As a business owner, you know that it’s important to gather effective customer feedback. It’s the only way to improve your products and services in line with what customers are actually looking for.
However, as a consumer, you probably find it pretty annoying when you get asked to participate in surveys when you’re just trying to do what you need to do and move on with your life!
If you want to gather effective customer feedback, it’s important to bear your own feelings as a customer in mind when you’re designing your customer feedback surveys.
1. Have a purpose if You Want to Get Effective Customer Feedback
When you’re designing a customer feedback survey, you mustn’t just do it for the sake of it or in the vague hope that you’ll find out something useful.
Be sure that you have understood what specific area or business or the customer experience you need feedback on and that you have designed your survey around this. For example, if you are concerned about negative feedback on social media, you could design your survey to ask customers about this specifically, rather than about their opinion of your company more widely.
2. Be specific
One of the common mistakes that businesses make when asking for feedback is not being specific enough.
If you’re going to ask for feedback, the principle is the same for if you will set goals for yourself. Goals need to be specific so that you can tell when you have achieved them. In the same way, you should ask for feedback specifically about the thing you need to know about so that when you get answers back, they are actually useful to you.
3. Ask for advice
According to the Harvard Business Review, people are more liable to respond if, rather than asking for feedback, you ask them for advice.
If you ask someone to rate your customer service, for example, you can find out their satisfaction levels. Likewise, asking someone how to improve your customer service gives you an idea of what is wrong in your customer’s eyes.
People are also more likely to be engaged in giving advice than they are in giving feedback, so you are likely to get a higher response rate.
4. Use the right tools to get effective customer feedback
Think about your customers, what you know about them, and which method of communication they are most likely to respond to.
Emails are commonly used to get customer feedback, but there are other methods available. For example, a lot of businesses are using the voice of the customer tools, which provides the opportunity for a short survey at the end of a customer service call.
This is effective because the customer is already on the phone with you, so staying on the line a little longer feels like less effort than opening an email and filling in a questionnaire.
5. Keep it short
When you ask a customer for feedback, you are essentially asking for their time, so be respectful of that. Keep your survey as short and relevant as possible to minimize the risk of people giving up halfway through.
