Collecting Customer Feedback and Using it Effectively
The number one way to improve your business is by collecting customer feedback. Find out exactly why it’s so important and what to do with the data once you’ve got it.
Photo by Afif Ramdhasuma on Unsplash
Keeping customer interests at the core of the business determines its success in the competitive market. Thus, collecting customer feedback is important to determine customer satisfaction and demand for a product. With the right strategies for collecting feedback, you can earn customer loyalty, improve products and services, and boost sales and revenues.
In this article, we’ll cover how you can leverage foolproof methods of collecting customer feedback that works every time. From using the Net Promoter Score measurement instead of conventional surveys to incorporating live chat data, analytics, and popups, there’s something to suit your needs.
If you’re struggling to get your customers to fill out feedback surveys, we’ve got you covered. Towards the end of this article you’ll know what is customer feedback; how it’s crucial to boost business success; and what are the most effective ways to collect and use customer feedback to ensure maximum customer response.
Let’s get started.
What Is Customer Feedback?
Customer feedback refers to the review that a brand receives from its customers regarding their experience and how they feel about the products and services it offers. Customer feedback can be positive or negative based on an individual experience. There are 2 types of customer feedback i.e. active and passive:
I. Active Feedback
Active feedback or direct feedback is the input that you request from your customers. Active feedback is usually collected through survey forms or Net Promoter Score ratings. For example, have a look at the email survey sent to customers right after food delivery. The survey requires the customers to rate the delivered food on a scale of 1 to 5 stars depending on their satisfaction.
II. Passive Feedback
Passive feedback refers to scrapping feedback that customers leave as product reviews, comments on social platforms, and product posts or discussions through community forums or third-party review sites.
For example, this dog training website collects customer reviews from Facebook as a form of valuable feedback. They also publish online reviews on their website as a marketing tactic to attract more customers.
Why Is Customer Feedback Important?
Customer feedback gives you deeper insights into what you should improve on your products, services, sales, marketing, or customer support. The key is to make your customers happy, satisfied, and loyal to your brand. Let’s dive deeper into the importance of customer feedback for business growth.
A. Product Improvement
A product is generally designed and launched to benefit customers, they should also decide if they’re satisfied with the result or not. Asking customers for feedback also builds brand trust among customers as they feel valued and listened to.
Ask your customers about what they like or dislike about a product or service or what needs to be improved for a better customer experience. This approach helps you align your products and services with the needs of customers and target audiences to boost sales and revenue.
B. Understanding Customers
Feedback helps businesses understand their customers’ needs and demands. Brands can assess customer satisfaction in the following areas through feedback:
- Product Quality
- Product pricing
- Product delivery
- Product shipment
- Product packaging
- Product advertising
- Website experience
- Customer service experience
For example, if customers reveal in their feedback that they are dissatisfied with product delivery or product shipment because of delays and item damages, it’s something you cannot take lightly whether you’re the supplier or the logistics provider.
The business can carry out further customer surveys, inspections, and research through data analytics solutions to find the root cause of the issue. Based on the results of the research, businesses can work on improving delivery by leveraging logistics automations to make it more suitable for their customers.
C. Customer Engagement
When brands ask for feedback, customers feel a sense of importance. They feel closely related to the brand and feel like a part of their creative team. Asking for customer feedback also builds a positive brand reputation as people perceive it as an active, progressive, and high-value brand with a continual passion for improvement.
However, when customers actively engage with you through feedback, they also expect you to take meaningful action. Once you deliver the desired improvements in your products and services, customers feel valued and act as your advocates.
D. Customer Loyalty
When customers feel the brand values their opinions and reviews about the products and services, they perceive the brand as friendly and humane. A brand that truly cares for its customers and works on providing a better customer experience earns customer loyalty. Customers are most likely to give positive feedback across social channels when they trust a brand.
Most importantly, it’s your loyal customers that ensure a steady flow of sales and revenue with minimum marketing efforts. Hence, maintaining good customer-brand relationships is the key to business success.
Now that we’ve learned how customer feedback is essential for your success, let’s find out the key ways that work wonders in collecting feedback.
7 Effective Ways To Collect And Use Customer Feedback To Boost Business Success
Collecting customer feedback can be a bit tricky in today’s fast-paced world where nobody has an extra minute to spare filling out a feedback form. However, we’ve come up with our 7 best ways to collect actionable feedback that works every time with a considerably higher survey response rate. Let’s find out.
1. The Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Most customers run away from filling out long surveys from brands after they’ve used the products and services. Marketers understand the impatient customer behavior and devised another great parameter to evaluate customer satisfaction i.e. Net Promoter Score (NPS).
The NPS measures customer loyalty on a rating scale of 0 to 10 with simple questions like “how likely are you to recommend this product to your friends and family?” NPS is an important tool to find out your brand’s promoters and referrals. For example, the customers who’ve scored your brand at 9 or 10 on the NPS scale are the most satisfied customers that’ll work as your advocates.
Marketers can use customer satisfaction scores to reach out to satisfied customers with special products using personalized marketing tactics. This approach is helpful to secure old customers. Similarly, marketers see satisfied customers as ideal candidates to take brand testimonials from.
Similarly, The NPS customer feedback scoring 7 to 8 falls in the category of “passive customers”. Passive customers have the potential to become returning customers if a brand offers a personalized experience and caters to their pain points. With defined marketing metrics and utilization of NPS customer feedback, you can win over passive customers.
Lastly, the customers scoring your brand at 0 to 6 on the NPS scale are called detractors. They’re dissatisfied and unlikely to make another purchase from your brand. Marketers need to pay extra attention to the detractors through social listening as they may result in negative word-of-mouth marketing for the company.
2. Live Chat Data
The live chat feature is becoming popular with online businesses as it ensures customer satisfaction and helps form a positive business reputation. However, the live chat data can also be utilized to gain customer feedback. When a customer frequently engages with a live chat representative, chances are he’s facing some issues.
Moreover, customers are more open to sharing their pain points, opinions, and negative or positive reviews with a human representative during a live call or chat session. Companies can train their customer representatives to ask for customer feedback after every interaction. Live chat data can be collected, analyzed, and evaluated to get necessary business insights.
Similarly, businesses can integrate live chat apps into their websites, WhatsApp messengers, and social media messengers to assist the customer service team and generate chat data for valuable insights. It’s an easy tool to evaluate how customers feel about your brand. It also gives you a chance to improve your products and services to better suit the needs of customers.
3. Popup Surveys At The Right Time
Most companies struggle with getting customer feedback without having to annoy the customers. Give complete freedom to users whether they want to give feedback or not to maximize the chances of survey responses. Instead of bombarding customers with email surveys, SMS surveys, and chat surveys, make use of survey popups on your website.
While setting up popup surveys, select the best time and the right page to display them. The average time spent on a website is 52 seconds. Display a popup survey to your users just before 52 seconds so that you’ll gather enough information about your brand.
While determining the popup display time and page, consider factors like customer online behavior, browser cookies, and use of personal data. Popup surveys can be displayed at the following times to maximize the survey response rate:
- Customers are browsing your website for a while
- Customers are about to leave your website without buying
- Customers have come to your website for a product query
- Customers have uninstalled your app or browser extension
- Customers are at the pricing page to get feedback on your prices
- Customers have purchased products to get feedback on the purchasing experience
One of our favorite examples is Speechify’s popup survey which is displayed after a user has uninstalled the browser extension. Also, notice how politely they’ve asked the customer to give feedback. When customers see how a brand is willing to improve its product to better comply with the needs of customers, they are more likely to fill out the survey.
4. Analytics Insights
Analytics help businesses find important insights regarding whether a customer likes your product or whether he’s willing to make future purchases from your brand. Analytics can offer deeper insights regarding customer demographics, behavior, interests, and goals. The data gathered from customer analytics can be used to improve the products, services, and customer support team and tactics.
Customer insights are collected through customer analytic tools integrated into websites, online surveys, Google or Microsoft ads, etc. Here is some of the information that is collected through analytic tools that help marketers and business managers improve brand services and marketing.
- Page URL
- Bounce rate
- Popular queries
- User information
- Screen resolution
- Customer retention
- Most viewed pages
- Browser information
Similarly, the customer feedback tools specifically integrated for collecting survey data are useful in determining the number of respondents and their data. Besides, the user behavior is determined by assessing “how many survey questions were answered?” and “how much time did it take to complete the survey?”
5. Survey Participation Incentives
Providing incentives to customers upon completing customer feedback surveys work wonders for businesses and customers. The survey helps companies gather important data from customers to evaluate and improve their products, services, marketing, and customer service.
The customers, on the other hand, feel motivated to fill out surveys as they look forward to the rewards. They also feel compensated for the time and energy they invest in filling out the survey forms. Survey participation incentives encourage the customer base to give out their honest opinion about products or services whether it’s positive or negative feedback.
Here’s a list of incentives that can be given to customers to ensure higher response and survey completion rates.
- Cash
- Coupons
- Gift cards
- Discounts
- Free trials
- Physical prizes
- Travel vouchers
- Charity donations
- Recognition and acknowledgment
- Early access to products and services
Incentives should be aligned with the interests and goals of your target audience. For example, if you’re a hotel-finding website, an effective incentive to compel visitors into giving feedback could be discount vouchers for hotels in their area, travel vouchers, or a chance to win flight tickets to holiday destinations in a lottery.
Similarly, have a look at the incentive given by HomeDepot, a home improvement company. They offer a gift card worth $5,000 to compel customers to participate in the survey. With it, marketers can identify customers that are interested in home improvement as only those who will participate in the survey are genuinely interested to get a HomeDepot gift card.
Marketers can then offer prospective customers personalized marketing of relevant products depending on where they are in their customer journey.
6. Social Media
If you’re looking forward to collecting raw, genuine, and blunt feedback from customers about your products and services, head toward social media platforms. People are more comfortable sharing their points of view, opinions, and concerns about a product with their friends, family, and peers instead of reaching out directly to the brand.
You can keep an eye on the posts and stories with your brand’s hashtags and mentions to better understand what people are saying about your brand. Social media makes it easier to evaluate customer satisfaction as well as any issues, basic questions, or misunderstandings people might have about your brand.
Here are a few ways to gather customer feedback on social media:
- Brand mentions
- Direct messages
- Polls and surveys
- Customer comments
Similarly, social listening is a powerful tool to notice which features or aspects of your product are most popular among customers. This provides marketers with new actionable insights about the product features that must be highlighted during promotions.
The best part, you can reach out to your happy customers who are positively advocating your brand on their social media and provide them incentives to get testimonials.
Brands publish satisfied customer testimonials on their social media to attract potential customers. One of our favorite examples is of this profit margin calculator brand that has successfully gathered testimonials from their satisfied clients as seen in the reels section of their Instagram profile.
Social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are great for sharing mobile surveys to reach more customers and increase participation rates. Since users actively watch brand stories, post survey URLs and polls on Facebook and Instagram stories to get maximum response.
7. Feedback Forms On the Website
When brands seek out customer feedback, the user experience must be fresh in the memory of customers. An easy customer feedback strategy while ensuring a higher response rate is integrating feedback forms into your website. It’ll ensure the customers can ask away any questions as well as give their suggestions for the website or brand improvement.
Feedback forms can also be placed at the end of the website pages to ensure less distraction.
Moreover, they are designed with less complexity and only a few questions to get maximum user responses. If a customer is facing an issue while browsing the website, he can give feedback right away on the same page without having to separately contact customer support.
One of our favorite examples is the user feedback form of this technology company, TomTom.
They’ve made the feedback form visually appealing by using smileys and a range of different colors. This website feedback form assesses the website’s usability by asking an open-ended question for possible improvement.
Conclusion
Getting customers to fill out feedback surveys is a constant struggle for business owners and marketers. However, with the right set of techniques and strategies, customers will be happy to provide their opinions about your brand. It will be the key to business improvement, growth, and survival in the competitive market.
Today, businesses are getting customer-centric and offering time-efficient ways to collect customer feedback. From incorporating Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric to utilizing live chat data, the strategies are constantly changing.
Now that you’ve learned about the importance of customer feedback as well as the 7 effective ways to collect and use feedback, it’s time you implement these strategies to boost your business sales and profits. Did you find this article informative? Head towards Pixel Productions Inc to get excerpt insights on digital marketing strategies and tools to help your business soar through the heights of success.
