The three pillars of modern feedback solutions and the impact they could have on your business
We’re observing the customer feedback market for five years now. Every year a few more feedback applications are popping up and going down. And they all look mostly the same: long feedback forms, net promoter scores and a full fledged analytics suite behind that. Always sounding great for businesses, never addressing those who are supposed to give feedback: your customers. Let’s point out what modern feedback applications should focus on:
1.) Simplicity
The best feedback solution in the world is actually the one that gets people to leave feedback. That means, any other information (name, e-mail, anything else) is less important than the core information of “what went wrong”. And the feedback solution should reflect that. The more you can reduce the perceived effort for the customer to give feedback the more likely you will get it. How can anyone expect their customers to fill out a survey? Sure, you get some to do this if the reward is big enough. But do you really expect honest feedback by rewarding people? Humans have the intrinsic need to share their experiences, to communicate, to voice their opinion. You just don’t make it simple enough for them to address it directly to you. Make it simple.
2. ) Integrability
The reason why you only get 4% of your customers feedback is that you let them have to make the decision where to do so. Being on Twitter, Facebook and other social media doesn’t make you more attainable. It doesn’t provide your customers the feeling of being heard, it doesn’t convince them that you actually want to listen. You have to have a feedback solution that is so simple and integrable that you can actually listen to feedback at any touchpoint, at any occasion and at any time. You should be able to channel the feedback in real-time, which is why your feedback solution needs to be integrable directly into your products and services.
3.) Transparency
This is a tough one. Just get this: You’re already naked. The web and todays connected world makes that happen and your employees make you transparent from the inside-out. Now you know. You should not only get used to it, you should embrace it, you should live after it. Your company should live it. As long as the dialog with your customers doesn’t include or require the exchange of sensible data, leave it public. It has so many implications and so many benefits. Your customers will feel treated special, you’re not leaving them alone with their opinion, they can see what is going on with their feedback, they can see who is interacting with it and they can publicly make a difference if you react on it. It is easier for them to wait for your reaction if they know that -> people <- gonna see it in the meanwhile. People are used to that. They are used to voice their opinion in public, identifying themselves with their digital self. Sharing. Social Media.
In summary: Make it as simple as possible, channel the feedback at one central place to be able to embrace transparency in a safe environment. It will reduce bad EWOM, it will reduce the costs of other public (social media) and non-public (email, phone) communication channels, it will increase your customers loyalty, it will give you access to the 96% of your customer’s bad experiences you currently have neither a clue about nor any control!
