To grow your business and increase your profits, it is crucial to put your customers’ interests first in every business decision you make. By making your entire strategy customer-centric, you create a customer experience journey that adds value to your customers and keeps them coming back for more.
To achieve a customer-centric business, varied and detailed customer feedback is essential. Feedback tells you exactly what your customer wants, needs, and expects, enabling you to mold your products and services into something your customers will buy. In this article, we will cover what customer feedback is, six customer feedback methods, and what to do with customer feedback. Let’s get started.
What Is Customer Feedback?
Customer feedback refers to any information that customers provide about their experience with your organization. This feedback can be positive, negative, or neutral and can take many different forms. There are two main categories of customer feedback: direct and indirect.
Why Is Customer Feedback Important?
Customer feedback is crucial to the success and growth of your business. By understanding your customers’ needs and expectations, you can create products and services that meet those needs and improve the customer experience.
Proactively seeking out customer feedback can help you anticipate future needs and resolve issues before they become bigger problems. Additionally, listening to your customers and acting on their feedback can help build trust and loyalty.
Research has shown that customers appreciate being asked for feedback and are more likely to think highly of companies that actively seek out and act on their feedback. By utilizing customer feedback, you can improve your business and build stronger relationships with your customers.
6 Customer Feedback Methods
Collecting omnichannel feedback is crucial for any business. This means providing customers with the opportunity to provide feedback seamlessly across various channels without having to switch to another platform. This can be achieved through in-app pop-ups, automated telephonic questionnaires, or embedded surveys in emails. Omnichannel feedback provides more comprehensive insights and is more convenient for customers. Let’s explore the six great ways to gather customer feedback.
1. Surveys
Surveys are an excellent way to get answers to specific questions. They can be sent out to large groups of people to gather useful insights. You can deploy Customer Satisfaction surveys (CSAT) after specific touchpoints to get feedback on particular areas of your customer experience. For example, you can ask for feedback on the delivery process immediately following the delivery of a product. Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys can be sent out periodically to get feedback on your customers’ overall opinions about your company. The Customer Effort Score (CES) survey helps you understand how easy it is for customers to use your products or services.
When creating surveys, make sure to keep the questions simple and concise. It’s also a good idea to have a mix of open-ended, qualitative and closed-ended, quantitative (yes/no) questions. Open-ended questions provide context for the closed-ended questions and give you information you can use to make improvements for your customer.
2. Emails
Emails are a powerful tool to get feedback from customers. A great time to send out an email is following the purchase of a product or at another significant touchpoint like after an interaction with a customer service agent or after canceling a subscription. These emails are generally automated, making the process even easier. The surveys that you send in these emails should be short and embedded in the email, meaning your customer doesn’t have to click through to a different page to answer.
3. Interviews and Focus Groups
Interviews and focus groups are a highly effective form of direct feedback. They are generally done on a small scale due to budget and logistics. While fewer people will be giving their feedback, you might find the insights are richer. Face-to-face or over the phone conversation lets you ask more detailed questions and give the participants the opportunity to respond in-depth. When conducting an interview or a focus group, it’s essential to go in prepared and keep the conversation focused on getting the answers you need.
4. Social Media
Social media is becoming more and more popular for customers to voice their opinions regarding brands. Monitoring your own social media channels and chatter about your brand on other people’s platforms helps you detect small issues before they turn into big problems. You can also better anticipate any needs that your customers might have and provide them with a proactive customer experience. Customers expect you to be present for them on these channels, and studies have shown that 59% of people perceive brands more favorably if they respond to complaints on social media.
5. Website Analytics
Analyzing website traffic and the different patterns customers follow on your site can provide valuable insights into how customers feel about your products and/or services. Analyzing pages that customers spend longer on or pages where customers abandon the site altogether shows you what your customers like and what they don’t. You can then start to analyze that feedback to see where some of your issues lie within your customer experience journey. It’s essential to make sure you have the right tools in place to monitor your analytics. You should also take into consideration the context that exists around your insights as you analyze.
6. Free-Text Feedback
Free-text feedback allows customers to leave feedback in an open way. This can be achieved through in-app pop-ups, feedback buttons, feedback sites like G2, product request forms, and more. A free-text box means the customer is not constrained by one single question. This can sometimes mean that you receive vague feedback, but it can also mean that the customer can give you useful, surprising insights that you might not have thought about on your own.
In conclusion, there are various methods to gather customer feedback, and it’s important to use a combination of them to get a comprehensive understanding of your customer’s needs and preferences. By implementing these feedback methods, you can improve your customer experience and build stronger relationships with your customers.
What To Do With Customer Feedback
Feedback from your customers is a valuable source of information that can help you improve your products and services. However, analyzing large amounts of unstructured feedback can be a daunting task. MonkeyLearn offers AI-powered text analysis tools like survey analyzer and sentiment analyzer that can help you process and analyze your customer feedback data in seconds.
Here’s how MonkeyLearn can help you analyze NPS feedback:
- Choose the NPS template to create your workflow.
- Upload your data in CSV format.
- Match your data to the right fields in each column, such as Created_at, Text, and Score.
- Name your workflow.
- Wait for MonkeyLearn to process your data.
- Explore your dashboard and view all your insights.
With MonkeyLearn, you can filter your insights by topic, sentiment, keyword, score, or NPS category. You can also share your insights via email with your coworkers.
Analyzing customer feedback can help you identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions. MonkeyLearn can help you automate this process and save you time and resources. Get in touch with MonkeyLearn today to see how you can analyze all of your customer feedback data and visualize your insights in an easy-to-read dashboard.
Conclusion
Collecting customer feedback is essential for creating a customer-centric culture that leads to increased growth and profits. There are various methods to gather customer feedback, but analyzing it for insights is crucial. AI-powered analysis tools are the best option for dealing with large amounts of unstructured qualitative and quantitative data. MonkeyLearn is a great tool to get the most out of the customer feedback you gather. By using MonkeyLearn, you can analyze customer feedback quickly and efficiently, gaining valuable insights that can help you improve your products and services and ultimately increase customer satisfaction.