Customer feedback is crucial to the growth and success of a business. It helps businesses understand and measure the satisfaction of their customers. With social media, customers are being vocal about brands and are sharing product reviews online and experiences with a brand. There are many ways you can collect customer feedback.
Gaining public or customer feedback is a powerful means to unlock customer insights such as their preferences, desires, and disappointments. Listening and understanding your customer’s concerns can help you implement necessary changes to improve their experience. It is important because you show customers you value them and a good customer experience, which boosts brand loyalty.
With a customer feedback strategy in place, you can use the data collected to make informed decisions for your business. This will keep your customers returning and help spot market trends that put you at the forefront of your industry. Collecting customer feedback is important as 85% of enterprises reveal that online customer feedback is beneficial to their business.
In this article, we will explore:
What is Customer Feedback?
Customer feedback is when your customers share their thoughts on interactions with your brand, products, or services. It informs you on how to improve customer experience, product or service, and what they are satisfied and dissatisfied with. Customer feedback can be received in reviews, comments, survey responses, ratings, discussions on public forums, and through conducted interviews. They are important as they help you understand and identify your customers’ pain points and provide valuable consumer insights. Moreover, it helps implement necessary changes and innovate your products to meet your customer’s needs. This shows them you value their opinion and are proactive about improving their experience.
There are two types of customer feedback, direct and indirect feedback which help you understand your customers better. The data collected falls into the categories such as structured data and unstructured data.
Direct feedback is reaching customers and asking them questions to understand their experience so you can improve it. This can be done by sending them a survey through email, popups embedded on your website, and focus group interviews. Furthermore, indirect feedback can be found on social media, public forums, or review sites.
Why is Customer Feedback Important?
Let us look at why it is important before we learn ways to collect customer feedback.
- It helps you understand your customers’ needs which positively impacts the success and growth of your business.
- It improves customer retention because you show customers that you take their constructive inputs seriously by implementing changes. This will keep them returning to your business and recommending your product or services to their family and friends.
- It allows you to resolve issues before they get to your customers and anticipate their future needs improving customer experience.
- Customer feedback gives you data that helps make business decisions. With tangible data collected, you can use and analyse it to make confident and beneficial business decisions.
- It helps you measure customer satisfaction by using a rating-based questionnaire such as a Likert Scale. By understanding your customers’ satisfaction and improving it, you can boost your business performance.
Ways to Collect Customer Feedback
Let us dive into ways to collect feedback and use it to craft a customer feedback strategy.
Surveys
Use surveys to ask important questions to your customers, find out what matters to them and understand their pain points. This is a great method to collect significant data and insights about your customers. Moreover, it has been resourceful to businesses, governments, organizations, and institutions. Furthermore, you can easily send them out to a large group of people thanks to online surveys or forms creators. There are distinct types of surveys which you can use to collect feedback such as Customer Satisfaction survey (CSAT). It helps understand and fix customer experience issues in certain areas. Moreover, a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey lets you know what customers think about your company. Additionally, a Customer Effort Score (CES) helps you understand how convenient it is for customers to use your product or services. Explore and choose from our collection of templates such as Employee Satisfaction Survey, Service Evaluation Survey, or Short Feedback Survey which you can find on our Survey and Polls templates.
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Focus groups
Conduct face-to-face interviews with focus groups to gain an in-depth and subjective understanding of the perceptions, insights, attitudes, experiences, or beliefs of your customers. It is a wonderful way to really listen to your target market or customers and understand your data better because of its qualitative approach and predefined demographic traits. You get to uncover the ‘why’ behind your data.
Interactive website content
You can use Interactive Content to collect customer feedback or customer data. Implement or embed Interactive Content like Online Surveys, Polls, and Interactive Popups to understand your website visitors and customers better. Dot.vu’s Interactive Content Platform allows you to add product rating popups or customer satisfaction survey popups to your website and content. There are different types of polls that you can use such as Poll with Gated Results, Visual Poll with Gated Results, and Animated Opinion Poll. Choose from readily available Survey and Poll templates from our marketplace.
Choose from a variety of Interactive Experiences such as Marketing Games and Personality tests that help you collect behavioural data. Additionally, place Interactive Popups on your website which allows you to collect actionable feedback about how customers are feeling and the issues they face during their customer journey on your website. By embedding Interactive Popups or Surveys key touchpoints, you can improve your website and create a pleasant customer or user experience.
Customer service
Having customer service channels such as live chats or hotlines in place allows customers to contact you directly and instantly with any issues they face as 65% of customers are impacted by good customer service than effective advertising. Receive instant feedback that can help you mitigate and rectify problems to prevent other customers from having an unpleasant experience. It is also a fantastic way to answer any concerns or questions your customers might have about your product or services. Feedback collected can be sorted into various categories such as product improvements, self-service resources, bug fixes, product design, or product usability.
Social media
Social media platforms such as X (Twitter), TikTok or Instagram are a major source of online customer feedback or public feedback. It is indirect feedback that you can observe from comments and view tagged photos, hashtags, or video reviews. Use this observation to collect customer feedback to see what people love or do not love about your brand. Delve into their reviews and opinions and analyse the issue. Additionally, social media allows you to uncover honest raw opinions and experiences of your brand and popular customer sentiments.
Make use of emails to get feedback from your customers as it is a powerful tool that easily helps you reach and understand your existing customer base. Send out emails to your customers after they purchase a product or after an interaction with customer service. Emails are automated which means you can blast them at any time that works best for you using email marketing applications or services. Send surveys or embed customer feedback popups into your email so customers can answer them directly without being directed to another page which could cause them to feel inconvenienced.
What to do with Customer Feedback?
Manage your customer feedback and make the most out of it with these tips below.
- Use customer feedback to add credibility to your brand through testimonials and positive reviews on your website.
- Use customer feedback to identify market trends to stay ahead and constantly innovate to expand your market reach.
- Customer feedback can be used to increase sales through reviews on your website which increases trust and your sales.
- Apply customer feedback to your business development plan with valuable customer insights you have collected.
- Utilize customer feedback to improve your product and customer experience by taking customers’ suggestions.
- You should respond to customer feedback to show them you are actively listening and to redeem your business from negative feedback.
Drive your business in the right direction with Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is an invaluable asset for any business striving for growth and success. By actively listening to customers’ opinions and experiences, you can gain crucial insights into their needs, preferences, and pain points. This feedback serves as a guiding light that allows you to make informed decisions. Moreover, it helps you improve your products and ultimately enhance your overall customer experience.
Implementing different strategies or methods to collect customer feedback such as Interactive Content provides a wealth of data. This data can be leveraged to build credibility, identify market trends, increase sales, and shape the future direction of your business.
Demonstrate commitment to customer satisfaction and foster stronger relationships through Interactive Content which allows you to collect feedback. Our Interactive Content Platform lets you embed Interactive Experiences onto your website such as Interactive Popups, Online Surveys, and more! It also provides customers with a unique and fun experience that makes them positively inclined to share their feedback. What are you waiting for? Get started with a 14-day free trial today and start collecting feedback to grow your business!
