Behind 5 Star Rating: How to deliver a great customer experience (part 3)

When we founded Daytrip in 2015, Tomas and I knew that delivering a great customer experience was going to make or break our business. In this series, I will take you through each element of how we make sure our customers come away happy and satisfied.

In our first two articles, we covered putting together a customer support team and setting your customers’ expectations. The next must-have element to delivering a great customer experience is getting feedback from your customers.

With customer feedback, there are a few important things you need to keep in mind if you want to harness it to deliver great customer experience.

Tip 1: Ask open questions to get useful feedback that may even surprise you

When you develop your own product or service, you are so close to it that you often don’t see it the way that your first customers will. And in your quest to understand what is working and what isn’t, you may let your perspective influence what you ask your first customers — which could be entirely different from how they see and use your product.

That’s why it’s so important to get feedback from your customers in the form of open questions as much as possible.

Don’t create an artificial frame for your customers. They are likely seeing things in your product that you don’t see or didn’t foresee, so give them space to express themselves.

Tip 2: Personalize your feedback requests

Feedback from your customers is one of the most important things your customers can give you. Especially early on in the life-cycle of your business, you could argue that it’s more valuable than revenue!

You should treat your requests for feedback with the same care, attention and personalization as you would customer acquisition. There are a few easy ways to do this right.

Time your feedback request to the customer’s use of your product. Don’t ask for it too soon (emotions can be raw, they might still be learning how your product works, or else they might be distracted) and don’t ask for it too late (if they last used your product weeks ago, they may have forgotten what they liked and didn’t like).

In the case of Daytrip, our customers are travelers who are in the middle of their holiday when they use our service. So we send our requests for feedback a week after the end of their trip. By this time, they will have most likely returned home and had some time to reflect on the good and bad parts of their holiday.

Our feedback requests always include the customer’s name, context about the part of our service they used (“your trip from Berlin to Prague”), and signed with a person’s name so they know there is a human being behind the request.

Tip 3: Read every piece of feedback you receive

If you take only one piece of advice from this article, let it be this one: read every single piece of feedback you receive from your customers.

Feedback is how you will learn what your customers actually value and like about your product. And if you’re asking for the right kind of feedback, what your customers are giving you is worth its weight in gold.

What you will learn from positive feedback about what your customers find valuable, you can incorporate into your marketing efforts to find new customers more effectively. Chances are, there are more customers out there looking for exactly the same things.

And the negative or critical feedback about your product’s shortcomings or areas for improvement needs to be shared with your leadership and development team. Use these when planning your roadmap and future iterations of your product.

Tip 4: Be responsive to customer feedback

When your customers are responding to your requests for feedback and giving you what you have asked for — good or bad — you need to show your appreciation by responding to them in a timely manner.

At Daytrip, our policy is to respond within 24 hours, with customers who are in the middle of trips receiving expedited responses often within a few hours.

If a resolution or a full response will take longer than planned, let the customer know that you’re working on it. Acknowledgment that a customer’s feedback has been received goes a long way in cooling down what may be a very hot head at the moment.

You can use templates to help you respond more efficiently, but don’t let your customer feel that their feedback is not being heard. Your responses should address the customer by name, address specific points from their feedback, and always thank them for using your product and giving you feedback.

And when you are responding to feedback from a customer on an open review platform like Google or TripAdvisor, keep in mind that the damage to this one customer has already been done. Your response to this customer’s feedback, however, will be read by hundreds or thousands of potential customers who are looking to see how a company like yours handles negative feedback. Did you acknowledge that there was a problem? Did you take responsibility? Did you propose a solution?

Every piece of feedback will make you stronger

When done right, feedback is going to be one of the engines of your company’s growth. Remember to ask for high quality feedback, personalize your requests, read every piece of feedback you receive, and be responsive to feedback so your current — and future — customers can see that you care about your product.