The 7 Best Ways to Get Feedback from Your Customers
People love to share information, especially if this information is associated with a bad customer experience. One dissatisfied customer can spread their experience, which negatively affects your business, your brand reputation, and brings incredible losses.
To avoid these situations and root out cases of failed service, you need to monitor customer reviews.
It is important to show the value of each client. Ask clients to leave a review that will be available to other users. This will demonstrate that it is their opinion that is valuable to you. By gradually collecting reviews, you will build brand loyalty.
If your product is not in trend with the target audience, you will not know the advantages and disadvantages. Collect feedback, it will help you learn more about the user experience and understand what needs to be improved.
When you turn to customers for reviews, you remind them of the company every time. So the brand does not disappear from the field of vision and customers do not leave.
There are three main reasons for creating feedback:
- Collecting feedback gives customers a sense of value.
- It helps to improve products or services.
- It also promotes customer retention.
Here’s what food entrepreneur Julie Hession says about the importance of customer feedback:
Let’s figure out how to get feedback from customers.
Customer Feedback Methods
1. Social networks
Track user reviews of your service on social media. On Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, people are already giving opinions on experiences with various companies. The only thing that remains to do is to go there and see what the clients are saying.
Use social media to build a base of opinions and fix bugs in your work if necessary. Email customers directly or respond to their comments. This will show that you are interested in everyone. The person will be pleased that their opinion did not go unnoticed.
Connect tools to help track brand mentions across all social networks. This saves you the hassle of manual search for reviews, and it doesn’t miss a single important note.
Post polls on social media. It is important to consider that the people who follow you signed up because you have already gained their trust. Therefore, such surveys can be extremely positive. This is nice, but it does not always reflect the real picture.
Increase the engagement of social media users with contests. This will expand your subscriber base and collect more data on the preferences of your target audience.
Conduct polls on Instagram Stories. The number of app users is constantly growing, so you need to present your brand on this social network as well. People love Instagram polls. Use stories to quickly get audience feedback on various issues.
2. Email
Emails are sent more often to a customer who has already made a purchase or used the service. In the letter, you can thank the buyer for their trust in your company and ask for feedback.
Compose your letter in such a way as to find out as much information as possible:
- Ask where your site was found: through Google, friends’ recommendations, social media, advertising, or any other promotion method you use.
- Ask why they chose your site. Was it due to pricing policy, shipping, return terms, site usability, or product variety?
- Ask about the overall experience with your company. How was site navigation, quality of support, and speed of delivery?
- Find out if the customer is satisfied with the product or service provided.
It is better to send such letters after 3 days after purchase. So the client will have time to get acquainted with your product and add up an opinion about the advantages and possible disadvantages of buying. Choose the most convenient survey sending service for you. You can start with SurveyMonkey or Survey Anyplace.
Sometimes the buyer needs to be given time to try all the functions of the product. Try experimenting and wait a week or two before sending an email asking for feedback. This will give you a detailed answer.
3. Track brand mentions on other sites
Disgruntled users often write reviews on forums or specialized sites. They trust them more because they see them as independent sources. On such sites, the client can share their opinions and no one will delete their comment.
Use dedicated tools to monitor online brand mentions. Connect Google Alerts to get notified of new reviews and keep an eye on what your competitors are saying.
4. Interview
Customer interviews aren’t just for large corporations and retailers with big budgets. Clients who are accustomed to using your services will usually respond if you ask them for a short interview. Such conversations are good because this is not the first time people have chosen you as a service provider. They have studied the product well and they have a story to tell.
Call a customer to get the first-hand opinions on a product or service. It is both an effective way of collecting feedback and a personal touch. Users who are loyal to your brand will only be happy to share their impressions because they are the first to be interested in receiving a quality product.
During direct communication with the client, you will better find out what worries them. It is important to find the right time to call. Never call during your lunch break. The time from 1:00 to 2:00 is the worst. During this period, a person is tuned in to rest and not to spend personal time on telephone conversations with strangers. It is much better to call in the morning between 8 and 9 o’clock and in the evening between 4 and 5.
5. Polls on the site
You can conduct several types of surveys on the site:
- Ask for feedback if a user abandons the cart.
Add a pop-up to the site that will appear if a person fills out the cart but does not start buying and decides to leave. About 68% of visitors to e-commerce sites leave at the full cart stage. It’s time to ask why they do this. Add multiple answer choices and a field that the user can fill in on their own. This will allow you to share the reasons why they refused to checkout.
- Submit a survey on the order confirmation page.
Not every site visitor reaches this stage, but it is necessary to take all opinions into account. However, don’t be in a rush to add a survey somewhere in the middle of a user’s journey through your platform. By doing this, you distract a potential customer and lose customers.
One of the best times to learn about your website experience is the moment after the purchase is made.
Ask if there are any problems with finding the right products and if the buyer is satisfied with the variety and choice presented. Learn about comments and suggestions for improvement.
It’s important not to overdo it and not make the survey endless. You won’t get results this way. Users do not like to waste time filling out many unnecessary fields. Limit yourself to a couple of feedback questions that are most relevant to your landing page.
- Find out why the user decided to leave the site.
It is impossible to avoid a situation when a person, having looked at the site, just leaves. But you can find out why this is happening.
Place a pop-up that will appear. When the visitor decides for the worst, click on the cross and close the site.
Ask what caused this. Are there any inconveniences with navigation, content, or products? Perhaps the reason is not you at all. When using the survey, you will know about it for sure.
You can also embed a lead magnet or a special offer in the pop-up. And even if the customer doesn’t buy anything, you still get their details.
6. Feedback Boxes
Surveys are good at helping to figure out the disadvantages. This is only the case if you show up with them in a client’s life on time. To find out what your site visitors care about, create a feedback form in the form of a feedback box. Site users rarely contact support when they encounter minor issues. In such cases, it is easier for them to leave the platform than to write and deal with the inconvenience. When they always have a box at hand with a call to leave feedback, then the client will most likely do so.
Thanks to such boxes, it is easier to learn about minor site malfunctions or inconveniences because of which users are indignant. Get ready, because these are the reviews that will most often fall into the box. Thanks to this, you can minimize their number and make the process of surfing the resource simple and as convenient as possible.
Feedback boxes help users communicate important little things. Don’t make it cumbersome and don’t fill in unnecessary questions. Let the visitor point out the problems themselves. Do not rush them and make a decision yourself about what to talk about. Your goal is to make it easier for people to report minor annoyances, not make it difficult for people to surf the site.
Always respond to user reviews. You have added a form to the site not only to collect feedback but also to solve a number of problems. Show that each comment is valuable to you.
7. Live chat on the site
Connect a live chat on the site, if you have not already done so. 44% of users who shop online identify a chat as one of the most essential features of e-commerce sites.
The tool will help not only to establish feedback with the client but also to collect statistics on the actions of visitors. You will be able to follow the movements of a potential client between the pages of the resource and thus find out what they are interested in. If you are attentive to the steps of site visitors, you can help the client choose the right product. You can do this if they have not yet decided or missed a good position.
Do not connect a chat into the site if you are not going to monitor its quality work. The client does not want to wait longer than a minute for the operator’s response. Therefore, make sure that each user receives the information in which they are interested in a timely manner.
Proactive chat can increase the number of hits by up to 300%. Open the chat every time the user spends more than 30 seconds on the page. It will be easier to find the correct time after testing the function.
To monitor the effectiveness of the support service, you can run mini-polls that will appear after the dialog box is closed.
Ask if the chat was helpful and how competent the operators are. If the survey reveals unsatisfactory data, a quick response will maintain customer loyalty.
If you don’t have enough resources to connect a live operator, you can try a chatbot. First, set up ManyChat. See how users will interact with it. Collect statistics and decide how effective it will be to connect a living person to this work.
How do I get a customer to leave a review?
1. Show reviews from other customers
By adding user reviews to your site, you show that people buy your product and trust your service. When a user sees that someone has already left a review for a product, they are more likely to buy that product and leave a review too. The decision to buy any product begins with the study of reviews about it.
Companies often post fake reviews on their websites and special resources. This is not the best way to increase your brand rankings and build customer trust. Often such reviews are very out of the picture. Therefore, your task should not be to fill the site with fake reviews but to collect a database of real ones. You want to fix all possible inconveniences for users.
Use negative reviews to your advantage. There are no situations when there are zero dissatisfied customers. Show how you deal with uncomfortable situations and prove that you have nothing to hide and the opinion of each client matters.
2. Offer a reward
Not everyone is ready to spend their personal time filling out questionnaires and surveys. For some, this can be annoying. To avoid this reaction, offer a small reward that is worth your time.
Encourage users to leave feedback in exchange for next purchase discounts, gift cards, or free shipping. Monetary gifts attract special attention but your offers don’t have to be valued in monetary terms. The time you invest in creating valuable content sometimes costs more and is more valuable than gift cards. Offer ebooks, white papers, or any other content in return for review that will help the client move closer to their goals.
This is how you buy yourself reviews and is one of the most effective ways to get feedback. By giving something valuable to the customer, you get an equally valuable replenishment of your feedback base in return.
What to do with the feedback received?
Users face a variety of problems. Even the ones you never knew existed. When you start collecting reviews, you will need to find a personalized approach to each client. Try to respond to the review within 24 hours. Ask for a more detailed answer if you do not quite understand the essence of the problem. Suggest workarounds to solve a user’s problem quickly and efficiently. If you don’t do this, the client will simply go to a competitor.
Engage with reviews. That is why you started to use this method to collect them. Analyze and listen to user opinions. They will help you identify and fix the main issues of your business.
Feedback also helps grab the attention of potential customers and build brand credibility. Therefore, collecting them should become part of the daily work in business development. Many companies may find it difficult to get feedback. People are used to receiving a service and very few people decide to leave feedback on their experience. The client does not consider it their duty to give feedback. Therefore, try to hint about it yourself.
Not everyone is willing to spend their time filling out surveys or telephone interviews. Some people just won’t care about you. For others, the way you choose to get feedback will be uncomfortable. Therefore, you need to experiment. Find the fastest and most effective methods for getting feedback for your business.
