Gathering Feedback From Customers

As discussed in How To Achieve A Great Buyer Experience, gathering feedback from your customers is a crucial part of creating a positive customer experience. Here are five great ways we recommend gathering customer feedback: customer complaints, social media reviews, website questionnaires, customer interviews, and direct surveys. 

Customer Complaints 

No business is perfect. Even the most successful companies receive customer complaints from time to time. Although some complaints can be blown out of proportion, many complaints are valid and deserve to be taken seriously. A pattern of the same complaints should be a priority for your business to work to improve. Taking a genuine interest in every customer’s complaints will not only diffuse the situation, but it will also help your company avoid lawsuits. Complaints should be logged and can be shared with your whole company in order to align everyone’s goals around the satisfaction of the customer. 

Social Media, Reviews, and Other Public Content 

In this day and age, listening to customer feedback on social media and review sites is more important than ever. Small businesses may have a low volume of customers talking about them online, but even just a few reviews can go a long way in this case. Large businesses are more likely to have thousands of reviews online and must consider what each customer is saying about them. Simply reading through public input that is provided by customers and taking this input seriously will provide your business with valuable information. 

Website Questionnaires and Analytics

Your website can be an influential part of gathering reviews and feedback from your customers. Questionnaires on blog posts, in your shopping cart, and on your landing pages are just a few touch points where you can add questionnaires. Simple and concise questionnaires tend to receive a high percentage of responses. Analyzing the bounce rate and other data of your website can be a vital step in responding to customers. If your customers do not find your website attractive then this could lower the amount of reviews you receive in general. Improving your website will not only help your business receive more feedback, but it will also optimize buyer experience as a whole. 

Customer Interviews 

Conducting interviews with customers is a powerful way to discover new opportunities and learn what problems your business can solve. Even though performing a large volume of interviews can be time consuming, you will see patterns from customers that your business will be able to learn from. The key to conducting a successful interview is to ask questions that will elicit responses that are helpful for your business. As the interviewer, it is important to act as a researcher without being an interrogator. Listening is key in an interview to discover valuable insight that may have not been found out on other channels. 

Direct Surveys

Today, customers are drowning in requests to fill out surveys. It is important to utilize survey tools in a way that doesn’t lose customers’ attention. Surveys that are emailed and contain a minimal amount of fields are most likely to get the most responses. When sending direct surveys to customers, there are three categories of buyer experience questions that marketers recommend small businesses use. These questions are: customer effort score, net promoter score, and customer satisfaction score. 

Customer Effort Score

A customer effort score measures how simple or challenging a customer finds completing a particular action to be. For example, surveys containing these questions would say something like, “How simple was placing an order for you today?” Then, you can have the customer rate their experience from one to seven. 

Net Promoter Score

A net promoter score question asks customers close-ended questions that rate their experience from one to ten. For example, this question could say, “On a scale from one to ten, how highly would you rate your chances of doing business with us again?” 

Customer Satisfaction Score

Customer satisfaction score questions are a simple way to ask customers if they are “satisfied” or “unsatisfied” with a product or service. The goal of these questions is to discover the overall perception your customers have of your brand as a whole. 

These five ways of gathering customer feedback are essential in achieving a great buyer experience. To read more about buyer experience and the benefits of improving it, subscribe to our Fresh Digital Marketing Ideas newsletter and we will send you the complete guide for free.