6 Strategies To Collect Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is a highly essential process for several reasons. Firstly, when a customer is satisfied with a product or service, it’s useful to know what is particularly impressive to them personally. With this kind of data, you can identify your strengths and brainstorm similar creative ideas. Secondly, when customers are dissatisfied, they tend to take to social media sites and write about their bad experiences or criticisms. To keep your online reputation intact, responding to such incidents is crucial. Whether good feedback or bad, continuous analysis is vital to drive the success of any business. There are a number of strategies that you can adopt.

Track your social media 

It’s essential to track and monitor all social media platforms as customers expect quick responses to their messages. Failing to respond could damage the online presence of your business, plus you could lose a valuable opportunity to make a connection. Whether the comment or review is positive or negative, a speedy response can serve to make your customers feel valued and respected. 

Customers will often leave reviews across multiple platforms. Positive reviews are excellent for business as word travels fast. Unfortunately, negative reviews can often travel even faster- so these need to be dealt with too. Often, the best way to deal with a negative review is a polite and professional response that attempts to deal with the problem right away. It’s a good idea to track your reviews on multiple platforms to stay one step ahead. 

Use email surveys 

Once customers have received their orders from you, be sure to send out email surveys. These surveys can help you ask for feedback on the experience overall. Get as much information as you can on everything from their motivation to shop with you to feedback on the actual product or service. Ask them about how easy it was to use the website and what their customer service experience was like. It can be a great idea to share positive feedback on your website to help promote what great products and services that you have on offer. The more detailed feedback that you get the easier it will be to utilise it to improve productivity. 

Live chat feedback

Many customers prefer to engage with businesses via instant messaging services. For this reason, using live chat software on your website can be a great idea. When customers have questions, live chat software can answer these questions for your customers on a mass scale. Customers may have delivery or website issues for instance. Once a live chat session has ended, ask your customers for feedback on the chat there and then. Doing so can help you to know where improvements need to be made or which questions are coming up frequently. Live chat features can be improved to add new answers if lots of your customers have the same issues. 

Abandoned purchase feedback 

Often, customers will begin to put items in their cart and then proceed to leave your website without completing the purchase. When this happens, it can be a great idea to ask them why they are leaving without buying the items. Create a pop-up form that gives them a few different answers to choose from. Possible answers could be ‘unsuitable shipping options’ or ‘ purchase taking a long time to complete.’ Whatever the reason is, this kind of data will help you to improve your website and sales process. 

Provide some incentives 

It can be difficult to obtain feedback because many customers just feel that they don’t have the time. To encourage more people to part with a little feedback, it can be a great idea to offer some incentives for people’s time. One easy way to do this is in the form of a discount or a competition. You could also offer a free downloadable how-to guide or an ebook. Customers who are interested in your industry are often keen to engage with some educational info. Instead of putting all your best content on your blog, keep some to offer in exchange for feedback. 

Try feedback via SMS

If you’re not having much luck with your email feedback, why not try sending an SMS. We all know that our culture is a little phone-obsessed these days- so why not tap into that to improve your feedback rate! It’s been reported that an SMS is often more readily opened than an email. By using SMS you could end up getting more responses. Again, when you’re trying to increase your feedback, providing an incentive or two can really improve your chances. 

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