Struggling with customer satisfaction? Here is your guide!
Customer feedback are getting more important than ever before, yet few companies are actually collecting valuable and actionable data. A typical business only hears, say 4% of its dissatisfied customers. Which is very impeding in terms of improving the overall customer experience.
In this extensive guide, I’m going to present you a new way to collect customer feedback, letting you build relationship, along with rallying up amazing feedback. 💡
I will try to be as clear as possible about the process and how we can improve it. Yet, if you have any question or remark, we’d be more than happy to receive it! I’m also going to give you a few tips along the way and share some findings from my experience. This is a result of a few months of research, talking to our early customers, listening and exchanging with a few tech founders and experts (tribute to them 🙌), and reading long (and sometimes dull) articles. For more details, please check out my notebook… Just kidding 😬, hit the comment button.
Hope you will have a blast, as much as I did writing it! 😆
Let’s shape the context first 🤝
First thing first, let’s define what is a feedback and how it can help your company.
Customer feedback corresponds to your customers’ opinion, voice about your products or services. They are comments or remarks that guide but also lead your decision making and influence your roadmap. It also helps you mesure your customer satisfaction and simply build a product or service your clients, customers or users want! The earlier in the customer journey you collect them, the better!
Having a crystal clear understanding on how your customers view and feel about your company is a must when it comes to growing your company. There are different ways and channels to collect those feedback and we are going to focus on the customer surveys today.
Before you start collecting feedback from your customers, you need to make sure you have clearly defined why you are seeking them.
Shaping the overall process and the desired results is essential. Otherwise, you will collect non-valuable feedback and simply clutter your understanding.
For more details, I’d recommend to check out this Quora question, there are some serious helpful answers.💡
How are customer surveys usually collected? 🧐
We will now define the status-quo, or common way of mustering up customer feedback.
Customer feedback are collected to get a grasp on what your customers think about you, thereby the more data you get, the better it is! But, what do your customers get in return? In other words, is there any incentive for them to answer your survey and help you grow, albeit use a better product?
As depicted in the illustration below, in the best case scenario, only 2,5% of your customers will actually take the time to give you something valuable and useful that you can play with! Scary, isn’t it?
We usually refer to this as a one-way flow. You’re asking them to fill in with as much details as possible, but you aren’t giving anything back. So you end up with no feedback at all, or literally too much details from your aficionados — or the 2.5% of your client base.
Besides this, what does it feel like to answer a sketchy and boring survey? Anything but good feeling. Most of those surveys are usually standard, we have seen those dull and impersonal stuff over and over again.
In this busy world, I want nothing but something where I feel valued, targeted, respected and listened. I don’t want to give away an unknown amount of time for a feedback that will, maybe, be reviewed.
So, wondering why your response rate or completion rate is so low? Well, don’t mull around, you have some answers above.
TL;DR, I’m not a fan of the common way of going about getting customer feedback. It feels like somewhat sloppy and trimmed down to me.
What if we could find a better way? 😎
We are going to detail and dive deep into a new way of getting valuable and actionable feedback. We are not saying it’s the best way to collect customer feedback, it’s our way of going about it.
1. Get to know your customers
You’re likely acquiring new customers each and every day, and you need to get to know them.
You — hopefully — have a hazy idea of you’re targeting, but you really don’t know, at this stage, how and when to speak to your customers.
We are trying to build the timeline which depicts the different milestone or events our customer stumbled into on their way to the conversion. We’ve already begun getting them used to the feeling of remembering, now it’s time to jump back to uncover their first thoughts, but we need to figure the right time to talk to them.
Start by answering the following questions:
- What language is he speaking? Speaking in the same language matters a lot and will, without any doubt, increase your chance of getting results.
- Is he likely to come back?
- How often is he likely to use your product or services?
By getting some answers to the above questions, you will simply figure out which channel or customer touchpoint to use in order to share and show off your survey, and thereby, get feedback from your customers. But also at what time should you ask for feedback. If you have identified several groups of typical customers — also known as cohort, don’t hesitate to work on those separately.
You will therefore figure out if you are better off pushing your feedback carrier (asking your customer to give his/her feedback: email, sms, etc.), or if you can use the pull approach, ie. your customer would give his feedback spontaneously (website widget, social networks, etc.). Whatever the case is, and whether you need to use the physical way (eg. in your store using a tablet), the email, mobile phone, or simply the web (your website or web application), it all boils down to who your customer is!
As a rule of thumb, we urge you to sensibilise your customer from the start about your upcoming feedback program. You need to prepare him and let him know that you’re valuing his voice! For instance, in your welcoming email, you could warn him that you’re looking forward to receiving his feedback at anytime, and you are open to any suggestion in order to better serve him.
The goal is to simply tell him that you collect feedback because you value his opinion, consistently making improvements to your services based on what he or she has to say.
As a matter of fact, if your customer is expecting a survey, he is way more likely to answer — which means higher response rate. By doing this, you not only come across as a very customer-centric organisation but can also bump up your survey response rates close to 100%!
No matter who your customer is, ask him its feedback straight after they have interacted with your business will give you better and more relevant feedback.
The experience will be fresh in their minds and they will be more honest as a result. It also means that if they’ve had a problem you can act on it straight away, so you don’t lose a customer or get a negative online review. This way, you simply reduce your likeliness of churn by understand what your customers want.
2. Segment your s̶u̶r̶v̶e̶y̶ feedback carrier’s questions
Let’s get the ball rolling now. It’s time to take gather those findings into a feedback carrier, most commonly known as a survey. We simply want to shy away from this scary word and put an emphasis on the fact that we carry feedback entries! We are also talking about a feedback program later in a way that you will likely run more than one survey in order to fully understand your customers and what they are expecting from you. Leverage is key!
You should have a clear idea by now of what you could ask to your customer in order to improve his experience and what you’re offering him. That said, some of your questions might not be relevant to every single customer.
For instance, let’s say you’ve an eCommerce website, and you want to know how your customer feels about your online support and overall website smoothness. Based on his answer, on the one hand, it will make more sense to ask him how you could serve him better only if he rates your support less than, let’s say, 3 out of 5. On the other hand, for the happiest customers, you’re better off asking them what makes them so thrilled about your services. This way, you will likely pull key insights that you didn’t know about!
That’s why, in the first step of our feedback , we are actually measuring our customer satisfaction and happiness using ratings, also referred as quantitative questions or metrics. That way, we have relevant and segmented questions to ask in a second step, in which our customer will neither loose any time, nor get bored of too many irrelevant questions.
Don’t waste your customer time, ask him the right question and get more relevant and actionable answers.
TL;DR, not only implement a way to segment your questions in a first step based on who your customer is (sexe, age, language, etc.), but also its level of satisfaction.
3. Carry on going with your questions
We have a satisfaction ratio for our customer, gorgeous! Let’s ask him some qualitative questions to fully understand him and get actionable insights.
Those qualitative questions can be of any type, depending on what you have to ask:
- A bunch of choices to pick from if you want to pull value but also statistics
- A slider ranging from 1 to x in order to measure something
- A text, which you can limit in length
- Or simply rely on well-known and acknowledged metrics — such as the Net Promoter Score® (NPS®)
Build a trustful, durable and respectful customer relationship from now on!
4. Lure your customers in and increase your response rate
In our crazy-stunning-amazing new way of collecting feedback, we also have a way to attract more customers to answer.
We want to level the playing field and implement a two-way flow by rewarding our customers for their precious time. 🎁 The idea is to automatically offer them an incentive, so that they want to give their feedback!
Based on your type of business and who your customers are, you could reward them with the likes of:
- A nice and easy voucher 💸 — let’s say you’re running a premium application, or an online eCommerce business, it would make lot of sense to give a discount (voucher) for an upgrade or on the next order. You’re not only giving back, but also increasing your likeliness of seeing your customer again.
- Your latest e-book📖 — we are seeing more and more businesses writing their piece of content relevant to their field. Eg. Fiverr writing about freelancing success and that kind of topics! By simply not giving away for free, but asking for feedback first, you’re serving both your company and your customer’s interest. E-book is only one example, the point is to send a valuable file or a bunch of files.
- A well-deserved money voucher 💵 — although you could feel like that one is costly, it is simply worth it! Feedback matters and they are worth money! They allow you to grow and reduce your customer churn, therefore making money over time. You could for instance give away 10 bucks sent through Paypal — or just a nice and easy Amazon voucher!
- A customized (or funny 🤑) message
Beside this, we also want to be utterly transparent about: why we are collecting feedback, but also how long it will take to give the feedback!
It’s never been easier to communicate about your feedback carrier than with the above suggestions!
You let your customer know about the timing and his or her likeliness of getting a cool reward!
5. Strive to engage and build up the relationship
We have just popped our customer happiness and satisfaction up with a nice, short and cool feedback carrier. How about we go further than that and make sure the relationship lasts?
Shall we ask for his email (if we don’t have it) in order to re-engage later, follow-up, keep him posted about any upcoming update extracted from his feedback? I’d say so!
That’s not all — is it? Instead of collecting the email, we might want to get a new testimonial, but we cannot go about that. We have sent hundreds of emails, but we only got like 2 or 3 testimonials.
You got it! We could just ask the most satisfied customers for a short and sweet testimonial right after they received their reward. Just saying “Hey mate, you sent us your feedback, really appreciate it; we gave you something back, would you mind taking two more minutes to write up a testimonial that we could boast on our website?”.
90% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a business. How would you feel about preventing the bad ones to come?
Or maybe it’s not relevant to ask for feedback, but you only rely on the online reviews madness. Okay, so let’s ask for a stunning 5-star review on Facebook, Google, Tripadvisor, Booking, G2crowd, AppStore, whatever the relevant place is.
So, whether you’re running an online business, a restaurant, a food-truck, an hotel, a shop, this trick applies to you! You need reviews, so instead of asking for reviews first, let’s collect feedback and fix the issues first, before they spread out, and then only ask our happiest customers for a review!
In a nutshell, this process allows you to get more positive reviews, which attracts more customers, and tackle customer concerns privately before they turn into negative online reviews. This is important because bad experiences are more likely to be shared online than good ones, and you don’t want a few negative reviews to twist how customers think about your business.
As you may have noticed, we are also increasing the word of mouth, attracting, and developing our brand awareness! Brilliant!
6. Make the experience branded and enjoyable
It’s time to go against the status-quo and gamify your customer’s experience. How to go about it?
Well, add some subtle and funny items, such as:
- Emoticons along the way
- A nice GIF cropping up when your customer don’t expect it
- Ideally, find a customer feedback tool featuring fancy animations and effects that will delight your customer
The point is to simply stand out from the mass and provide something enjoyable!You’re not done yet! We also want to brand and personnalize our feedback carrier to match our organisation. It means, at least, add our logo and our colours.
Every customer is on their own unique buying journey. Their motivations to try, buy and stay loyal change depending on the individual making the choice. The more personalised the experience, the happier the customer.
TL;DR, attract and make your customers want to answer your feedback carrier! Make the experience memorable.
7. Spread the word
As mentioned in the first section Get to know your customers, we want to find the right channel to share our feedback carrier. We are looking for the right time and touchpoint that will give us the highest return. Although, we won’t put all our ‘eggs in one basket’, we’d strongly recommend to focus on one channel.
8. Analyze, iterate and keep moving forward
That’s it! Your feedback are now trickling, and we have to analyze them. We will likely want to connect to our everyday tools (eg. Intercom, CRM, Mailchimp, Segment, etc.). That said, if our tool could feature some nice and useful widget allowing us to pull out valuable insights, that would be helpful.
We will keep analyzing, iterating and creating more feedback carrier if we feel like it! We will also follow up our customers, keep them up to date about our roadmap and how their feedback fit into our strategy.
Your dream comes true: your business is on the cusp of it’s best growth period! You product will perfectly fit and match your customers’ expectations. Loyalty at its finest — your customers spread the word for you! 👋
Using this valuable process, you will go through your current struggling moments; in other words, we are helping you get your Job To Be Done (cc Alan Klement); whether you struggle to get actual feedback, your customer feel bored or not targeted, or you just can’t manage to talk to your customers, this trick is for you!
In a nutshell, measuring your customer happiness and understanding of your product will, not only help you gauge how your business is doing, but also how you could amend your copy to make it clearer to your audience. You help your customers see value in what you’re offering, and eventually convince them of the usefulness of your product to get their job done. Besides this, feedback also helps you increase the retention and spring up your customer loyalty. “67% of consumers list bad customer experience as one of the primary reasons for churning” (Kolsky), that’s a good reason, isn’t it?
That’s why I’m proud to introduce you our new product, doing exactly all the above for you! Nice and easy, it’s a no-brainer to collect feedback and build relationship with your customer! Meet Feedier.
So convinced? Sign up for free at feedier.com 😎
For more details and further references, please check out the following links:
