How to Collect Customer Feedback Effectively

Customer feedback is one of the tools to support business growth. Today, every organization is trying to find every opportunity to talk to customers to get to know them. While there are ways to expect customer feedback, they don’t always tell you the truth. So how to collect customer feedback? Please refer to the following article to learn how to do it effectively.

Definition of Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is information and problems shared by customers about their experience with a product or service. Collecting customer feedback helps your business understand what they want, thereby changing and improving products and services to satisfy customers. You can proactively collect customer feedback through customer surveys and polls or interview them. 

The Reason for Collecting Customer Feedback

Customer feedback plays an essential role in the success of a business. Because it helps you listen to your customers, understand what they think about the products and services you offer.

Indeed, in collecting customer feedback, you will receive positive and negative comments about your product. What you need to do is, from the good feedback, you continue to maintain your product advantages. As for the nasty comments, you need to absorb them to improve the quality of services and products to satisfy customers.

Because when you make customers fall in love with your products and services, it is the best way to help your business succeed. Thus, customer feedback is a tool to help you become closer to customers and a guide to your company’s success.

6 Useful Ways to Collect Customer Feedback

There are hundreds of survey tools to help you learn how to gather customer feedback from your customers. Here are a few of the most popular and effective ways we’ve put together.

Surveys

There are many types and forms of customer surveys. Famous among them is the customer satisfaction survey. This survey uses a Likert rating scale to see a product’s ranking in terms of customer expectations.

These surveys have the advantage of being easy for customers. It can be done on many different channels when they don’t have to put in too much effort to implement. The downside of this tool is that customer feedback can be inaccurate due to many factors. Like bias or depending on the customer’s mood and situation at that time.

Leverage Social Media

The development of social networks makes this a place for customers to share their thoughts freely. From there, customers give opinions and reviews about your products, services, and company on social media channels. Some social media channels allow customers to leave comments and reviews about brands like Facebook, Google, Youtube, Instagram, etc.

Regularly monitoring your brand discussions and conversations on social media will help you spot minor issues before they become big problems. In addition, you can also anticipate the needs and wants of customers early so that you can improve products and services in advance. From there, proactively provide them with a better customer experience.

Besides, customers also expect the appearance of your brand on social media channels. This will be the place where customers can respond or complain in the fastest and most convenient way.

Emails

Another powerful tool for getting feedback from your customers is email. Emails should be sent immediately after a customer purchases a product or after a customer interacts with customer service, or after unsubscribing because this is the golden time to survey the reasons and the satisfaction level of customers’ purchases.

You can design automated emails to make this survey process easier. Survey questionnaires should be written concisely and simply for the customer, which does not take much time.

Interviews and Focus Groups

Individual or group interviews are always highly effective. However, it takes a lot of time and effort to implement. Most companies will usually do it on a small scale.

Face-to-face interviews allow you to ask customers more detailed questions and take longer to interview. Therefore, although few responses were collected, this information was very in-depth and more affluent in variety.

For the interview to be successful, you need to be fully prepared and keep your focus for the interview. This helps you get the key information you need without taking the discussion too far.

Website Analytics

You can learn a lot about your customers and how they feel about your products and services through website analytics. Website analytics tools will give you metrics on how many people visit your website, service, or product pages and where customers spend more time. From there, you can analyze which products and services are of interest to customers as well as uncover problems in the customer journey.

It is essential that you choose the right website analytics tool. In addition, the way customers use the website is also affected by many external factors. Therefore, you need to carefully study the surrounding context of their experience during the analysis.

Free-Text Feedback

There are many ways that customers can actively and openly write their feedback. Common types are a feedback window that pops up in the app, a feedback button, a survey landing page, a product inquiry form, etc.

This method makes a text box available to customers so they are free to write what they want. It is not only product reviews but also descriptions of problems that customers encounter while experiencing or suggestions to help build a better product.

The advantage of this free text box is not being limited by any questions. There will be times when you will receive vague, general feedback, but there will also be times when you will receive highly detailed and quality feedback.

Tips for Collect Customer Feedback Effectively 

To know how to ask for feedback effectively, your business can refer to some of the following tips:

• Be proactive in asking customers instead of just reacting to their opinions.

• Use tools and metrics to assess customer satisfaction on multiple levels.

• Research, learn, and select the proper techniques to gather the most accurate feedback.

• Should interview and collect customer opinions at the right time.

• Define a strategy for collecting customer feedback.

• Keep your customers’ priorities in mind when gathering their opinions.

Collecting customer feedback is an important thing your business should not hesitate to do if you want customers to be satisfied with your products and services and to increase sales and profits for your company. Hopefully, the above article has provided helpful information to help you know how to collect customer feedback effectively.