Customer feedback has always been something of a sore spot for many businesses. It can be challenging to collect. And once you do, you are not guaranteed to get any useful information if you fail to do things the right way. To help you avoid such awkward and frankly infuriating situations, here are six ways to collect and use customer feedback.
Provide an incentive for survey completion
The first way to gather customer feedback is good old surveys. They are perhaps the most comprehensive way to collect data since you can tailor them to fit whatever aspect of your business you want more opinions about. The tricky part is getting people to complete your survey voluntarily. Of course, you can try and lock something out behind a survey. But that is just a quick and efficient way to annoy your customers into never wanting to use your website again. Instead, it would be best if you motivated them to do surveys willingly by offering some form of incentive. It doesn’t have to be something all that special. You can offer a discount coupon or a small cash coupon redeemable in your store. Phone games have perfected this by providing special currency rewards to their players in exchange for doing surveys, for example.
Encourage leaving reviews
Reviews are the absolute best way to collect and use customer feedback. The best thing about them is the fact that they’re free. All you need to do is make sure to have your employees, or even pop up messages after transactions on your website, encourage people to leave reviews. Reviews are often brutally honest and to the point because the person stands to gain nothing by lying. This allows you to truly gauge the quality of your services or products as well as the quality of your customer service. Naturally, you need to provide a platform for them to get reviews. This can either be an existing app or your website. This gives you an excellent incentive to look up what you need to know about Google My Business optimization since it is one of the most popular platforms for business reviews.
Encourage staff to chat with customers
There are few things as reliable as getting information from your customers. So, it is always wise to encourage your staff to chat with customers to obtain feedback. Now, is this the right thing to do with all your staff members? Of course not. It depends heavily on their position and job description. A sales manager or a sales team member should be given this task. Field teams, who go out there and do the work if you are running a service-based business, or the cashiers handling dozens of customers in queues if you are running a store, are unlikely to have the time or the inclination to chat. And it would not be smart to burden them with an additional task when they already need to focus and work hard during their regular workdays.
Reach out to customers on social media
One of thetop business mistakes you might be making is not using your social media accounts to their full potential. And one of the ways to use them is to collect and use customer feedback through them. If you are running an active social media account for your business, and it is doing well, lots of people will feel motivated to engage with you through it. You can ask them for their opinions about your products and services. And even gauge their reaction to potential future products. This allows you to go into the decision-making phases of running your business with more data and forewarning than you otherwise would have.
Let customers score their service satisfaction
A nifty piece of coding utilized to collect customer feedback offers a simple grading scale on your website after purchases or reservations. It can be something as simple as asking them to provide ‘stars’ matching the quality of customer support and service they have received. Or their satisfaction with your website. Even their opinion on how diverse and comprehensive your lineup of products and services are. People often feel more inclined to do these ‘mini survey’ types of questionnaires since they do not take a long time to complete. One or two clinks, and you would be done and free to continue your day. This also provides a suitable venue for ways small businesses can improve customer service since it is crucial to work on this aspect, and collecting data this way is quick and cheap.
Collect data from your website
The final way to collect and use customer feedback is directly from your website’s data. There is plenty of software out there that can track visitors’ activity on your site. Lots of them even come built-in on platforms like WordPress. And they’re pretty comprehensive, too. Now, while this is admittedly not direct feedback, it is still an essential source. You can see how many people were on the verge of completing a transaction with you just to give up at the very last minute. How many people have visited your site in general? Even what some of your most popular pages and links are. That provides you with valuable insight into the state of your business and customers’ wants and needs. You do not need us to provide helpful business advice to know why this is important.
Final comment
Now that you have six ways to collect and use customer feedback under your belt, you should be ready to put them to use. Just remember: not all customer feedback you get will be positive. And that is perfectly okay! You can even use negative feedback to improve your business a step further. Which, in the end, will only boost your profits and business success.
