Customer Feedback
Every business needs to know if their customers or users are satisfied with the service/product. Unfortunately, very few customers take their time to provide that feedback. Most of them, if unsatisfied, they walk away, find a replacement and never return.
Statistics show that for every one customer who complains, there are 20 others who remain silent and decide not to do business with you.
With social media and all, these unsatisfied customers share their experiences with more people which then hurts the company’s brand. To counter this, companies can engage with their customers and get quality feedback from them.
Some methods to collect feedback are:
- Live support — though online, a company should be easily accessible to help its customer whenever need be. This could be through live chat or calls.
When a customer is having a problem accessing information or accomplishing a task, they can reach out then and be offered the necessary assistance.
This way you even get their feedback as a bonus. It’s easier to identify recurring issues from the customers hence correct it on time.
Tools: chat.io, liveagent, zohosaliesiq. - Dedicated Feedback Forms — Having these on the site allows a customer to write their complaints, issues and feedback of the service.
Most of the time, you may not receive positive feedback because that’s what the customers expect when they come to your site.
Lack of feedback however, doesn’t translate to satisfied customers. Have the necessary questions you would like to ask your customers and ensure that the form is not long. - Customer feedback surveys — These are the easiest ways to get customer feedback. These could be sent out in emails.
Have well designed surveys that seek to ask the customers relevant questions that are short and easy for them to respond to.
These are best when asking open ended questions that require detailed input.
Tools: surveymonkey, Qualaroo, typeform, Zonka - Customer interviews — Having direct interaction with the customer is super helpful. It allows them to share their experiences through a conversation.
This works best with your regular customers because they already understand the product and are willing to improve it. - Customer/user activity from analytics — Monitoring users as they spend tine and use your platform is super helpful. The features they use most, the amount of time they spend on each section and also the interaction in those sections.
This can help identify the necessary features and hiccups users face on the application.
Using customer analytics, when we look through the activity of individuals, it’s much easier to identify the reason why certain outcomes occur.
Tools: Kissmetrics, cloudcherry,
https://medium.com/crispytest/product-tip-mixpanel-118b4e84b88d - Suggestion Boards — these allow the customers to collaborate on their ideas with each other and the company.
They allow interaction on the ideas through comments and voting from other users. Navigation and ease of creation of posts is key in this case. These are helpful when you are looking for new ideas from the customers.
Tools: Aha.io
Any of these methods can work for you business, all you have to do is find the right combination. Experiment with them and find a process that allows you to collect high quality feedback from your customers.
Once you have collected all this feedback, what do you do with it?
Dealing with Feedback:
Getting lots of feedback is good but can be overwhelming as well. Realistically, you can’t act on every kind of feedback you receive, due to resource constraints and the type of feedback.
The first step is filtering through the feedback and identifying any sort of trends. If there are issues that are coming up from different customers, then that needs to be acted on.
This might be obvious, but reach out to these customers to get a deeper understanding of what they were trying to accomplish and what the friction was to get perspective. This way, you are able to identify the improvement areas. Also, organising these feedbacks into customer segments and dividing it into strategic horizons can help with structuring. These are:
“Horizon one: Immediate tactical adjustments, such as quick wins, red-alerts, and lifelines
Horizon two: Revenue interlocks, including actions that impact revenue not this month, but over the next year
Horizon three: Game-changing ideas and suggestions for the long term”
Through the horizons, you can feed the customer feedback into the product roadmap. However, it’s important to work with your best customers to determine whether the changes are necessary in the first place.
“As you launch feedback-driven changes, track which and how many of your customers offer up additional ideas and input. In my experience, the more you can get the right customers to participate, the better your business is growing.” — Wood.
Once you have acted on the feedback that was customer oriented, it’s important to notify the customers of these changes. They will feel valued, listened to and that their feedback actually matters. This motivates them to give their input in the future.
Always go back to your users and tell them you implemented something they suggested — this is a solid step in building a long term relation with them.
Importance of Customer Feedback:
- Helps Identify the niche — As you analyse feedback from the customers, it’s easy to identify where the happy customers come from. What they are interested in and what they do with the product.
- Improve the Product — A product grows and gets better with constant feedback and ideas from the people who use and find value from this product.
- Prevent Customer Churn — Dealing with negative feedback and helping customers when they have issues prevents them from leaving and spreading the negative word about the company. Turning the negative into “raging evangelists”.
- Identify Potential advocates — through feedback, it’s possible to identify customers who can be potential advocates and nurture them. If they are satisfied, they can be nurtured to rave about your product to their family and friends.
- Motivate the team — If there’s praise about a feature and the employees know about it, they are motivated and have healthy competition amongst themselves.
If you are a customer, take a few minutes to provide feedback to a service or product you use, you will reap the benefits.
