The improvement of your services and product relies heavily upon gathering and analyzing the feedback from your customers. However, the process of obtaining valuable feedback is quite a challenge for most businesses.
With the intense volume of possibilities for collecting data, it can be quite overwhelming to choose the most appropriate path. Combine that with the customers’ reluctance to provide feedback; businesses may positively have to struggle to draw feedback.
A proactive approach is thus, the need of the hour for every business. Here are the top 5 ways of gathering valuable feedback from your customers:
1. Offer Incentives
A survey demands the customer to invest his/her valuable time in providing you information that doesn’t interest them much. To motivate customers, your business can offer them some form of incentive to make it worthwhile for them.
Discounts and monetary benefits are great but not always possible or necessary. You can, therefore, incentivize customers in other creative ways such as the provision of free content relative to their workflow or something similar.
2. Feedback Surveys
Surveys are by far the most effective form of customer feedback. However, they can be quite challenging to design in a way that draws the attention of the customers. You can choose from the traditional and longer surveys, the slider surveys, SMS surveys, and even offer free Wi-Fi to attract customers to your location.
SMS is quite an effective channel since the high tech age keeps customers in close proximity with their phones 24/7. Feedback collection would be really easy this way.
Free Wi-Fi is another effective channel; you attract customers to it and make them open free accounts, the support team uses the captured email addresses to seek feedback soon after. You can also design pop-up surveys for your website, customizing the questions to keep them on-point, precise, tailored as per your goals, and open-ended.
3. Note Social Media Handles
Businesses have the greatest advantage in social media channels, which are not only efficient but also inexpensive. Your customers are already active users of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, so your business does not need any additional investments.
Your team can join in the conversations and send direct messages, respond to comments, and engage the customers to analyze how they feel about your business.
In the case of negative feedback, the team can respond quickly. Social media participants seek immediate responses, and so you must designate a resource for each channel. Close monitoring will keep your company up to date with trends, events, and customer opinions regarding your business.
4. Analyze Transcripts of Live Chat
Live chat tools on-site are an integral part of customer services and customer support now. Analyzing the transcripts of the live chat tools and categorizing the feedback you collect on them is a great way of spotting business inefficiencies.
The topics customers mention repeatedly will instantly highlight your company’s problem areas, and you can set to work on them right away. You will satisfy customers tremendously this way and also cut down on resources required for customer support.
5. Reflect on Sales Calls
When you employ an outbound team, they will record hundreds of calls from your customers daily. These logs are like gold, not only for training purposes but also for providing you much valuable feedback.
Even if the calls are not from regular customers (yet), you could use the leads as direct feedback on your products in the complete absence of bias. Even when the reviewers have not completed your product trial, their feedback regarding your presentation will help you battle the obstructions in your winning to winning potential customers for life.
Final Thoughts
Customer feedback is perhaps the essential guiding resource that impacts your company’s growth. However, the process of obtaining valuable feedback from potential customers is quite tricky and needs foolproof and proactive strategies.
With the right approach, you will soon be able to spot the shortcomings in your product and services and satisfy customers better than before.