Running a business without asking your customers’ feedback is like trying to cross a busy street with headphones plugged into your ears while playing Angry Birds on your phone.
If you think customer feedback is only useful for putting out future fires then you are quite mistaken. The customer insights gained from the feedback can reflect very positively on your company’s performance.
Customers’ “opinion is a resource for improving customer experience and adjusting your actions to their needs.”
Keep your ears to the ground by implementing these options for collecting customer feedback.
There are two types of feedback you can receive – prompted (such as contact forms or surveys) and unprompted (clients’ reviews, etc.)
Hubspot outlines 16 strategies to obtain customer feedback. While they are all efficient ways, we selected six different mediums through which you can receive customer feedback.
1. Contact forms
Use contact forms on your website to facilitate easy exchange of ideas between customers and your organization. Don’t guide the feedback process by allowing customers to answer only a few pre-set questions. It’s in your own interest to keep the feedback as free-flowing as possible.
Use a ticket management system in the backend so that every customer contact can be managed and tracked.
2. Forums
User forums are another great way to learn what customers think about your products or services. These forums can be hosted by you or by third parties. Monitor these forums for valuable insights and interact regularly with the other members.
Keep in mind that you have to maintain and moderate your forum. An absentee moderator or owner quickly turn an online forum into a dystopian wasteland. A dead forum has the same impact as an abandoned social media profile or a crumbling store- none of them inspire buyer confidence.
Related Post: Turn Customer Feedback Into Customer Insight
3. Social networks
Depending on what you sell, social networks can be immensely beneficial in engaging with customers and getting feedback.
The trick here is to know what social network your customers are active on. Interacting with your market and mining information from social networks is easy to do with a number of tools, both free software and business vendors are available.
A presence on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube is an obvious way to get started.
But this is only scratching at the surface. For example, if you are a restaurant you should look at Yelp. If you are a tour company, focus on TripAdvisor.
4. Live Chat
Live chat is an important tool for customer feedback. Chat is the next best thing to talking with a customer on the phone or face to face- you can get targeted feedback in real time.
These days adding live chat functionality to your website is as easy as signing up for an email account. Pick a good solution that comes with features like robust analytics and live chat transfer.
Related Post: Easy Ways to Ask For Feedback
5. Surveys
Surveys are also widely used to get customer feedback. Done right, they can uncover a lot of things that you might have overlooked otherwise. Design the questionnaire so that the questions are short and concise. Keep the user informed of the progress made.
Keep it simple and as short as possible.
Some further tips – be upfront about the objectives of the survey and give sufficient incentive for users to participate. At the minimum, create a report out of the results of the survey and gift it to them.
One emerging new way to offer surveys to customers is through feedback kiosks. Case studies show that placing them in business locations has proven to increase the likelihood of customers filling out the surveys.
6. Customer Touchpoints
Advancing technology is now making easier than ever to collect real-time feedback from your customers at critical touchpoints. It’s also making it easier to intercept and remedy negative reviews before they hit the internet. Whether you are a brick & mortar business, event venue, transportation hub, or health facility, products like Big Mouth Survey’s portable, on-site survey kiosks can be placed in high traffic areas (i.e. reception desks, bathrooms, checkout counters, ticket windows, concessions, and more).
In addition, BigMouth Survey is guaranteed to increase your brand’s automated online reviews by at least 15%. The customer feedback software can be configured to automatically prompt customers to review their on-site experience online. They will even have the option to be texted or emailed an online review link from any social media platform.
Do you have a policy of regularly seeking customer feedback? Which option has given you the maximum amount of feedback? Share in the comments below.
