3 Ways to Collect Feedback from Digital Customers
Creating an unmatched customer experience and fostering a customer-centric approach requires collecting and paying attention to customer feedback. Customer feedback is a combination of individual customer experiences, their unique perspective and feelings about a product or service, and problems faced while interacting with the company. It is the most valued information for any company as it helps them gauge what the customer wants, develop meaningful connections with new and existing customers and bring around the appropriate changes in their product development and service experience. In a world that is undergoing constant digital evolution, getting in touch with customers in a personalized manner, listening to what they have to say, and then addressing the issues is pivotal. If done right, customer feedback can be the North Star of a company’s progressive journey. So what are some of the best ways to collect feedback from online customers? Here’s a look at some ideas.
Link Embedded Email Surveys
The easiest and the most conventional way to get feedback from your digital customers is to reach out to them via email. Link embedded email surveys offer a more flexible way to gather feedback. They are easy to send out, track and analyze. You can simply embed an email survey form in the email body. Once they receive the email, they have to click on the link and fill out the response form that appeared on their screens. In the digital age, where the average attention span of customers is on a constant decline, choosing options that require minimum effort and help enhance the response time, are the most viable.
Email surveys allow customers to record their responses directly from the convenience of their mailbox. However, when designing a customer feedback form make sure that it is not very lengthy, the questions are preferable closed-ended and the language used is easy to understand. As customers, we have all been asked to fill out lengthy and boring customer feedback forms that never made it back to the company. So, to ensure a higher response rate from your customers, keep it short, engaging, and user-friendly. As an incentive, you could also attach a free gift voucher or offer a prize in a lucky draw to those who complete and send out surveys.
Social Media Activity
Digital platforms, like social media channels, are one of the core places to look for direct feedback about your products and service because they have the highest customer activity and engagement numbers. Typically, customer responses on social media are placed with the perspective of helping other customers navigate their decision-making process and helping companies understand the customers’ opinions.
Different social media platforms offer different interactive features that can be used to collect customer feedback. For example, YouTube offers an inbuilt comment section, which can be turned on or off depending upon the preference of the company. This implies that customers are responding to the content posted on YouTube. You simply have to post your video content and let the customers engage, review and pour in their respective feedback for you.
Similarly, Instagram introduced the idea of interactive online polling. The polling sticker became live in 2017, enabling companies to ask questions on their Instagram stories and record customer responses via online voting. This feature of Instagram helped companies get better insight into customer perspectives and provided them with an easy channel for forming engaging connections with them.
A similar poll feature is provided by Facebook as well. Unlike Instagram, this poll is not restricted to the stories and can be created on the company’s Facebook page, improving customer interaction through the comment section. Sometimes customers don’t feel satisfied by just recording their responses on the poll, they have a lot more to express and that is when they turn to the comment section, active under the poll. This extra information helps businesses get a deeper insight into new ways to retain and serve customers. Therefore, the use of social media monitoring tools is encouraged by data analysts to help companies gather insights into what their customers are saying and feeling.
Live Chat Surveys
Another actively used digital tool to collect customer feedback is the live chat survey. A chat survey is a mode of collecting valuable customer responses, accounting for their overall experience of interacting with the business. It is an integral feature of any live chat software for business, which can be easily customized in the preferred language. Live chat service offers real-time interaction for businesses with their online customers on their website, business app or social media channels, as the chat agent asks questions, which can be further analyzed to help the company improve its customer experience.
There are a couple of ways to run chat surveys depending upon the company’s approach. The most popular and widely used live chat survey is the post-chat survey. Live chat service providers design these surveys to appear at the end of each chat session, allowing the company to record the visitors’ overall customer experience with the brand, including their services and even the chat agent they interacted with. These are usually closed-ended questions. Thus, post-chat surveys are suitable for those companies that are working towards measuring their customer satisfaction.
Surveys embedded during the chat itself are another effective way of gathering valuable customer feedback. These surveys are usually constructed to gather detailed feedback about a specific service or feature, a new product launch or to gather information about a distinct company concern. They are more detailed than the post-chat surveys and have a combination of open and closed-ended questions, designed according to a proper response recording scale. The conversation between online customers and the chat agent carries valuable information that can be used to develop future strategies to enhance the customer service experience and develop new products and features. Live chat surveys are one of the most flexible and efficient feedback collection tools used in the current digital era.
Customer feedback is an essential component of the customer-centric business approach. Digital Surveys enable you to collect meaningful customer feedback by providing a precise mode of interaction between the company and the customer. With the above listed methods of collecting feedback from digital customers make sure that your business grows by valuing its customers and by building deeper connections with them based on the collected feedback.