Listening to customer feedback is one of the most effective ways to improve your business and offering. Learn all about how to gather feedback with Feefo.
Asking your customers for feedback is the best way to gain insight into what their pain points are and get you the information you need to make significant changes.
Customer feedback can take lots of different forms and businesses can collect it in a whole range of different ways. This guide explains why gathering customer feedback can be beneficial to your business and the best ways to collect useful, actionable insights.
The benefits of collecting customer feedback
1. Get to know your clients directly
Company reviews provide a direct line of communication between your customer and your business. Existing customers can provide objective feedback about your products and services and you will be able to better understand who they are and what their needs are.
If a certain group of customers is finding problems and the rest are happy with it, then that gives you more insight into who your target audience is.
2. Take on your competition with confidence
You will have the opportunity to benchmark your services against your competitors and identify ways to do better.
Keep an eye on what customers are saying about your competition. If they are complaining about an issue, make sure never to repeat the mistake. If they are praising them, find out how you can offer the same and offer better.
3. Help you identify areas to improve
Embrace negative business reviews and take all criticism on board as part of the learning curve for your business. If there's a recurring grievance trending among multiple reviews, then you need to look at fixing it. If it’s a one-off, then find out more details about what went wrong and try to ensure it doesn't happen again.
Never delete a negative review unless it contains something malicious or offensive. Instead, always respond to a negative review with an apology and make a plan with them to resolve the issue. It lets the customer that you care and also highlights to potential clients that you are responsive and you listen to feedback.
4. Build trust and credibility
As a company, it's important to appear as authentic as possible, particularly on the internet.
The best endorsement you can get is from existing patrons. Transparency and sincerity are crucial, and word-of-mouth marketing is extremely useful for setting your business apart from the rest.
Both good and bad company reviews, but especially the good, tell strangers that your business is real and trustworthy, which helps give other customers the confidence to buy from you.
5. Improve your visibility
Customer reviews provide you with the exposure you need — and more so if you are a new or small company. Each new online review opens the door for more people to have their say and give their opinion about your services, and this increases your chances of getting discovered by more and more new customers.
6. Grow user-generated content (UGC)
A high number of business reviews also help you rank higher on search engines. Customer reviews are a great opportunity to get user-generated content (UGC) that increases your brand’s visibility across the internet and supports your search engine optimization efforts.
Google likes robust pages with a lot of content that usually product pages lack so badly. With a substantial amount of reviews on your pages, you can prompt Googlebot to pick up long-tail keywords from UGC that your page can rank for — especially if those reviews include keywords that web users are searching for.
7. Improve your Google Ads quality score
Google says that ads with star ratings get a CTR of 17% higher than those without ratings. Make sure to have at least 100 company reviews live from the last 12 months and encourage your customers to leave their feedback for your business across the web.
The more times you're mentioned, the more important Google thinks you are.
8. Influence future buying decisions
93% of customers say that online business reviews have a direct impact on their purchasing decisions. Customers can see what it’s like to do business with you, how you make other customers feel, how you compare to the other options they’re considering and what sets you apart.
Company reviews act as a viable customer touchpoint in their buying journey. Seeing a plethora of positive reviews helps accelerate their journey to the next step towards a purchase — leading to more conversions for you.
Seven methods for collecting customer feedback
Here are some of the most popular methods of collecting customer feedback.
1. Product and service reviews
The Feefo 2019 Consumer Report reveals that 96% of consumers read or use reviews in some way; online customer reviews have become an important part of the decision-making process when it comes to clicking the ‘buy now’ button.
Online reviews usually take the form of a star rating and written comment and are split into two main categories of customer feedback: service (or company) reviews and product reviews.
Service reviews allow customers to offer their opinion on the overall experience and service that they received when dealing with a brand, whilst product reviews are for giving feedback on a particular product that the customer has purchased.
Benefits of product and service reviews:
- Honest feedback from real customers helps shoppers feel more confident about making a purchase.
- Product reviews may help you become eligible for organic stars in search, which can help drive more customers to your site.
- The insights you gain from customer feedback can help you improve your products and service, as you uncover common issues and can resolve them before they escalate.
Disadvantages of product and service reviews:
- People who aren’t genuine customers can leave a review on a brand’s page, whether they have had an experience with them or not, leaving businesses open to fake reviews.
2. Surveys
Businesses run customer feedback surveys to get a better understanding of how their customers are feeling. The answers provided also award the insight you need to influence marketing campaigns, develop your products, and optimise your customer service processes.
Benefits of surveys:
- By giving customers the option to share their opinions with surveys, you’re showing that you value their insight.
- Surveys are one of the easiest and quickest methods of collecting customer feedback. Often, you can build a survey and start collecting responses right away, meaning you can get up-to-date data whenever you like.
- Surveys are versatile and can be used pretty much however and whenever you like. You don’t even have to wait for your respondents to complete a transaction to start asking questions or requesting customer feedback.
Disadvantages of surveys:
- Being such a popular method of collecting customer feedback means that customers can sometimes feel a little bombarded by surveys and are less likely to take part.
- If you don’t design and execute your survey in the right way, there’s a chance your responses could be skewed. For example, if you don’t offer a ‘Not applicable’ option, your respondents could be forced to give an answer which doesn’t reflect how they feel.
3. Follow-up phone calls
Collecting customer feedback over the phone means you get to pick up on the tone of the responses, allowing you to dig a little deeper where you feel you need to.
Benefits of follow-up phone calls:
- Phone calls are much more personal than most other methods of collecting customer feedback, so customers are likely to feel valued and that their opinions are being heard
- Speaking to your customers is a good way of building relationships and trust in your brand
- The nature of these phone calls allows for long, in-depth answers and opinions.
Disadvantages of follow-up calls:
- Some customers may feel that phone calls are too intrusive
- With no ‘physical’ feedback as such, it’s hard to measure, report on, and use the responses as you would be able to with written and recorded customer feedback.
4. In-app customer feedback collection
In-app customer feedback software can sit inside a range of different apps and products — often hiding away somewhere at the side of the screen, in a bottom corner, or even a pop-up prompt to give some feedback or rate the app after a few minutes of using the product.
They’re used to collect customer feedback in real-time, so the customer is using the product as they are being asked how they feel about it.
Benefits of in-app feedback collection:
- As the product collects customers’ information, the feedback tends to be extremely concise and relevant to their exact point in the customer journey
- Once the mechanism is integrated into your app or software, there’s not much for you to do other than wait for the feedback
- Response rates can be quite high. Since the feedback collection takes place within your product or app, customers can access it whenever they need to, and whilst this usually means they’re reporting a bug or an error, it’s the feedback you need to make things better.
Disadvantages of in-app feedback collection:
- Because of the types of questions that are commonly asked, this isn’t the customer feedback method for you if you’re after detailed responses
- As this method is always ‘switched on’ and extremely accessible to your customers, it could easily lead to an influx of responses, some of which may be completely irrelevant
- Depending on how your feedback collection is set up, you might not have enough information to follow up with your customers and delve a little deeper into their responses.
5. Feature requests
Feature requests are ideas and suggestions from existing customers about how they think a product could be improved. Not all feature requests are the same — they can be bug reports, ways to improve current features, or completely new ideas.
Companies can collect and manage customer requests in various ways, including:
- Feedback boards
- Idea portals
- Apps, such as Trello
- Specific software dedicated to hosting this type of customer feedback
Benefits of feature requests:
- Collecting customer requests help you solve problems, and so long as you’re taking note of what your customers are asking for, you’re ultimately making your product stronger and picking up on issues that could have otherwise gone unnoticed
- Even if you don’t put the customer feedback into action, allowing real users to speak up is a great way of making them feel as though they’re part of your product roadmap
- Feature request boards are great for creating a real sense of community for you and your customers.
Disadvantages of feature requests:
- Often the requests and problems are very specific to individual users and may not benefit the majority of your customers
- Unless your customers are actively asked to provide ideas, feature request boards are often underused.
6. Social media
Social media is cost-effective and provides genuine insight into customer behaviour, as people are happy to share their opinions socially. 80% of customers expect companies to interact with them through social media over other marketing channels. Talk to customers where they are most comfortable and they’re more likely to tell you their honest opinion about you.
Benefits of social media:
- Interactive features like polls, quizzes, questions, chat, and rating options on Instagram stories are a great way to engage your audience and obtain feedback.
- You can gain customer feedback under the guise of competitions and interactivity by asking for their feedback in exchange for a prize. The more likes, mentions, comments and shares you get, the more people you can ask for feedback.
- Comments on social posts can offer you valuable insights into what you’re doing well and where you are lacking.
- You can also monitor your competitor’s posts to see what their audience is saying. What is their tone of voice like? Are most of the comments positive or negative? Identify any key issues that you can address, or avoid, from your competitor's feedback.
Disadvantages of social media:
- Managing social media accounts will require extra resources to commit to keeping up your brand’s media presence
- Not all feedback will be useful — it’s extremely difficult to moderate social media feedback and you may find that many customer interactions aren’t always constructive.
7. Live chat
Live chat allows customers to air their grievances, ask questions, resolve issues, and locate what they need as soon as they want and in real-time.
Keep transcripts of all interactions with your customers, from live chats to recording sales and customer service calls. Take swift action on resolving any issue, use the transcripts to identify patterns and problem areas you can improve on and, if you can, get back to that customer to tell them you have resolved their issue.
Benefits of live chat:
- Live chat provides direct feedback from your customers in an unbiased way and as it’s all collected online, you will have an archive of transcripts that you can refer back to in the future
- Transcript logs can give you data insights into things like peak hours, average first response time, and chat duration. These figures will give you valuable information about your customers and the quality of your customer service.
Disadvantages of live chat:
- Going through large transcripts from hundreds and thousands of customers can be time-consuming.
Top tips for collecting customer feedback
Perfect your timing - Timing is crucial as it can increase, or decrease, your chances of a customer offering their feedback. Asking for feedback once the customer has ordered but before they receive the product, is unlikely to get you any kind of product feedback. Conversely, by sending an email 24 hours after confirmed delivery, you’re far more likely to gain a response from your customers.
Personalise your feedback form —Your brand image can often be emotive for customers, so include your recognisable colour palette and logo when asking any questions. Secondly – and, arguably most importantly – personalise the questions to your database. Make your questions widely applicable to all customers or create segments of audience data to make each question more personal and relevant.
Make it user-friendly —A user-friendly feedback form will help to reduce your bounce rate and encourage users to complete all the fields. Common pet peeves for feedback forms include:
- A poor mobile experience
- Compulsory text fields
- Minimum character limits on text fields
- A long survey with lots of questions and multiple pages
- Having to input phone numbers, email addresses or names
- An unclear journey
- A survey that’s not optimised for a customer’s device
Ask clear and concise questions —Think about what you need to get out of the customer feedback and try not to get bogged down with questions about every element of their experience with you: prioritise based on what’s truly important. When using rating scales, make it clear what each end of the scale means. Here are a few examples of questions to include in your feedback surveys:
- How satisfied are you with our product/services?
- Would you buy this product/service from us again?
- How easy did we make it for you to solve your issue?
- Did you find all the information you needed online, or did you need to speak to us?
- Would you still buy our product if it cost more?
- What would you like to see in our future product ranges?
- What would you change about your experience with us if you could?
- How did you hear about us?
Create an incentive for completion —One of the best ways of encouraging customer feedback is by creating an incentive for them to fill out the survey. This can include:
- Entry into a prize draw
- A discount code for their next purchase
- Money off their next purchase: £5, £10, £20 for example
- Free shipping
- An invitation to an exclusive VIP group
- A free gift
Try to discourage neutral ratings —Neutral reviews don’t always give you the best insight into how you can improve, or the specifics of a customer’s experience with you. Use even numbers in rating scales to discourage these: ratings on a scale of 1-10 make 5 a negative (1-5), and 6+ are positive (6-10), while ratings on a scale of 1-9 give 5 as a perfect neutral.
Be clear about the expectations before customers start —When you’re inviting customers to get involved, tell them how long it will take and/or how many questions there are. This sets a clear guideline that the customer is almost agreeing to when they click to get started.
Demonstrate to the customer that their voice will be heard —Often, customers don’t take the time to give businesses their feedback as they think it’s pointless or no one will respond to their feedback. To show the customer that their feedback is valued:
- Explain why you’re collecting feedback and how the data will be used
- Allow them to speak to someone
- Create a follow-up process
- Respond to reviews left on your website and third-party websites
- Answer customer comments on social media
Use Net Promoter Score (NPS) –NPS is a generic customer feedback service metric that helps you measure your level of customer loyalty, quickly resolve issues, and gain an overall view of customer satisfaction. The NPS question is standardised across all businesses, and is as follows: “How likely are you to recommend [business] to a friend, relative or colleague?”
This is answered on a scale of 1-10 where the following bands apply:
- Score 0-6: Detractors. Unhappy customers who are likely to go elsewhere and possibly damage your brand with word-of-mouth
- Score 7-8: Passives. Satisfied customers but could be swayed by the competition. Not necessarily brand loyal
- Score 9-10: Promoters. Loyal customers who will continue to buy from you and refer your brand to others.
Start collecting customer feedback today
Obtaining customer feedback should be an ongoing process and a vital part of your marketing strategy. Online review websites are a powerful marketing tool for customers to share what they like and for others — both customers and businesses — to listen.
Our team at Feefo are happy to answer any questions you may have and show you how your business can make the best use of your customer reviews. Get in touch with us today to learn more.
