Want an insight into how customers think and feel about your brand?
The easiest way to know whether you’re on the right track for customer experience is to gather as much feedback from your audience as possible. Feedback is a powerful compass giving your business insights into the steps required for a better customer journey.
The more feedback you collect (good and bad), the more you can make informed decisions on how to optimize business processes, conversions, and client loyalty. Today, we’re going to look at just some of the best ways to receive customer feedback.
1. Feedback Surveys
Probably the simplest option for most companies, feedback surveys simply ask your customers to provide their insights on a specific experience. You can deliver customer feedback surveys to customers in a variety of ways. For instance, you might send an SMS survey that asks clients to rate their experience on a scale of 1 to 5, or automatically deliver surveys via email.
If you have a mobile app, you can even send requests for surveys to customer smartphones via beacon when they leave your store. If you’re worried about customers not having time to complete an entire survey, try Net Promoter Score (NPS). This uses a scale of 1 to 10 to determine whether customers would recommend you to other clients. You count your negative responses (Scores of 0 to 6), neutral responses (7-8), and positive responses (9 and 10) to get an overall score.
Because there’s only one question to answer, customers are more likely to respond.
2. Review Conversations
Omni-channel tools for customer experience are becoming increasingly effective at gathering customer information. The live chat apps on your website can collect transcripts and offer insight into customer trends and experiences. You can even ask a bot to request a rating from your customer at the end of a self-service discussion.
Artificial Intelligence and analytics solutions can also gather useful information from calls and voice conversations, evaluating everything from customer sentiment to overall satisfaction. Transcripts and recorded calls can form the foundation of future training strategies so you can actively improve your ability to respond to different kinds of customers. Some tools even come with machine learning features to ensure your service improves with time.
3. Use CX Analytics
Analytical tools in your customer experience landscape aren’t limited to solutions that can record and analyse conversations. There are full reporting suites available that can integrate with your website analytics service and CRM to help you better understand your audience. The more information you can gather from every stage of the customer journey, the easier it is to adapt to suit your clients.
If you do a lot of business through your website, you can even download software which records some of the time customers spend on your site to see how long it takes for clients to find answers to questions or issue a question through your ticket system.
4. Conduct Customer Interviews
This is often a more effective option for B2B companies that build deeper relationships with long-term clients. Speaking to your happy and unhappy customers about their experiences with your company is crucial. Try finding a number of different customers who might be willing to provide feedback on your service, so you can get a broader sample of your audience.
If you’re struggling to find anyone who has the time to sit down and discuss customer experience with your team, you could provide incentives for people willing to share information. Vouchers, discount codes, or even entry to a prize draw will all make people more likely to share their valuable time with you. Pay attention to the incentives that work best so you can use them again later.
5. Monitor External Conversations
Sometimes, companies don’t need to approach customers to get feedback; they just need to listen to what their clients are already saying. There are endless review sites and forums where customers can talk about your company and discuss your product freely these days. Monitoring brand mentions, both online and offline (At events) is a great way to discover what people really think about you.
There are tons of tools to help you collect this kind of information today. For instance, social media monitoring tools ensure you can collect valuable information about the words your clients use to describe your service, or what they often complain about when talking to friends.
Remember, combining more than one source of feedback will give you a better view of your audience.
