Customer feedback is important to guide or inform your decision-making as it provides you with insights on what changes you need to make to your products and services. It helps you understand your customers’ expectations from your services and guides you to identify the ideas where you could put more effort to make things better. It is one of the essential aspects of running a business that is often neglected.
Most businesses and companies think that providing customer service is more than enough to build a connection with the customers. However, it’s not true. Your job doesn’t end at providing good customer service only. To make sure your business stands out in the market, you need to know what your customers think of your services. This is where customer feedback steps in.
All the big companies are practicing different methods of improvement based on customer feedback. AT&T, which is one of the world’s largest telecommunication companies offers 24/7 support to their customers. AT&T customer service is known for enjoying a higher customer satisfaction rate because not only do they pay attention to collecting the customers’ responses but they also make sure they implement the suggestions to make improvements. And customers know when a brand is valuing their response. This is what makes their service worth investing in.
How do you collect customer feedback?
Collecting feedback from customers doesn’t always have to be face-to-face questioning. With call centers being the main point of customer interaction, a lot has changed. Here are some of the common ways you can gather insights from your current and prospective customers:
1. Ask them for feedback at the end of the call
Once you’ve done solving your customer’s issues and answering all their queries you can ask them for their feedback. Use polite language. Your tone should be humble yet assertive. Ask them about how their experience has been with your service and if they’re satisfied. Talking to your customers on call can give you a better idea about how they feel about your service, in itself. You can guess by the tone of their voice and sense how their experience has been.
You can also check back or follow up on your customers after a few days to know how they’re doing and if they’ve encountered any more issues with your services or products. This will be a nice gesture from the company’s side and the customers will feel valued.
2. Social media monitoring
Use your social media platforms to receive feedback from your customers. Collect their feedback via comments or direct messages. You can create a separate customer support page on social media to make it more convenient for your customers to reach out to you. Tweets and reposts are other helpful ways to gather up feedbacks using social media.
3. Through feedback forms
Ah, the old classic way to collect feedback! Surveys and forms are one of the oldest and most credible ways to know what users think of your services or products. The trick is to be precise and ask just the right questions so that you could get just the right responses, that you needed to know.
Don’t bombard your customers with too many questions. The more questions you put in a survey, the less time your customers will spend on the responses. Asking 5 to 10 questions is a decent number. There are a number of tools available online to create surveys and feedback forms.
4. Online polls
Online polls are convenient, short, and less time taking for both the creators as well as the respondents. You are likely to get a quicker and higher number of responses through online polls. You can put these polls on your website, at the end of your blog, on your customer service page, or as an ad at the beginning of YouTube videos.
5. Add feedback reactions
Another easy way to collect your customers’ feedback is by adding a feedback reaction scale in which you can provide various instruments to your respondent to express an answer. It could be reaction faces from happy to sad or be number ratings from 0-10 on how satisfactory do the customers’ find the services.
What to do with customer feedback?
Once you have your customers’ feedback, then comes the real question. What do you do with the feedback once you actually get it?
1. Determine useful and useless feedback
It’s not always necessary that you get the desired feedback. Often your customers will not be happy with your services and leave negative feedback or comments for you. And sometimes you manage to make them happy and satisfied and offer services that are up to their expectations. The very first thing you need to do is determine which feedback is useful for your growth and which you should leave behind and look forward to.
2. Identify the areas of improvement
If a problem is constantly highlighted in the feedback it means that a particular area needs improvement. Look into the details and find out where your services are lacking. Do needful changes to improve what your customers are suggesting and consider your customers’ recommendations.
3. Share positive feedback to promote a positive brand image
Do you know customer satisfaction ratings are based on positive feedback you receive from your current customers? Positive feedback is equal to good word of mouth and people often pick services based on customer satisfaction ratings. Go ahead and share the appreciative feedback on your accounts. It can serve as an organic promotion to your business too.
Conclusive notes
Happy customers are the biggest asset for any business and what makes them happy is the company meeting their expectations. Collecting feedback is one of the most easiest and needed steps to ensure that you are offerings the service that people want and need. It also helps you to identify areas of improvement. So never overlook a response or feedback from your customer as each one of them matters and can contribute a lot to your business.
