How to get customer feedback online
The evolution over the years from using call centres to using toll-free numbers and finally social media as tools for reaching out to customers demonstrates how critical and timeless customer feedback is in business.
It helps business owners gain valuable insight from their customers and gauge the value of their businesses.
This knowledge enables them to optimize these businesses to improve customer satisfaction. Many successful businesses today use customer feedback software to collect, analyze and manage customer inputs periodically.
Customer feedback helps you understand why you may be gaining or losing market share, how your products or services compare with competitors’ and most importantly if and why your target customers like or dislike your products and services.
There are multiple ways to get feedback from customers online. These can be categorized according to the type of feedback.
Given feedback
This category encompasses feedback that customers freely give without any encouragement from the business owner. Given feedback includes:
- Customer calls
- Live chat conversations
- Social media messages
To get this type of feedback, you must have a strong online presence. Start by organizing the customer feedback to keep track of the negative and the positive. Next, engage your customers by responding as soon as possible and asking to follow up questions.
Requested feedback
This type of feedback comes as a response from your customers to your initial contact. Examples include:
- Replies to email newsletters
- Response to interviews and surveys
- Customer satisfaction ratings
- Responses from in-person conversations with your customers
You must take the first initiative to contact your customers for this type of feedback. Since this type of contact can be intrusive, it is advisable to be simplistic and direct in your questioning. You may offer incentives like reward points to encourage the engagement of your customers.
Remember to employ a soft handed approach. Some customers may get offended if you push too much for the feedback and you may end up losing customers.
Observed feedback
You get this feedback by closely monitoring the behaviour of your customers. By finding out how your customers got to your site, how they interact with your products and the documentation they read, you can find out if your business plan is working or not.
- Use social listening tools to find out what people are saying about your products or services on social media.
- Using web analytics tools like Google Analytics to find out how customers are interacting with your website.
- Creating an online community for your customers and observing their conversations about your products. You can use this platform to get valuable tips and to answer any questions that may be raised.
Customer feedback software
Customer feedback data is useless unless you analyze it and get some real insights you could use to improve your brand. The fastest and most efficient method of achieving this is to use a reliable customer feedback software solution. With this software, you can receive customer feedback in real-time. This enables you to quickly and efficiently address any queries and issues from distressed customers. Using a technique called sentiment analysis can help you understand the customer’s feelings towards your business. The software solutions also help you measure the traffic of the various feedback channels. This enables you to determine which ones need optimization.
In conclusion
Customer satisfaction is what determines the success of any business. If your customers are regularly frustrated by your brand, your business is not long for this world. This is why successful businesses invest a lot in getting customer feedback. This feedback drives their product development, marketing strategies and service expectations. By getting as much customer feedback as possible and analyzing it carefully, you can give your customers what they want, best your competition and improve your bottom line.
