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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here are some of the most popular methods of collecting customer feedback.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
