Our customers are the life and soul of our businesses. Without them supporting our products, services, and brand, we will have a difficult time growing our businesses. We might sound redundant, but only because we care, when we say that customer feedback is crucial to any businesses’ success.
Have you ever heard positive or negative feedback about your store, staff, and products or services? Not as often as you’d wish. Or have you only received lackluster feedback even from your most loyal consumers? There’s a high likelihood that you aren’t approaching your customer feedback correctly.
Here’s why customer feedback is important.
Customer feedback is what makes or breaks many businesses in different industries. This feedback takes several shapes and sizes. They can be reviews, surveys, ratings, polls, or even emails. With your customer feedback, you’ll be able to find new ways of improving your brand, sales, service, and gain more traffic.
Success will be difficult to achieve without customer feedback because you will have insufficient knowledge of your customers’ wants and needs.
Today, we’ll focus on smart, awesome ways of collecting customer feedback.
Reach Out to Customers
Not many customers will give you a piece of their minds unless they were asked about their experience. We all know this. Whether we had a great or horrible experience at a restaurant, many of us will keep our opinions to ourselves.
At a restaurant, let’s say, we could’ve loved or hated our dinner, but after the meal, we just want to pay the bill and go home. We’re tired from the day’s work, tired from dinner, and need to be home ASAP because there’s work the following day.
So, reach out to your customers. You can send a short online survey asking for their feedback. Provide several options like star rating. Tools like SurveyMonkey are really helpful for these kinds of engagement.
Give Live Chat Support
We live in a time of instant gratification. Businesses lose customers when they can’t respond to a question or demand instantly. When customers want something these days, they want it right away. Integrating chat system on your website is an amazing way of responding to their needs. And data shows it as 73% of businesses with a live chat function have the highest customer satisfaction levels.
Follow-Up with Your Customers
Always think of your customers. As businesses you want your customers to leave smiles on their faces. Check up on their experience with the product or service they bought from your shop. Show them you care. Your follow-ups should be thoughtful and well-planned, but it doesn’t have to be elaborate. A short, simple message from the heart should suffice.
Display Positive Customer Feedback
Word of mouth feedback is alive and well. It’s gone digital! Displaying customer feedback on your website not only builds up your brand to potential customers, but it also encourages other current or past customers to leave their own reviews. It sends a message to your loyal customers that they matter, and you value their feedback.
AI Feedback Analysis
Artificial Intelligence is a friend to business owners who wear many hats. When looking to boost customer support, AI helps you detect patterns and classify problems. This capability allows you to find and categorize customer feedback. This provides a more accurate customer experience than a simple 1-5 scale system. AI feedback analysis shows outcomes such as what the complaint is, how big the problem is, and how customers feel about the product/service/experience.
Be Active on Social Media
People of all ages are on social media. As a business, your online presence must be felt by your followers. When businesses leave a negative comment unaddressed for days and weeks, it reflects on the business because other potential customers see the negative review.
Whether you’re on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or all of the above, be active on those platforms. You have to be vigilant and respond professionally to negative reviews.
Ask for Feedback at the Right Time
This can be a little tricky because gauging the right time is a skill that is learned through experience. Depending on the product, give it a day or two before sending an email asking about their experience. Keep the email short and sweet.
In the email, offer the consumers a discount on their next purchase when they leave feedback. Let them know the feedback won’t take up a lot of their time and will only take a minute or less.
Call Center Monitoring
This strategy might be a little outdated to some but call center monitoring is still effective. This is a great way to track both your staff’s happiness and clients’ satisfaction. As a business owner, you get to hear the strengths and weaknesses of your staff and your clients’ experience, good or bad. Call center monitoring becomes an important tool because it allows you to improve the way you provide the quality of service. When your team shows a positive and helpful presence over the phone, it brings a sense of contentment to your consumers.
Offer an Incentive
Entice your customers to by offering free shipping, a discount, or free samples! Who doesn’t want discounted stuff or freebies? This is an amazing strategy for you to conduct survey and encourage customers to leave positive feedback.
Nurture Customer Relationships
Here’s an age-old sure-fire way of collecting customer feedback – nurturing relationships with new and loyal customers. There’s nothing revolutionary here, just an old-school way of engaging and interacting with the customers. Treat them like family, and they’ll provide the most honest feedback you need to improve on your business.
These are just a few examples of ways to gather feedback.
While there are several ways to collect customer feedback, essentially, it’s easy. You just need to find the right platform or platforms that will work well for your business.
Need help collecting customer feedback, conducting survey, or reputation management on social media? Drop us a message and let’s chat. We provide real-time assistance and management that ensures your online image is what you want to see and read.
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