Introduction to Getting Feedback from Customers
Getting customer feedback is important in improving your business to a great extent. Your customers are more information for your business than you think. To deliver a good user experience, you should first listen to what your customers are saying. They can help you to innovate a new product and provide better customer service. In this way, you can offer more value to the customers.
The more customer information you get, the better you can perform. When you have more accurate information from the customers, it will put you ahead of all the competition in the market. With customer feedback collected through effective tools, you can reduce the churn rate of the customer and increase customer satisfaction.
Why Getting Feedback from Customers?
It helps to bring meaning to your product or service. Here are a few reasons listed which tell you why it is important to get feedback from customers
- Better decision-making – Your customers can give you the best suggestions for your product or service. They will tell you both positive and negative things about your business.
- Identify risks – By getting feedback, you can learn about the customers who are not satisfied with your service. Such feedback will help you make many improvements in your business.
- Stop the repeating problems – By getting customer feedback, you can know where it is going wrong and then take precautions to prevent it from happening again.
- Increase customer satisfaction – Getting feedback from customers is one of the best customer retention strategies. It increases customer satisfaction and helps to build a healthy business relationship with the customers. You can create a strong and long-term customer bond through two-way conversation.
- Find out potential advocates – Through customer feedback, you can know who your happy customers are, and then these customers can convert into advocates. Customer advocates will refer your business to their friends and relatives. You will get new customers from such references, improving your business and revenue.
Top 9 Strategies Used for Getting Feedback from Customers
Companies should include the customer feedback section in their development cycle. It is a tricky thing. You should phrase your questions in a proper way.
Here are listed a few ways of getting feedback from customers.
1. Customer surveys
Customer surveys are the most efficient way of getting feedback from customers. They are easy to set up, send across, analyze, and scale.
There are two types of surveys:
Long surveys:
This is the most familiar type of survey. In this method, a set of getting feedback from customers’ questions is sent to the customer through a link. Sometimes these surveys yield poor results because the surveys are either shipped unfinished or the responses need to be more helpful. But there are a few tricks to make this survey give you a better result.
They are mentioned below:
- Keep it short – If you need to get quality answers, then you need to keep your survey quick and simple. Have only 5 to 10 key feedback from customers’ questions in your surveys.
- Ask questions that serve a purpose – The questions you ask should have a purpose behind them. If the customer feels you are wasting their time asking irrelevant questions, they will not pay attention to your survey.
- Start with open-ended questions – If you ask questions with rating scales and multiple choices, you limit your assumptions. So always make your questions open-ended so that you can know your customers’ thoughts.
Short surveys:
You can conduct short surveys on your site. Keep the survey short. Ask only two or three customer feedback questions that are more relevant to the page. This survey will help you get better feedback.
This is the current method that many sites are using. But only rely a little on such surveys because they will not help you to understand the customer deeper as they don’t receive any explanations from the customer. Start this survey only as a starting point.
2. Telephonic surveys
Surveys conducted by phone always give you a higher response rate. It is because it becomes more personalized and offers a better reach to the customers. This method is more expensive than the online survey method. It still has a lot of benefits like higher control of standards, higher control of the sample, and ease and quickness of getting the responses. The online survey can also be linked to a telephonic survey to get further details from the customer.
3. Feedback boxes
You should always have a structured process of getting feedback from the customers. Your customers are always thinking of ways to improve your business. This is because they will not be satisfied with some sections of your site or have found some errors.
If the problem is not serious, they will not reach your customer support center. They will move away with little satisfaction. In that case, short surveys that appear on the site with little related feedback from customers’ questions will help to express their problems.
But to get simple customer suggestions, use a feedback responsive forms on your site. This form aims to make it easy for the users to give feedback when something is wrong with the site. It also collects feedback from customers’ information like the account name, the URL, and the browser version so that the problem solves quickly and easily.
But some sites have completely changed the concept of the feedback form. They have a feedback button on their page, and when the user clicks on that button, they get a feedback form with many questions. The user gets frustrated and irritated by looking at this.
One effective way to direct your users towards your user survey forms is through modern tools such as QR code generators. These tools can help you create a QR code that can simply direct the user to your survey form when scanned with a smartphone.
The purpose of the feedback form is to collect feedback from customers the users about small things. So make the feedback box as simple as possible and easy to use.
Once you collect feedback from customers, you need to respond to it. Allocate a person to respond to every piece of feedback within a few days.
4. Focus groups
In a focus group, people are asked about their perceptions and suggestions toward a product, service, or business. This method of collecting customer feedback, particularly through customer feedback analytics tools, is most commonly used in the early stage of development when a company is trying to find out who its target customer is.
Focus groups are conducted in an informal way and in a real-world environment which will let you know what the customers feel. Your customers ought to gain from it. This is again an expensive method of collecting customer feedback because to invite customers to participate in focus groups, you need to offer them free lunch or some free training. Only then will they take part in the focus groups.
5. Reach out directly
It’s common to undervalue this feedback technique, but it is the best method. You can get real feedback by contacting them directly. Other feedback methods, such as surveys, may leave out contextual information. You can now know their passion in their voices by talking to them directly. You will also be able to understand their problems better.
Your customers might feel that some changes to your business can make them more satisfied. There might be several reasons why they need such changes. You must talk to them directly to know what is happening and the customers’ problems. Only if you know the exact problem can you fix it easily.
You will get many benefits if you meet your customers in person. So first, take a list of all your customers and find out who is available locally. Invite those customers and tell them you want feedback to improve your business. You can learn more values from this meeting. To make it easier for them to participate, create QR Codes that they can scan for quick access to your feedback forms or meeting invitations.
6. Quarterly business reviews
Quarterly business reviews will allow you to sit with the clients and discuss what happened in the past three months. You can find ways to provide better service. Often business reviews need to be understood more as talking about numbers and results. But it is not a fact. Business reviews can also be used to get feedback. It is the right time to ask for more feedback from customers’ questions and get detailed feedback from the clients. You can have a better understanding of their thoughts.
7. Get a report from analytics
Analytics will help you know which page and section of the site is most liked and mostly used by the customer. You can use web analytics to get such details about your site. Web analytics often tells us about the total usage, but it does not mean you about the individual user’s behavior on the site. It is because web analytics tracks your website as a whole and does not consider your customers.
But customer analytics will help you track an individual customer’s activities.
You will think about why this is useful. But this is the easiest way to find out why certain things occur on your site and what is the outcome of that.
For example, if you have software, you can offer a free trial to a person to use your product or service for one month. You can let them create an account and then provide a demo.
If the person is satisfied with your product, he will upgrade to a paid plan. If they don’t come back again to use your product, it means that the person did not find enough value in your product.
Now from this data, you can know who didn’t like your product. You also have the person’s details, like their name and mail id. So with these details, you can use any other feedback method to know why they thought your product was not valuable. In this situation, you can easily understand and create some feedback questions.
8. Community groups and discussion boards
Customers love to be a part of a community or a group. Online community groups and discussion boards provide a great platform to mingle with customers. The customers offer feedback as their comments in such groups and committees. Such feedbacks play an important role in the development process of the company. The customers will also give some recommendations for future product enhancement. You should listen to them and respond to their comments.
9. Usability tests
In this method, you can see someone use your product or service. You can track the sections they visit, find out what attracts them the most, and where they need clarification.
Previously, you needed to allocate the task to a random person and ask them to record the entire process. These days there are software and services which will tell you exactly what is happening. The cost has also become reasonable for such services.
This test is best suited for new application development and account creation. You can use this option if you have come up with a new sign-up processor or launched a new product. You can ask a research firm to watch someone use it. This way, you can find and solve the problems immediately. It will also increase your customer acquisition rate.
Do not select your family or friends when selecting random persons to test something. They always feel that everything you do is great. They will not look at your product unbiasedly; you will get only positive feedback. Always perform this test with strangers to get unbiased feedback that will give you the exact output.
The Bottom Line
Getting feedback from your customers frequently will let you know whether your business is set in the right direction. Given above are a few methods to get feedback. Experiment with each of them and find the right combination for your business. Make it a standard practice to get feedback from the customers.
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