Customer feedback is a critical aspect of any business. It helps you understand what the buyer is looking for and makes their experience better. Feedback can be in the form of reviews, comments, interviews, surveys, and suggestions submitted by customers. It is the most valuable asset for any business. The way you collect it will significantly impact how you design your products or services.
What is Customer Feedback?
Customer feedback is a direct expression of appreciation or disappointment from the customers to your business. It includes their views and opinions about you, your product or service, whether positive or negative.
It is collected with the primary objective of measuring their level of satisfaction and can inform you on how to improve your current product and service. A feedback is not limited to comments about a company’s physical products; it can include services such as customer support, delivery etc.
How Customer Feedback Helps your Business?
Here are 4 ways in which customer feedback helps your business –
1. Helps improve products and services
This is a given. Before you build and introduce a new product or service to the market, you need to know what your customer needs. This is where market research helps. But even after good market research, the chances of your product or service not being able to satisfy customers are quite high. This is where feedback helps. It lets you figure out everything about your product, including its pros, cons, and experience of using it. This data, in turn, will help you fine-tune the product or service and make it a successful one.
2. Helps improve brand perception
Everyone loves to be heard and valued. This includes your customers. Feedback is a great way to show your customers that you not only value them but also their opinions. You can show the world that your business revolves around your customers, which improves your brand image. This has a direct impact on your sales, thanks to positive word-of-mouth marketing. All you have to do is listen to your customers’ opinions and implement them in your product or service instantly. Do not make the mistake of just hearing out the customers’ opinions and forgetting about them later. This can cause more harm than good.
3. Help build better customer experiences
In this digital age, customers are the kings, because they have thousands of options to choose from. If you do not offer a good experience to them, they are going to instantly shift to your competitors. The key here is customer experience. Yes, you need to offer a stellar customer experience everytime them interact with you. Customer feedback is the easiest way to offer a tailored experience to the customers. You can hear from the horses’ mouths about what they like, what they dislike, what can be improved, etc. and modify the experience accordingly.
4. Motivate your team
This might come as a surprise to you but customer feedback can indeed help in motivating employees. For instance, if your customers praise a particular feature developed by a particular item, you can pass on the compliments directly to the team. This is a great way to build an environment of healthy competition as other teams and employees will start working extra hard to gain such recognitions from the customers directly.
How to Collect Customer Feedback?
It is easier than ever to collect feedback from your customers these days. You can use surveys, emails, chat support, social media platforms, phone interviews, etc. to collect it.
1. Surveys
The most common way to ask them for feedback is through a survey after selling a product or providing a service. A survey can include Multiple-choice or open-ended questions that allow for more in-depth responses. It should not be lengthy as the customers do not have time to answer questions that offer no immediate benefit to them.
They are quick and can be easily sent out to many people at once. Their only drawback is that they will never provide as much insight as to other feedback collection methods, but they can still give you an idea of what people think about your product or service. You can also include an incentive to encourage them to complete the survey.
You might need to build surveys that are long at times. For cases like these, it is advisable to use third-party sites like JotForm Survey Maker or SurveyMonkey as they provide users more interested in filling out long surveys.
2. Email
Another way to ask customers for feedback is by emailing them after providing a service or delivering a product. Since you get the feedback in an email format, you can follow up on them when necessary. It is a fast, easy to set up and cost-effective way of collecting feedback.
For example, you must have received a request to rate your experience whenever you shopped online or stayed at a hotel. This is an excellent option for companies that want something more personalized than just using social media or other market research tools such as Google Analytics or SurveyMonkey software.
Many service providers can help you automate this process and ensure reviews are posted across all virtual channels like Facebook, Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp etc.
3. Chat support
As a business owner, you need to care for your customers and know what they want. One of the best ways to do that is by providing chat support. It is a popular customer service method that allows you to assist them via messaging apps or online chatbots.
It provides a better experience to them and has been proven to be more efficient when collecting feedback. Customers love the convenience of connecting with brands through chat rather than having to pick up the phone.
You can get instant responses over chat while maintaining human connection and empathy. Chat support can help you interact efficiently with your consumers and collect feedback and resolve their queries.
4. Social media channels
Social media is one of the best ways to collect feedback because it’s accessible and provides a direct channel for customer service. There are many benefits to using it as a tool for collecting feedback.
First, it has the potential to reach out and engage with customers and potential customers because people are always on their devices scrolling through their feed. Second, it is an interactive medium where feedback can be given instantly and in real-time.
This instant feedback can help immensely gauge how well (or not) you are meeting your customers’ expectations or needs. Third, using social media as a tool for obtaining feedback can give you access to more qualitative data than quantitative data, which you can use for market research purposes.
For instance, Facebook is great for getting detailed reviews, whereas Twitter is great for getting instant reactions to specific news stories.
5. Phone calls
A phone call is one of the simplest ways to get in touch with the buyers. It can be done quickly and easily, and you don’t need a specialist per se. It allows you to ask them about their experience with services or products.
You can ask for their feedback on various topics such as customer support, delivery, and product quality. Phone calls can be an excellent way to collect feedback because they help keep the conversation relaxed and informal.
A little bit of effort goes a long way. You can make the most out of your phone calls and get saved from wasting time on any unnecessary extra steps. You should not make marketing offers while collecting feedback and focus on just the customer’s opinion and review.
Feedback is about asking, listening and constantly improving and responding to your buyer’s wants and needs. It helps you improve their experience and gives insight into how your service team does their job. Such feedback can lead to increased agent engagement and better performance which can be helpful when training new team members.
A cloud telephony service provider like FreJun can help you automate your calling and emailing process and make feedback collection much more manageable and efficient. You can try FreJun for 7 days for free and see if it’s the right fit for your business.
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