.
Respond to the comments or send direct messages plus engage with your audience to check how people actually feel about your business. When your team sees negative reviews, make sure you respond to them rather quickly. Those who are active social media users are expecting a quick response, which indicates you would have to dedicate one resource to each channel. By closely monitoring your social buzz is one great way of tracking trends plus events that could influence your business.
Offer incentives for the feedback you receive
Going through one survey takes away all valuable time out of the busy schedule of the customer. One method of making your surveys worthy of investment is to offer a prize for the completion of their activities. This makes for one simple, yet extremely effective approach of transaction towards acquiring feedback.
While discounts or money are really wonderful, you need to remind yourself that rewards don’t need to be cash also. You could incentivize the customers to use free content that is useful and productive towards their workflow. This could be one e-book, an in-house study, or one educational pamphlet that helps towards achieving these goals.
To sum up
Customer feedback system are proving to be really effective in creating a new dimension to businesses. As the system provides an extensive understanding of the customer’s needs and sentiments, it is really essential that accurate strategies and modalities are applied to the systems to leverage the maximum amount of understanding of what customers need and how they can be converted into trusted and valued customers.
