Here we’ll list five effective ways of gathering and leveraging your customer feedback.
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 (Harvard Business Review, August 2015). Customers who had the best experiences with a company, spend 140 per cent more than those who had the poorest experience. Whoa—need any more incentive?
Analysing customer feedback is a great way to know where the gaps in your business are. Any flaws will show up – there’s no-where to hide!
Don’t forget that just as anyone else, your customers want to be heard and respected and to know that their feedback is incorporated into your business plan. The most thought-through 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 your end goal for your entire business means that you have a greater chance of achieving your business goals.
Before getting on the survey bandwagon, you need to establish what your business goals are. Why do you need this data in the first place and what are you going to do with it? How can you ensure that your business is making the most of this valuable feedback?
Often, the main objectives is to facilitate communications between your business and the customer. This can be made difficult by the fact that many businesses are online these days, whereas if you have a retail shop, you’d interact with your customers on a daily basis. So online businesses need a way of being able to communicate with their customers in a nimble and straightforward fashion.
Some common “why’s” i.e. goals are to measure customer loyalty, get insights for new product development, understand the gaps in the business and gauging how effecting customer service is.
Establishing when the right time is to gather your feedback can be tricky. There are some best practice pointers though which are:
Related content: The Customer Retention Playbook
There are lots of ways of gathering your feedback, here are the most common ones:
Here at Customer Monitor, we do all of the above, plus the following:
Once you've received the feedback, it’s crucial to be able to use it throughout your business. If you don’t take action on the feedback, you might as well not have surveyed your customers in the first place.
One sure way to annoy your customers or clients is to ask for their opinion but then do nothing with the feedback. Also, customers who believe companies take action based on the feedback feel better about the company and are more likely to respond to surveys.
Sometimes management will see the results but no one else, therefore upon getting your results, distribute your feedback throughout the company to make sure everyone hears the voice of the customer loud and clear. And, make sure they know how your business will act upon it. If your customers know that you’re listening, they’ll see you as responsive to their concerns, and willing to make important changes.
To learn more about how to get feedback with an online survey, check out our free eBook on everything you need to know about online customer surveys, below.