Your customers understand your products better than you. Why? Because they are using it regularly. Customers understand what it lacks and what they expect from you regarding the product. Their ideas can help your business in the long term.
As per g2crowd, 68% of customers provide a detailed review if companies request them for it. Hence, it is high time that you incorporate a customer feedback strategy into your business. Let’s examine this concept through an elaborative guide.
Table of Content
What is a Customer Feedback Strategy?
A customer feedback strategy involves gathering feedback from your customers who use your products and taking specific actions on those feedbacks.
Report by g2crowd states that:
- 93% of customers decide whether they can trust the business or not by seeing its customer reviews.
- Around 72% of consumers state that they would not buy a product if they haven’t seen its review.
- In terms of the impact of customer reviews on buying decisions, there is a 15% increase in the chance that a customer will purchase the product after reading a verified buyer’s feedback.
Why is Customer Feedback so Important?
It Helps a Company Improve Different Aspects of Their Product
A company understands its product well. Every feature of the product gets discussed thoroughly by the product team. Due to this reason, they may not see its imperfections.
Hence, it is essential to know what suits your customers. What features of the product they don’t like, and why they don’t like it. Consider your ideas as you develop the product for them. Hence, it must fulfill their expectation.
Bad Feedbacks are an Opportunity to Improve
Nowadays, with cutthroat competition, any problems or misunderstandings must get solved immediately. Unhappy customers who give negative feedback are an excellent opportunity for improvement.
If a customer contacted you and gave a bad review, try your best to solve it. Value this feedback and try to turn the entire situation into a happy ending.
Do you have an action plan for tackling negative feedback from a customer? It’s essential to have one. Connect to your customers, listen and try to solve their problems, and set a particular date when you will contact them again if needed. Plans like this will help you deal with negative feedback and measure the ultimate customer satisfaction level.
Listening to Customer Feedbacks Makes Them Feel Involved and Important
If you want to make your consumers feel important, ask their opinions and act on them. They will feel valued when you ask them to share their experience after using your product. When customers feel like they are being listened to, it will create a positive image of your business in their minds. In return, your business will generate more future sales.
Check out CloudTutorial’s blog on How to deliver a great customer experience for an in-depth guide on improving customer experience and overall customer satisfaction levels.
Good Feedback Leads to Personal Recommendations
Word of mouth advertising or referrals is an effective and free way to advertise your product.
As per research from Kellerfay for the RewardStream, personal recommendations are a big motivation to the customer base for purchasing decisions. It applies at every step of the purchase cycle.
Other factors, such as advertising or price comparison websites do influence customers’ decisions but only at one stage of decision making.
Recommendations influence at every stage of the purchase process. A reason behind this is that it comes from family, friends, or experts from that field.
To get customers through recommendations, ensure that consumer feedback for your product is positive.
Customers Will Come Back for More
Even if a consumer buys a product from you, that doesn’t guarantee that they will be back again. You may improve the product’s quality, sell it at a better price, or show a unique advertisement. Still, there are some aspects that only a customer can point out.
A customer feedback strategy will make you aware of those customer issues that you previously didn’t take into account. Let’s say safe packaging, free shipping, a polite support team, and a user-friendly website. These customer insights will help you understand what’s the best approach to fulfilling their desires. It will result in them coming back at you.
It’s not that you have to provide your unhappy customers with a free product. Let’s say a 5% discount on all your products will convert this negative situation into a positive one and impart customer satisfaction.
Feedbacks Will Bring New Customers
Customers often check others’ opinions on the business before buying its products. Online reviews have their importance. As per Invesp, 90% of customers read online reviews of a company before visiting its website. 88% trust these online reviews and treat them as personal recommendations.
To get better online reviews, ask your website visitors and customers to share their feedback. Analyzing customer feedback and solving their issues will definitely make them refer you to their group.
It Cements Customer Loyalty
Asking customers’ feedback and taking action on their reviews will establish a personal relationship between your company and them.
Such customers will see your company as someone who cares about them and their experience. They will treat your business as their favorite.
Implementing such a customer feedback strategy and maintaining good relations with customers pays off in the end.
Want to Gather Customer Feedback for Quick Reference?
CloudTutorial allows you to collect all your customer feedback in a cantral knowledge base to be referred at anytime
Ways to Collect Customer Feedback
Why do you want to gather customer feedback? This question helps you set a clear intent before seeking the data. It will also help you set an expectation of the desired result and establish the groundwork to fulfill it.
Here are some questions that you and your team should answer before collecting customer feedback.
- Which part of the customer experience do you want to improve? It could be onboarding or content marketing. Pick any aspect that you feel will benefit if you gather customer feedback.
- How do you plan to use the data you are collecting? Customer feedback is useless if it doesn’t lead to actionable change. Let’s say survey responses revealed that customers find your product’s UI confusing. In such situations, you need to have the willingness to fix the issue before collecting feedback.
Here, we will share with you the different ways to collect customer feedback.
Customer Feedback Surveys
Developing a customer survey is a challenging task. There are many questions that you can ask customers. For creating surveys, you can approach it in two ways:
– Choose short slider surveys that target specific issues
– Go for traditional, longer surveys
Tools like Qualaroo can help you develop short-question surveys. SurveyKing is an excellent choice for longer-form surveys. It offers a free platform for those companies that have recently begun their journey. Alchemer is for everyone, from startups to larger companies. For the enterprise level, Qualtrics provides in-depth insights into customer feedback.
Here are some of the best practices that ensure your customers complete your survey:
– Focus on those questions that align with your goals
– Your questions need to be thoughtful and open-ended
– Your rating scales need to be consistent
– Avoid loaded or misleading questions
Customer Interviews
Reach out directly to a customer and ask for feedback. Direct outreach is always excellent for feedback. When customers explain their personal experiences, it helps the team understand the specific reason behind their decisions.
Conducting customer interviews will help your company overcome wrong assumptions that get developed over time. Here are some helpful tips when talking with a customer directly.
- Focus on having an open-ended dialogue. Asking open-ended questions to your customers allows them to explain their experiences more in detail.
- Be more specific as you go. Keep asking more detailed questions as the dialogue continues. Every feedback you get allows you to get more through follow-up questions.
- Be an active listener. You and your team need to be open and receptive if you want better insights. Maintain eye contact when talking to customers and repeat back what you are hearing from them.
On-Site Activity Through Analytics
Analytics helps you understand how your customers are interacting with the company. It also reveals how they are using your product.
Let’s say your business is offering self-service content for customer service. Analytics will make you aware of how many customers are visiting each of your articles. Does the content have a high bounce rate? How many views is it getting? Analytics will reveal all of this to you.
Reporting tools like CloudTutorial will give you insights about the most frequently visited pages, failed searches, which will help you improve your content and provide a better self-service experience to your customers.
Social Media
Social media platforms are like an untapped reservoir of honest feedback from customers. Keep an eye out for direct mentions or comments on social networks. Your business can also include built-in polling tools. Here your team can encourage customers to ask any of them any questions and provide the answer for them. It’s similar to a quick poll on Instagram.
Your product team can also ask to conduct a poll on what product customers want for next year. Such natural engagement ensures that your company’s product decisions are aligned with customers’ buying behaviors.
Email and Customer Contact Forms
Emails are an excellent customer feedback tool. Most companies use it as a support channel. The customer interaction you are having through emails is an invaluable source for essential feedback. Here are few tips that ensure you hear back from your customers through emails:
- Set clear expectations on when you will respond to them
- Organize all your email feedback in one place. Trello is an excellent platform for it
- Send personalized responses
Like emails, customer contact forms also act as a medium for a company to get feedback directly from their consumers. Use CloudTutorial to build your contact forms. It can act as your contact page, which your customers can use to get in touch with you.
Retaining Customers is Your Aim?
Create a self-service knowledge base with CloudTutorial so that your customers can get instant answers.
The Customer Feedback Loop
What is the Customer Feedback Loop?
Let’s say your customers feel that you are providing the services at a very unfair price. How will your company respond? It may convey an apology and issue a refund, right? That is called the customer feedback loop. It’s a practice of responding to customer service feedback in a meaningful way.
The A.C.A.F customer feedback loop, it’s a system for gathering and implementing customer feedback. Here is how it works:
Ask: Step one is that you ask your consumers for feedback on a specific service or product.
Categorize: Step two is that you categorize the feedback in different sections.
Act: Step three is that you act on the feedback. Share the issues with others in the company and put in place the necessary changes.
Follow-up: Step four is that you get in touch with your customers who gave you the feedback. It will create an impression that you are listening to them.
Although, customer complaints aren’t the only feedback. Customers also leave feedback when they have a great experience with your services. They may even suggest improvements or request new features in their feedback.
Closing the customer feedback loop is essential, and it should get incorporated into your customer feedback strategy.
Why is Customer Feedback Loop Important?
It is five to twenty-five times more expensive to get new consumers compared to retaining existing ones. Many businesses in the world are becoming aware of this and are investing resources to provide a better customer experience. They are also implementing structured customer success programs.
Although many businesses request their consumers for feedback, they still rely on two basic strategies for closing the loop on that feedback:
- They respond with “Thank you, we received your feedback” after getting feedback from consumers.
- Organizations focus only on very negative customer feedback as per the scores given besides the comment. As per the net promoter score (NPS) surveys, companies only focus on super detractors. These scores are of 0,1 or 2 on an 11 point scale. It indicates the most at-risk consumers, who are likely to churn and leave a bad review.
Customer churn can happen on any score that a consumer gives. Most organizations make the mistake of focusing only on those with low scores while ignoring the rest of the consumers that might also churn. Observe the net promoter score (NPS) and don’t make that mistake.
Closing the loop is necessary. If you include it in your customer feedback strategy, it will help you retain your core consumers and even generate more revenue for your company.
Next Steps: Processing Customer Feedback and Follow-Ups
43% of consumers don’t leave feedback because they feel companies don’t care about it. This problem can be solved with the help of CloudTutorial software. Through this software, you can reduce the customer support ticket by 80%. CloudTutorial will also help your company achieve two things:
- It will simplify the process of giving feedback. Your consumers won’t face any difficulty.
- CloudTutorial acts as a medium that lets companies connect with their consumers directly. It will make the consumers feel heard.
Consumers won’t be afraid to share their opinions if they feel like they are getting heard and organizations taking action on their feedback. Appreciate your consumer’s feedback. It doesn’t matter if it is positive or negative.
The issue with most organizations is that they have put great systems in place to collect feedback. But there are no plans on how to act on those feedbacks.
Are your consumers raising the same feedback twice? If that’s the case, it means that you didn’t rectify the issue the first time. In such situations, you risk losing your credibility, and your consumers won’t fill your surveys in the future.
With the help of CloudTutorial, you can create knowledge bases and FAQs that consumers can use to solve such issues. The software is flexible for any industry.
CloudTutorial will be a great addition to your overall customer feedback strategy.
FAQs
CSAT stands for customer satisfaction. It is a customer satisfaction score that shows you how satisfied consumers are with your company. CSAT scores display the numerical measure of customer satisfaction.Customer effort score is a survey that measures the ease of service experience with a company. It focuses on the ease of using services or products on the scale of “very difficult” or “very easy.”Here is the list of different types of surveys:- Online Surveys
- Paper Surveys
- Telephonic Surveys
- One-to-one interviews
- Cross-sectional studies
The consumer journey is the experience that consumers go through when interacting with your brand or organization. It documents the complete experience of being a consumer.
Conclusion
It is your responsibility as an organization to follow up with those consumers that share feedback with you. If you don’t incorporate a customer feedback strategy, you stay unaware of the consumers’ issues or requirements.
This will leave them feeling unsatisfied and eventually, you will lose your client base. To offer the best support experience to your consumers, sign up for FREE with CloudTutorial or schedule an appointment today.
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