The hustle and bustle of the modern-day business world keep us from paying attention to the nuances of the communication and with no customer feedback strategy, you are shooting yourself in the bush.
If we look around, communication is everywhere — we talk to our loved ones, we instruct our dog to sit, we order our favorite pizza, we ask the prices when we go shopping, and sometimes, we ask customers how we can help them. So communication is happening all day every day.
There are many principles of business ethics that we learn, grasp, and adapt over time. Our environment, society, and company educate us on reacting to certain situations, for instance:
- Saying thank you to someone who helps you in finding an address
- Apologizing to a stranger you bumped into at a supermarket
- Being nice to a waiter who shows up to take your order
Therefore, we know that being polite and nice to others is a good deed. The interesting part is that organizations and businesses grasp the values and infuse into their cultures too.
Have you noticed you enter a fancy restaurant and you’re welcomed and ushered to the seating area?
Did you know some companies serve tea and coffee in their waiting rooms?
All these things are being done because they showcase their culture, values, and ethics.
Customer feedback is one of those things that companies around the world are adopting day by day. The organizations that are paying close attention to customer feedback use the input to shape their products, methodologies, and strategies.
In 90s popular TV show “Friends” when Joey takes up a waiting job at Central Perk. Rachel shares her wisdom based on her two years of experience working as a waitress. She gives her two tips, which were as follow:
- Customer is always right
- A smile goes a long way
So we can take away from the example is that even in the sitcom, they’ve tried to portray the importance of customers’ opinion, which is understandable.
Although, the very next dialogue of the same scene was Rachel telling Joey that if a customer is rude to you, sneeze muffin, which was the part of making us laugh.
Before building a customer feedback strategy, a company must strengthen its relationship with its customers. It’s not just the high-quality products that build the repute, but the company-to-customer communication matters too.
A lot of customers like to start up a conversation with the company before they go ahead and buy their product. There are many reasons why someone would go to a company’s support page and strike up a conversation with their support staff.
There could be more than one reasons for that to find out:
- How quickly they respond to the inquiry
- How they treat prospective customers
- How well they know their product/service
- How deep their resolve is to satisfy a customer
Following are the common communication methods between the companies and the clients:
Social Media Responses
Some customers reach out to companies via social media. They tweet, DM on Instagram, or message on Facebook page to ask for help. Many companies out there pay close attention to social media.
Not only do they just use social media platform to post content, but they also listen to their audience. Therefore, the customer feedback could sway in your favor if you’re active on social media and respond to your customers rather quickly.
Email Replies
Email is perhaps the most used communication method between customers and companies. Most companies take 24-48 hours to respond to email inquiries. But there are businesses which never check their emails, which is disastrous for their sales and marketing.
Phone Back
Most businesses have their phone numbers mentioned on their website, and they respond to the phone calls, but let’s admit, the majority of people want to use the internet to communicate with the companies.
One of the reasons is that if there is an overseas company, you won’t prefer calling on an international number. There are many ways to communicate with the companies, for instance, Skype, email, and social media, which people mostly prefer these days.
Let’s dive deep into the strategic side of the customer feedback to figure out what makes it better.
How to Build an Effective Customer Feedback Strategy
If we look at the current state of the customers’ feedback scenario, it’s no surprise that only a handful of companies are taking it seriously.
Sure, sometimes, we receive a survey email when we close a support ticket on a website, but still, either we don’t take it seriously, or the company doesn’t pay attention much to the feedback.
You might have filled up some surveys from companies, but have you received a personal email or a phone call from the surveyor based on the details you provided? The answer would be NO.
Here are common customer feedback strategies that some companies are using:
Live Chat Feedback
Live chat has been a growing trend in customer care segment. Indeed, it does help the customers and prospects who want to know about the pricing, how a product works, or anything else related to the purchase.
Normally, a live chat feedback box pops up when a customer ends the live chat with the company’s customer care representative. It either asks to rate the customer service or gives you a couple of simple questions to answer.
For instance, did you like our customer care? What should we do more to improve our product?
The benefit of live chat feedback is that the response is often quick and handy. A customer just has had an interaction with the support team, and it’s easy to express the opinion during that moment.
Some of the popular live chat software are Olark, GoSquared, and Intercom.
Email Support Feedback
Have you ever received an email for feedback after closing the support ticket on a website? Chances are, you’ve received it, but you haven’t paid much attention to it. It sounds about right because we all do that.
It turns out, the email support feedback does work from time to time, but not as much as the live chat feedback. Perhaps because it requires more effort from the end-user standpoint. For instance, first, the receiver opens the email, then reads it, and then finds out that it’s asking you to go to the link and fill up a survey.
The majority of people won’t do it unless there is a lucky draw or something attached to the feedback submission.
Helpline Assistance Feedback
A lot of companies have set up a helpline feedback system, which works in different ways. Some of them call back to confirm whether or not the problem has been resolved.
Others want to know how was your experience through their phone representatives. Mostly such feedback is recorded via automated phone calls.
Now, let’s move forward to the steps you need to take for building an effective customer feedback strategy:
1: Fix loopholes in your current plan
First things first, you should scroll through your website and find the loopholes that are holding you back from receiving feedback from the customers and prospects.
To get customer feedback, we must first create an environment that floats the idea of giving feedback. Here are a few quick fixes that you can do to start getting customers’ feedback.
For example, tawk.to is a fantastic live chat service, but their website doesn’t clearly communicate how people can contact them other than live chat.
Here are some changes you may want to make:
Insert an inquiry form
If your website doesn’t have an inquiry form, then it’s highly unlikely that you’d get inquiries. The reason is that the more ease you create for the audience, the more they get closer. People use products like SEMrush, Long Tail Pro, and Canva because these tools solve their problems and make things easier for them.
If you don’t have an inquiry form on your website and you’d still be expecting inquiries through your website, then you’d be living in a fool’s paradise.
Add contact information
Some companies set up their contact pages, which are half-baked. They simply put up a small contact form instead of contact person’s name, email, and phone number. Not only does it start to look fishy, but visitors who look at it often lose interest in the company.
So add proper contact information to your contact page so that anyone could easily contact you. Plus, if you name your contact page to something weird, it also backfires. People easily recognize a contact page if it’s named either “contact” or “support” on the website.
Bring a bug reporting system
One of the ways to get feedback on your product or software is through a bug reporting system. Some big companies across different industries offer big bounties to ethical hackers who find vulnerabilities in their apps, softwares, and products.
It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to offer a bug bounty because some experts don’t mind telling you what’s wrong with your product or website for free.
You can simply set up a bug reporting system on your website. You’re likely to get something at some point. Therefore, having a bug reporting page would make this process smoother.
Improve website CTAs
What if you have a feedback system in place, but no one is actually using that? There could be more than one reasons for that, but perhaps people might not be able to notice it properly. In such a case, make sure to change your call-to-action buttons to common CTAs such as support, inquiry, contact, get notifications, and report a bug.
Once you’ve done with these developments, you’d have fixed some loopholes that may have been leaking prospective customers out of your website.
2: Rejuvenate system with new strategies
The job is to provide your customers with an opportunity to express their concerns or satisfaction through a proper channel. When such an opportunity isn’t provided, things start to get convoluted, which doesn’t help the process.
Besides your simple feedback tools such as inquiry form and contact page, you have to infuse an out-of-the-box strategy to spice things up.
Here are a few suggestions to do that:
Post-checkout Survey
A post-checkout survey might come in handy for e-commerce stores and SAAS companies that deal with online selling. The idea is to do a little survey through a landing page or an email to be 100% sure that the customer went through the checkout process without any hassle.
You can ask a few questions regarding the ease of searching the products, adding products to the cart, and checking the available payment methods. A lot of new customers get confused on the websites if there is so much to offer on the checkout page, for example, value-added products, discount offers, and promo code.
E-commerce stores try out all types of selling techniques on their checkout pages to see what increases their sales.
The only purpose of a post-checkout survey is that a brand could know how was the customer’s shopping experience so that it could be improved in the future.
Customer Satisfaction Survey
A customer satisfaction survey could be about buyers experience with your products. It’s obviously an aftersale strategy that could give you an edge over competitors. The only goal is to measure customer satisfaction through any rating or scoring system.
It may lead to knowing what small things bothering some clients, but they were cool with it. And surely, it could have been way better if that small thing is changed in the future. So customer satisfaction survey could be a real thing.
Unsubscription Survey
This type of survey could be done once a client leaves you or a product subscriber unsubscribes to your service. It must be a very simple survey expressing your gratitude towards your former client and asking what you could do to improve the product or service.
Some may respond to your survey positively and tell you politely that what you can do better, some would share that it’s temporary discontinuation due to circumstances and they’d come back, and others might not respond.
The whole idea is that you got to try out new stuff to see what works better. If you end up finding more responses just by trying out something new, then it’s all worth it.
3: Analyze the effectiveness of your system
There is no harm in scrutinizing the system you created for customers feedback. Over time, the customer feedback system you adopt goes through an evolution, and it gets better and better over time.
So to analyze the performance of your feedback system, you need to develop an analysis system to measure the quality of your customer feedback strategy.
Different metrics would allow you to analyze the performance of your feedback system:
Response rate
Keep track of the percentage of the customers who respond to a certain type of feedback strategy. For example, if you create a poll on the Facebook page, you could analyze how many people saw that post and how many of them responded to the poll.
The point is to study the feedback ratio, whether it’s a Facebook poll or a web-based online survey through your website. Furthermore, you can categorize all the results and compare which strategy has been fruitful as far as feedback is concerned.
Surveying platform
One of the best ways to take feedback from your customers and audience is by doing a survey. There are a bunch of surveying platforms available now. Check out their features, pricing, and how they work before jumping to any conclusion.
You can try out one, and if it doesn’t work out, consider trying a different one. Some of the popular survey sites are SurveyMonkey, SurveyLegend, and SurveyPlanet.
On-page Clickability
Suppose you have a landing page that you expect your visitors to use. Now, you want to specifically know where your audience is clicking through or what portion of the landing page they’re looking while they’re on the landing page.
So to make that happen, you need a heatmap to find that out. Check the heatmap tools like Heatmap, Hotjar, or CrazyEgg.
A/B testing
One of the best strategies to analyze the effectiveness of your feedback strategy is A/B testing. You can A/B test between the option A and the option B whether it’s a landing page design, email format, or newsletter template.
The idea is to compare two options to find out which outperforms the other one. Once you figure out which option is more effective, you can work on to optimize it further.
Lucky draw
Who doesn’t like to win something for free? A lucky draw could be an enticing offer for the audience that responds to the customer feedback. People would be likely to respond to the offer because no one would hate winning a product for free.
It could be a software subscription or any physical product that you can give away in the lucky draw. It must be very clear to the audience that someone who responds to customer feedback is eligible to win this lucky draw.
They should also know that the winner would be chosen through a lucky draw, and the picker doesn’t control the selection whatsoever. However, don’t let the emphasis shift towards the lucky draw. The objective is to get feedback; the lucky draw is a secondary element in the process.
All these metrics can tell the story of your customer feedback strategy right off the bat.
Such analysis helps you milk the new opportunities to start up a conversation with a client that may lead to something new or figuring out what you could do better in the future.
What’s the point?
Putting your customer feedback strategy to the test isn’t easy. However, the results would be fascinating. A lot of companies seem to like the popular belief that “the customer is always right,” but the reality could differ, in some cases.
Having a customer feedback facility represents the acceptability of views, room for improvement, and gratitude towards customers. Not only does it show how much you value your customers, but it also portrays your professionalism.
Customer feedback is communication that could prove to be a new threshold for businesses. If a slight change in plan starts to show better results, then why one shouldn’t go all in and turn things upside down, the possibility of newness may lie on the other side of a feedback inquiry.
What else would you like to add to the importance of customers feedback?
Let us know in the comments below.
