When it comes to improving the overall customer experience for your brand (and subsequently your profitability and ROI in the long term), you'll want to start by understanding your customers first. Gathering and analysing your customer feedback—for example, through an online survey—is an ideal place to start understanding the voice of your customers.
Monitoring your brand presence in the market is another great way to gather customer feedback, measure customer experience and sentiment, and identify where improvements are needed.
If you’re still on the fence about why improving the customer experience is important, consider this: customer experience drives sales for both transaction based and membership based businesses. Research shows that customers who had the best experiences with a company spend 140 per cent more than those who had the poorest experiences.
Analysing your customer feedback is a great way to know where the gaps in your business are. There is no hiding from customer feedback that highlights the flaws in your customer service and experience.
Remember, your customers want to be heard and respected and to know that their feedback is incorporated into your business plan. The most effective customer feedback strategies are intuitive, and work at their best when the whole company listens and effectively responds to the voice of the customer.
Making customer-centricity the end goal for your entire business means that you have a greater chance of achieving your business goals.
Before getting on the survey bandwagon, establish what your business goals are. Why do you need this data and what are you going to do with it? How will you ensure that your business is makes the most of this valuable feedback?
Often, the main objective is to facilitate communication between the business and the customer. Many businesses are online these days, which makes communicating with customers directly and getting their a challenge. A survey can help address this problem.
Other common “whys” include:
Establishing when it's the right time is to gather feedback can be tricky. There are some best practice pointers though, which are:
Related content: The common pitfalls of customer experience management
There are a lot of ways to collect customer feedback, and the most effective customer experience strategies often use more than one approach. Here are a few of the most common:
Lastly, no matter what strategy you use to gather feedback, always remember to thank your customers for their time. Even if their feedback is negative—it may even provide some of your greatest insights.
Once you've received feedback, use it. If you don’t take action on the feedback, you might as well not have surveyed your customers in the first place. Your customers have taken the time to provide you these insights, doing nothing with them broadcasts that your business doesn't care about their opinion. Customers who believe a company will take action based on their feedback feel better about the company and are more likely to respond to surveys.
Customer feedback is not just for management—everyone in the company stands to benefit from it. Therefore, upon getting your results, distribute the feedback throughout the company to make sure everyone hears the voice of the customer loud and clear. Most importantly, make sure your staff know how the business plans to act upon it. This will trickle back to your customers and if they know that you're listening, they’ll see you as responsive to their concerns and willing to make important changes.
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