The Best Ways to Get Your Customers’ Honest Feedback

TechsPlace | Listening to consumers is the key to success. It demonstrates how dedicated you are to learning from them, giving them what they want, and improving their experience. While it may seem difficult and there is no way you can learn all these things, all you have to do is have a plan and ask the right questions. That’s it. And to help you find the right strategy for your business, here are the best ways to get your customers’ honest feedback.

Interviews

Interviews are the most detailed option of hearing all about what customers have to say. However, they also take the longest time, and will certainly require effort to complete.

First things first, you will need to decide how you want to conduct the interviews. A live interview usually takes one hour and is the perfect opportunity to go in-depth and listen to everything a consumer has to say about your brand. Interviews on phone or Skype generally last half as much, but still offer sufficient time to receive data about two-three key issues.

Then, create the plan. Dedicate one day of the week to this activity and spread it out across one or several months. Introduce the topic to your customer care and HR teams, and set them on the task of creating the ideal open-ended questions which support the main aim of the survey. After that, it’s all about creating customer incentives, like discounts and special offers, to motivate customers to participate.

Surveys

Conducting paid surveys online is one of the best ways to target multiple customers all at once. However, it is a difficult thing to do, as you need to craft the right kind of questions to make it work. This also includes the approach you will use.

Keep your survey questions short. Choose the main goal of the survey and what it aims to discover. This should be one key feature of the service you wish to improve and create one to three questions around it. Short surveys with multiple-choice questions have the best success rate because of high engagement.

When it comes to the approach of sending your surveys, take into account how and where your brand interacts with the average consumer. If you communicate regularly with your fans through social media, then it seems more logical to promote the survey on Facebook and LinkedIn, rather than via email.

Ratings

Including them is a great way to get immediate feedback from customers. Every time a customer completes a purchase of a product or receives the full service you offer, they can quickly rate their experience online.

The benefit of this is manifold since it’s quick and easy to implement on your website, online shop, or email. Then, they don’t take long to complete since they rely on a grading system, usually 1-3, 1-5, or 1-10, so their success rate is pretty spectacular. And finally, they can potentially increase your sales, since they increase the trust and credibility of your brand by affecting 70% of consumer decisions.

Remember, social media channels like Facebook already have their own rating systems in place, which can be integrated with other platforms. You might want to start from there until you develop something that works best for you.

Comments

It’s a fairly simple way of receiving customer feedback. Placing comment boxes at strategic locations on your website is a great way to engage with customers and find out what they think about the brand. This usually means the bottom of your blog post or on the product or service page.

Comments allow customers to get really creative and engage with other customers and the brand. And while this might be a good thing for your brand identity, it can sometimes get out of hand and you will have to sift through the comments to access the true opinion of the customer.

Polls

A poll is an easy way of discovering the attitude your customers have with any aspect of your business. If you want to learn what next to include in your product offer, all you have to do is ask. If you want to learn what they want to see improved when it comes to services, ask that question instead.

There are many applications of a poll since it can be placed across all your communication channels from social media and email, to your website. This allows you to ask multiple questions and gain more data faster.

After you have included a couple of these strategies, it is important that you gather all the feedback, analyze it, and learn from it. That’s the main point. Only then will you take the path of true business success.