Customer feedback strategies: top 5 best methods to use

The customer is the most important visitor on your premises (physical and virtual).

Why is that? 

The reason is simple. 

They’re the lifeblood of your business. 

This important analogy of a customer drives organizations to continue to improve their customer feedback strategies.

Your business runs on your ability to please your customers – to give them what they want. This entails you meet their needs,  keep them loyal, and ultimately turn them into brand ambassadors through quality service. 

However, the question is, how can you be assured your efforts will result in desired outcomes? In order to give clients the best possible experience, you must find out what they think about your service and their real expectations.

Today’s growth tactics by organizations increasingly revolve around customer feedback.

This guide will show you multiple methods to get inside the heads of your customers using customer feedback strategies. 

Understanding customer Feedback

A client’s feedback relates to their experience with a product, service, or brand as a whole.

Its goal is to reveal the level of satisfaction and to help product, customer success, and marketing teams understand what needs to be improved. Customers can be polled, surveyed, or interviewed to collect feedback.

As a result of a question or a request for an opinion, people may form judgments that they otherwise wouldn’t. Some users might not realize that they enjoy a particular feature unless they give you feedback. Nowadays, organizations are always on the lookout for opportunities to talk to their customers.

Every year, companies spend millions of dollars on creating feedback channels like emails, tracking tools, reviews, and surveys. Getting your customer’s feedback is one of the great ways in which you can keep ahead of the competition.

Positive or negative and prompted or unsolicited, either is acceptable. Below are some of the insights you can gain from a customer feedback process;

• By analyzing the WHY, you are able to better understand individuals’ actions.
• The reasons conversion steps fail to turn visitors into customers.
• Which of your features/products attract significant patronage and which doesn’t.
• What makes customers stop using your product altogether (or less frequently)? 

Let’s take a look at 5 top evolving customer feedback strategies that’ll help you capture more useful insights in your business.

1. Live Chat

Live chat can help a business get real-time feedback from customers. Clients utilize live chats to mostly get product information, resolve product usage issues as they arise, or even express displeasure or otherwise. Customers commonly reach out through live chat to receive sales and support assistance. This presents a great opportunity to collect feedback on the spot. 

Using chat surveys is often an effective method to collect feedback. Customer feedback can be requested just after the end of the conversation to receive information about the customer’s experience and the agent’s performance.

Providing live chat on your product page, pricing page, and checkout page will enable you to answer queries instantly and have a positive effect on cart abandonment rates.

2. Brief in-app survey

With increased app usage in recent years, companies are on the lookout to improve their app’s performance. Also, customers are constantly considering ways your product could serve them better. 

Note: apps in this instance are mobile apps and cloud-based applications. 

The user may not find what they want in certain parts of your app, or maybe the design needs to be improved, or perhaps they discovered a bug. They will rarely reach out to you via your support address.

Consider offering your customers a survey while they use your app. During a particular interaction with an app feature, the user may be prompted to complete a survey. Due to its immediate use, the user is more likely to give precise and to-the-point feedback.

Be sure to remember that in an app, users are there for a reason, so sending them a long survey doesn’t make much sense. Keep it short. Just include two or three relevant questions related to the page you are displaying.

An effective approach is to ask about a specific feature that they’re interacting with or to send an NPS survey. NPS surveys can give you an idea of how you’re doing overall and information about specific things you’re doing well (or not so well). 

3. Making telephone calls

There is an abundance of data in surveys and tests, but they will not provide you all the information related to how people feel about your product. Phone calls are necessary for this situation. Personalized and proactive, they yield the best results.

Knowing what a person is thinking and feeling about your product can be discerned from hearing their voice and tone. Additionally, you can probe certain statements that they wouldn’t share in an automated survey. 

When you speak to customers, you will learn the features that get them excited, the features that really simplify their lives, and the ones they don’t care about. 

It is pertinent to bear in mind that there has to be genuine interest on the part of the person calling the client and offering solutions. Rather than doing it because it’s your duty, enjoy it. It shouldn’t sound like a sales pitch.

Equally vital is the time of the call. It has been shown that customers are more likely to respond between 8 A.M. and 9 A.M., and between 4 P.M. and 5 P.M. Lunch between 1 and 2 pm is the absolute worst time to contact anyone. 

Would you like to be disturbed during your lunch break?

It’s a lot of work to schedule calls with your users, talk to them, and analyze feedback that isn’t as structured as survey data. Identify users that can offer the best feedback on your product or service. 

There are two groups to prioritize. First are your most active users. At the same time, you want to get feedback from users who have an unfavorable opinion of you so that you can understand where you’re falling short.

4. Emails for transactional purposes

This is a customer feedback strategy that has not been fully tapped by businesses butter has great feedback potential. These are the emails you receive after signing up for a service, updating your plan, making a purchase, etc. 

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In truth, transactional emails are more often than not viewed as mere notifications. Companies do not make any effort to engage with customers. Studies show that these emails get higher open rates compared to promotional emails. This is so because the customers actually wait to receive them as they contain specific information regarding products/services purchased.

Including a question about a recent purchase in a transactional email is unique to endear the customer to your brand. It shows commitment on the part of the business to customer success. 

When a new user signs up, upgrades, or exits a plan, send them a brief multiple-choice question or a one-line question. The secret is to gain insights about their experience with the product/service at the right time without being burdensome.

5. Suggestion Boards

Using these forums, customers are able to create feedback posts that can be upvoted or commented on. Finding out what your users want most can be as simple as taking a look at posts that have been upvoted or have more comments. 

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Suggestion boards are great because ideas that have been posted by some customers become popular with others who weren’t aware of the benefits they could provide. Customer suggestion boards go beyond simply collecting feedback: they allow users to interact with both the company and their peers on ideas.

A user-friendly board is critical. Adding new posts should be as easy as possible for users. The key to success is creating categories, making them searchable, and allowing your customers to view popular ideas. It will take some time to accumulate feedback. It is best to wait and see which ones your users like before calculating which ones are most popular.

A great way to utilize a suggestion board is when exploring fresh ideas on product/service launch, review, or upgrade. Inviting active users first is the best route – they know your product well and will be able to offer suggestions for improvements and new products. You can then invite more users to the board – even if they don’t have an idea, they can comment on other’s thoughts.

As soon as you have collected the feedback that needs to be addressed, the next step is to analyze it and take action to improve outcomes for everyone.

What to do with customer feedback

There is so much a business can do and achieve with client feedback if and when used correctly. Let’s briefly make a list of some of them.

• Determine any improvements that need to be made to the product/service: Customers are most likely to offer unbiased feedback on your products and services because they are the users. With such information, areas of improvement can be identified and improved.
• Encourage potential advocates: Loyal customers are a business’s best marketing asset. Such customers that regularly give great and honest reviews/feedback can be nurtured into brand ambassadors. A thank you note for a great review can go a long way.
• Take customer feedback into account when planning your product roadmap: Client feedback can be factored into the growth chart of a business. The thoughts of your customers can pave the way for future innovations to meet and surpass their expectations and ensure retention.
• Create a niche that’s right for you: Over time, your clients’ feedback can help to tailor your service and weed out unnecessary elements. Focusing on their areas of greatest needs can end up creating a unique brand.
• Keep customers from leaving: When a customer knows that their opinion counts, they tend to stay put with you. Receiving their feedback and promptly resolving them will help keep them from deserting your product/service.
• Boost your team’s motivation: A great review from a customer is sure to boost employee morale. Most times it is the approval needed and a motivating factor to give more to the company.

Conclusion

Marketing a good product or service is only half the job. In order to propel your product and your business forward, you need a sustained commitment to advocating a consumer-focused culture. This means a passionate desire to gather, analyze and implement customer feedback.

There is always customer feedback to be found. You can use the tools and resources highlighted above to collect this data as well as others. Never undervalue comments about your products and services, and always try to respond to them. Putting your clients’ opinions first will make them feel valued. Establishing strong connections with your audience relies on it. A customer’s voice is invaluable to your business, so listen to them.