Updated on April 9, 2024
We all know that customer is king. Keeping your customer happy and satisfied plays an important role in the growth of any business. But, many questions need answers when improving customer happiness and satisfaction related to customer feedback. Some of these questions include:
- How do we know what the customer wants?
- How do we know if the customer is satisfied?
- What kind of problems do they face in using your products or services?
- Does your product or service provide a complete solution to your customers’ problems?
- Why should your customers choose you over competitors?
The list is endless but majorly revolves around these aforementioned questions.
The list is endless but majorly revolves around these aforementioned questions.
Well, most of us seek experts’ help by attending board meetings or analyzing the competitors. Of course, all these are important activities to ponder upon. But is there a simpler way to get an answer to all of these questions?
Yes – It is simply by asking for feedback from the customers.
Let us now understand the importance of getting feedback from the customer.
What is Customer Feedback?
Customer feedback is information given from your customers about the quality of your product, customer service or any processes or transactions at your company. It’s all about meeting customer requirements.
In fact, there is no better and more reliable source of knowledge about your company than customer feedback.
Importance of customer feedback
- Improve your customer support: You can analyze and improve your customer support based on customer feedback. Improved customer support can help you acquire and retain more customers.
- Helps you to know what your customer likes or dislike: This will help you to understand what your customer likes or dislikes about your product or service. Which will eventually help you to reduce wasting time on the trial and error methods as you already have a precise answer from the end-user to improve as per their exact requirements.
- The customer is king, and their opinion matters: When you ask for feedback from the customer, it makes them feel important as you are considering their opinion in developing your product which will create a positive emotion in customers’ minds to consider you as a valuable supplier.
- Gives a new perspective: Taking feedback from the customer will give you an outsider’s opinion and a new perspective. You might not see any problems or place for improvement in your company from the inside, but the customer can act as an expert to identify major flaws.
- Acts as a roadmap to improve your product and service: You can ask for a suggestion from your customer about design, product, service, and needed extra features to use as guidelines for improving your product/service.
Different ways to upgrade customer feedback strategy
There are a lot of ways through which you can upgrade your customer feedback strategy. Constantly changing and improving your strategies can enhance your final output. Let’s look at ways you can enhance your customer feedback strategy.
Time appropriateness
Emailing surveys to customers decreases the probability of obtaining appropriate feedback. Instead, integrating surveys and questionnaires in the app is more beneficial for getting the necessary suggestions. This will help you get customer feedback, eventually enhancing your organization’s output. This increases the chances of getting responses as more people are likely to answer the questions that pop up while using an app than answering a survey that has been emailed to them.
Making it customer friendly
It is essential to ensure that surveys are designed to the customers liking and not what the company wants. make sure that customers can easily locate your feedback forms or service. Also, occasional feedback is not enough to improve the performance of your brand. Make sure that you are consistent in taking your customer feedback.
Use a smart strategy to derive customer feedback
Customers should have the ability to rank their feedback based on their priorities. For example, if a customer is being bothered by late delivery, then they must be able to prioritize that problem. This helps an organization focus on the aspects of business they lack the most. Your customer feedback service should be extremely seamless so that a customer doesn’t hesitate to give a couple of minutes to your organization. The product team must also consider the search segment feedback to understand the available patterns better. This is a great criterion among many other efficient customer feedback examples.
Implementation of the feedback
An organization needs to take the collected input into account and implement it practically for the better performance of its organization. Frivolously managing feedback and not implementing it will waste time and not add anything to the company’s worth.
How can customer feedback helps with marketing goals
To become a good market leader, searching for tools to help you achieve your marketing objectives never ends. Also, these marketing objectives keep changing, and you may find that what was working with you a year ago is no longer effective. Another problem that most companies face is not being able to convert visitors into customers. Customer feedback can help in understanding where the problem lies. As a service provider, you might be doing everything in your capabilities, but it might not be enough for the customers.
This is why it is essential to work smart rather than hard. Know what your customers want and provide them exactly with that. Customer feedback service is beneficial for both the customers as well as the organization.
Types of customer feedback
- Product feedback
- Feedback on the customer experience
- Sales process feedback
- Brand feedback
- Competitors comparison feedback
How to get feedback from Customers?
The simplest way is to analyze the behavior of your customers on your website using the analytics tool. Their behavior on your website will give indirect feedback. But is it enough? Or does it make more sense to ask your customers directly? Now let’s have look at the different tools to get feedback from the customer.
- Surveys
- Review websites
- Emails
- Live chat sessions
- Talk to your customers directly
- Social media
- Usability test
Surveys
Surveys are one of the traditional methods to get feedback from the customer. They are effective and easy to set up. There are two types of surveys in practice, namely:
Long Surveys
This survey can be designed by using survey tools such as Survey Monkey. You can send survey links to your customer through social media, emails, or any other channels.
But these surveys might not give you quick feedback as you must wait a few days after sending it to the customers. There is a chance of lower response rates from customers as such surveys are usually long and boring. You can follow the below guidelines to make your survey interesting and get proper feedback:
Be Specific: Don’t beat around the bush. Ask only questions that give constructive feedback to improve your process.
Open-ended questions: Open-ended questions will help you to know your customers’ feelings as it involves a thought process to answer the question. Make sure they are fewer in number.
Put multiple choice questions: It’s better to keep a higher number of questions where users have to select the answer(s) rather than writing them so that the survey becomes easier for them to answer.
Short Surveys
These surveys usually appear on the bottom of the screen as your customers are browsing through your website, as shown in the below image, or at the end of emails.
You can use Qualaroo or similar tools to insert such forms in your website to conduct polls and short-form questions. It also contains a questions library to choose from, or you can create your own questions.
But the problem with this kind of survey is that it will be difficult to understand the reason behind the response from the visitor. Ideally, this can be considered as a starting point of feedback only.
Bonus > 20 Most Popular Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions
Review websites
Being a saas company, review websites are one of our favorite tools to get feedback from our customers.
Feedback and Reviews have a thin line between them. But most of the case reviews serve the same purpose as feedback.
There are a lot of online review websites based on different industries. You need to find the relevant one and share it with your customer to drop their reviews about your product.
Here is the list of famous online review websites for different types of businesses.
These reviews will not only help you get customer feedback but also improve your SEO and influence targeted customer buying decisions.
Here is an example of customer feedback that we have received through the review website.
(Be careful. Sometimes it might backfire if you get more negative reviews)
Emails
Emails are one of the best ways to get feedback. Most customers prefer to provide their opinion on your products/services. Still, they are not comfortable with online review as it doesn’t create a private environment to express their genuine opinions.
You can always send an email to your customer after a meeting or demo to get feedback from the customer.
This creates more trust in a customer’s mind to come back to you to take the deal further. You can club the emails with survey forms to get maximum output. Below is an example of the presale email survey form.
The same process can also be followed after the sale to build a strong relationship with the customer. Below is an example of the post-sale survey. This will give a better perspective to improve your products and service to increase customer satisfaction.
Live chat sessions
According to a recent survey, 73% of customers prefer to communicate using live chat tools with a business. Live chat will help customers get 24/7 customer support. You can trigger a small survey in your live chat session to get feedback from the customer.
You might get relatively more raw and genuine feedback from the customer in a live chat session. It is very cost-effective and consumes less time as you don’t need to spend more time creating a survey or asking your customer to fill out separate survey forms. You can check the steps to add live chat on your website here.
Talk to your customers directly
This, again, is one of the traditional ways in this digital age. Calling your customer helps you build a personal connection with them and get deep information about the problem. Having a conversation will help you to understand the tone and the emotion of your customer to build a better context about customer satisfaction.
A recent study suggests that making an emotional connection has helped businesses to increase their brand value, customer retention, and upselling. So it is always better to use a personalized way to interact with your customer.
Social media
Most of your customers will be available on social media (Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook). Be present on all the platforms and monitor your customer feedback, complaints, and compliments. Responding to customer complaints on social media increases the brand value as millions of people use it.
Below are some hacks to get feedback from social media:
Update your status: Ask questions to your customers by updating the status of your social media page.
Monitor comments: Analyze all the comments on your social media posts to observe the tone or emotion depicted by these comments.
Use social analytics: You can use social media analytics tools to know the engagement metrics.
Engage one-on-one: Directly message your followers on social media to get their feedback.
Usability test
This test is mostly applicable when building any new product feature or service. Usability tests give you the ability to observe the usage of your product by real customers. Which in turn is more valuable than any source to improve and build new features and services.
Well, there are many research firms to conduct this test for you. They will let your products /service used by the target audience and record the whole process to analyze their behavior to understand the product’s ease of use.
Below is the representation of the usability test process.
But this might cost a few dollars to conduct the research. The cheaper way is to ask your new employee or friend to use your product without providing any user guidelines to get feedback and analyze their behavior to improve the product accordingly. Additionally, many tools in the market can help you record customer journeys on your platform to analyze later.
How customer feedback will help you to increase the growth of your company.
Advantages of customer feedback
There are a lot of advantages of customer feedback that might not be visible on the surface level but directly and directly contribute to the growth of your business. These advantages include:
1. Make your website better
The best way to use customer feedback is by improving your website by incorporating feedback. A fully functional website is integral to a successful company. The initial impact an organization can have on customers’ minds is catered to through their website only. If your website is creative and visually attractive, a customer would be more likely to buy from you, making it harder with a poor website.
It is essential to consider customer feedback to constantly rebuild your website as per customers’ liking. Rebuild doesn’t mean changing the visuals of your website but also other things such as layout, searchability, and responsiveness.
2. Customize offers as per the needs of your customers
All successful business organizations understand that providing customers with what they need is the key to a successful business. This doesn’t apply to a particular industry but is universally applicable to all companies. This is why customer feedback service is extremely crucial to a business organization. Understanding your customer’s psychology can help you win their hearts and make them permanent buyers of your products or services.
Keep on asking your current customers about what type of changes or new facilities they would like to enjoy. By taking their feedback into account, you can make the necessary changes. This can help you expand your business and find out if a particular product or service you’re planning to launch will succeed, even before its release in the market.
3. Improve customer satisfaction
To incline more people toward your website, you need to invest a lot of money in marketing and advertising. The investment in developing and maintaining a website is a separate cost.
But all of this investment is worth it if the customer is loyal and sticks to your company for a long time. To ensure that a customer sticks to your company for more extended periods, you must satisfy them. Net Promoter Score is an excellent way of knowing if your customers are happy with you. You can ask basic questions such as whether customers will recommend your organization to their friends and relatives.
Basic questions like these can help you greatly improve your organization’s functionality. Things like NPS are great examples of customer feedback that can help you improve customer satisfaction.
4. Know the perception of your customer about you
With so many tools available today, companies no longer have to make assumptions about their image and perception among customers. Also, you can always ask direct website visitors how they end up landing on your website. There are a lot of people who might use the Google review widget on your website as well. This is why it is essential to invest in online and offline campaigns. After investing, you have to ensure that all these bring in results. It is among the most helpful customer feedback examples and will help you understand your image as a brand in the market.
5. Create useful content
An intelligent strategy related to inbound marketing is integral to strengthening your company. Not only it helps in attracting strangers to your website, but it also converts them into regular customers. But you need to ensure that your strategy is different and creative. It’s not essential to have massive ideas that require a lot of investment. But make sure that your system is authentic and output driven. The best way to check whether your content is valuable is by asking your customers. Customer feedback can significantly help you understand the loopholes in your content production. Customer feedback service like this will keep your organization relevant and make customers an active part of your content creation process.
6. Validate buyer persona
Buyer persona refers to a research-based profile that shows the target customers. It defines the ideal customer type of an organization and other related details about them, such as its routines, day-to-day challenges, and decision-making process.
It is possible and very familiar to have more than one buyer persona. Buyer personas help organizations develop empathy towards customers, which can help them develop a personal relationship with them. A buyer persona is, again, an excellent customer feedback example. It can help an organization understand the aspects of a customer’s personality that can benefit their business.
Conclusion
There are many methods to get feedback from the customer. You can choose a suitable method to get feedback from the customer which suits your business practices the best. The important thing to consider while getting feedback is to get more insight from the customer to improve the product and customer service to match the demand in the market.
Subscribe here to get the good stuff — we solemnly swear to deliver top-of-the-line, out-of-the-box and super-beneficial content to you once a week.
At Kommunicate, we envision a world-beating customer support solution to empower the new era of customer support. We would love to have you onboard to have a first-hand experience of Kommunicate. You can signup here and start delighting your customers right away.
