Effective Ways to Gather Customer Feedback
How to collect customer feedback effectively
Customer feedback plays a crucial role in terms of improving user experience, understanding the needs and wants of your target audience better, and for making informed business decisions to achieve higher success. Customer feedback offers several advantages and is critical to continuously improving business processes, growing customer loyalty and eliminating pain points.
Businesses must focus on gathering customer feedback effectively since it is critical to maintaining their competitive edge and market position in this hypercompetitive business world. There are several methods that businesses can employ to gather feedback. Due to the proliferation of digital technology, it has become a lot easier for businesses to collect feedback from customers. They can use one of the several digital channels and various types of platforms and tools to collect feedback. In this post, we will discuss the various methods that companies can employ to gather customer feedback. Here are 12 effective ways to gather customer feedback:
Surveys: Surveys are considered the most useful feedback collection methods in both B2B and B2C environments. They are considered effective because of their highly targeted, individualized, and focused nature. Surveys provide a range of metrics and scales, such as rating scales, popups, emoticons, single-choice questions, and more, for gathering feedback. Surveys can be further subdivided into types based on their objectives such as NPS (Net promoter Score), CES ( Customer effort score), CSAT (Customer satisfaction), onboarding, and CSI (Customer satisfaction index), each of which are aimed at gathering feedback for different objectives. In this way, there are various types of surveys that can be carried out to achieve different types of objectives. Most businesses that are concerned with customer satisfaction from their business carry out CSAT and CSI surveys to measure customer satisfaction.
Email Requests: Email is a great tool for marketing and customer service. It is an excellent tool for following up with new customers or customers who just visited your website. However, the best thing about email is that it can be used to automate the process for gathering customer feedback at various stages of customer journey. There are several advantages of using email to carry out surveys or to gather customer feedback through other methods. The process of gathering feedback via emails can also be automated with a robust customer feedback tool. However, you will need to ensure that emails are targeted and personalized based on the customer’s browsing history or previous buying behavior to make them more relevant and engaging. This will ensure a higher response rate from customers and better results.
Website Surveys: Using website surveys to gather customer feedback also offers several benefits. They help you understand users’ needs and intent as well as improve user experience. However, they are also used to gather product feedback and are considered one of the most non-intrusive methods of gathering feedback from customers. Website surveys can be embedded directly into your website to gather feedback from customers immediately after their interactions. This helps in understanding the customers’ experience on your website and their preferences. Website surveys can help you achieve different objectives and apart from a higher response rate, another important benefit of using website surveys is that you can gather responses in real time.
In-App Surveys: In-app surveys can be used to collect valuable feedback from customers within your application or mobile app. They are integrated within your application and unlike external surveys do not redirect users to another page which makes it easier for the customers to respond with just a few clicks. In-App Surveys are carried out to fulfill various objectives. They can be carried out to make critical product decisions and they can also be carried out to learn about UX or in-app experience and identify areas for improvement. In-App Surveys are effective as they are easy and effortless for customers and also offer an improved response rate.
SMS Surveys: SMS Surveys are surveys administered via SMS. Despite some costs associated with sending bulk SMS, it is considered an effective method of data collection. SMS surveys can be used to collect feedback from customers via text messages. This is particularly useful for gathering quick and concise feedback. SMS surveys are considered effective because of the high SMS open rate which hovers between 95 and 99% and typically remains 98%.
Mobile Surveys: Mobile surveys can be used to collect feedback from customers through mobile devices. This helps in understanding their mobile experience and preferences. Mobile surveys are also an effective method of collecting feedback from customers since they provide higher reliability, faster results and higher convenience.
Social Media Monitoring: Social media can be a gold mine of valuable insights related to your brand and products. Monitoring social media conversations and interactions can provide important insights into customer sentiments and preferences. It also helps learn about customers’ perception of your business and products. Regularly monitoring social media interactions can help identify opportunities for improvement as well as find ideas for new products.
Customer Interviews: Customer interviews are also excellent for collecting customer feedback. INterviews can generate in depth and detailed feedback regarding customer experience and preferences which can be used to make improvements. Interviews can also help understand customer needs and pain points better.
Review Portals: Rating and review portals and important for businesses because they have an important influence on customer opinion. They are also important for managing quality and reputation. Review portals can be used to collect feedback from customers in the form of reviews and ratings. This helps in understanding their overall satisfaction and preferences. The rating portals offer free and real customer feedback. Learning about the customer experience can help improve a company’s efforts in this direction.
Long Form-based Surveys: Long-form survey generally refers to questionnaires with a minimum of 15 to 20 questions. They are a common method of collecting feedback. They usually involve sending a set of questions through email. However, it is crucial to keep the surveys concise and avoid asking too many questions.
Short and Simple Surveys: Companies can use short and simple surveys to gain quick feedback from customers. They can design forms which are easy to understand and can be quickly completed. This can improve response rates and help businesses gather more actionable insights. It also involves using quantitative feedback such as survey rating scales or multiple-choice questions.
Visual Elements: Companies can boost customer engagement when collecting feedback through the use of visual elements like icons or images in the feedback process. It boosts engagement and makes surveys easy to complete. This involves making the survey more visually appealing and easier to navigate.
Businesses can easily gather customer feedback using surveys that can be carried out through various channels. There are several methods to collect valuable customer feedback without having to spend a fortune. However, keeping surveys short and simp[le can guarantee higher response rates. Businesses should also personalize the experience based on customer interaction and use various channels to reach a larger audience and gather diverse feedback. By leveraging these methods and strategies, businesses can effectively collect customer feedback and make informed decisions to enhance their products and services. Customer feedback can help them make continuous improvement to their products and services as well as customer experience and manage their reputation better.
Citations:
[1] https://www.surveysensum.com/blog/collect-customer-feedback
[2] https://www.zonkafeedback.com/blog/ways-to-collect-customer-feedback
[3] https://hiverhq.com/blog/collect-customer-feedback
[4] https://www.optimonk.com/best-ways-to-get-customer-feedback/