How to Get Quality Customer Feedback: 4 Effective Strategies

Many businesses track metrics like customer acquisition cost, time on site, conversion rates, and bounce rates. However, these metrics fall short when you’re trying to understand customers’ experience with your business and how its performance relates to their expectations. And if you fail to meet their expectations, their likelihood of staying with the business goes down and their lifetime value declines.

Here are four effective strategies for getting quality customer feedback.

Send Out Surveys

Surveys are the most common way of generating customer feedback. They’re easy to set up and send to customers. They’re easy to analyze. They readily scale up; survey tools let you send surveys to 100 as easily as 10,000.

Long surveys are preferred by those who want feedback since it generates the most information, but their value is undermined by the low response rate. As the survey grows longer, fewer finish it. A twenty-minute survey can feel like an imposition to your customers, hurting their impression of the brand. In some cases, the survey responses aren’t helpful, since people tend to rush through the survey when they realize it is long.

This is why businesses should keep their surveys short. You can do this by only asking a few critical questions. The ideal customer survey is around five questions, and ten questions is the absolute maximum. You can help narrow your current survey questions to only those questions whose responses you’ll actually use. This not only frees up customer time but your time as well since you aren’t crunching numbers that have no value to you.

If you want to maximize the valuable, actionable feedback you receive, start with an open-ended question. A survey full of multiple choice questions on how they feel doesn’t give you information on why they’re dissatisfied or why they’re happy.

Starting with the open-ended questions, you increase the odds they’ll provide detailed feedback and you’ll learn what they really think. You could combine ratings and open questions with a site generated survey at the end of a transaction, asking them to rate the experience and giving them the option to provide detail if desired. Keep rating scales consistent. And don’t ask loaded questions since this really isn’t useful to your organization.

While email surveys are a standard operating practice, don’t overlook newer versions, such as SMS surveys. SMS has higher open rates than email, and they may be your only option if you only have the customer’s phone number.

Follow Up Via Email

Email is an excellent way to gather customer feedback. When you’re soliciting feedback via email, one of the first things to do is ensure that you respond to customers in a timely manner. You can improve the odds they’re satisfied by managing expectations, such as sending an automatic response: “We will reply to your message within X hours/days.” However, you have to actually respond to the emails, or else they won’t want to contact you again.

Create an organized system for responding to and collecting customer feedback. For example, have a system for tracking feature requests, service failures, and general business complaints. You can sort the product ideas at a later date, but you want to ensure that they’re saved. Consider saving the contact information of those requesting product enhancements, so that you can notify them when the change has been made.

Send honest follow-up emails to customers. Note that you could end up in a very informative conversation with customers and learn a lot from it.

Have an Appropriate Complaint Management Process

Having a complaint management process means having a place for unhappy customers to complain to someone who can do something about it. Your business will collect the negative feedback that you need to improve things. The complaint management process is an opportunity to turn a negative experience into a positive one. At a minimum, a dissatisfied customer talking to an advocate that responds to them personally and empathetically can reduce their dissatisfaction.

Reach Out Directly

There are times when emails, surveys, and detailed data analysis just don’t give you the information you need. Sometimes you need to truly listen to your customers. You may want in-depth feedback from customers about why they just don’t like the current design.

Perhaps customers are saying they want several conflicting things out of the product or service, such as wanting more money. Customers’ suggestions on how to improve the product may not make sense to the design team, and you need to meet with them to understand. One method is to set up a customer advisory board. Groups of customers are gathered together to advise the company. This is an excellent group to draft for usability tests. Or, hold exploratory customer interviews with these customers.

Conclusion

Consistently collecting customer feedback helps you determine if your business is going in the right direction and build engagement with your company. It can also give you useful guidance on how your business could improve and expand in the future.

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