For a successful business, it is imperative to gather all sorts of insights into what your customers want from your business.
Most of the time, analytics are considered the best way to gather insight. But, it’s not the only way. You can gather insight directly from your customers. Customer feedback helps you understand what people think about your brand. Custom surveys, feedback boxes, direct access, user activity, and usability tests are some of the effective ways to gather customer feedback.
It’s been proven that customer feedback really helps you get a clearer picture of what your customers demand and their changing needs.
Below are some of the effective ways to gather high quality and consistent customer feedback:
- Surveys
Conducting a survey is one of the most effective ways of getting feedback. Customer feedback surveys are easy to build, easy to distribute, and easy to analyze. Here are two ways to conduct surveys: Long surveys and short surveys.
Most people are familiar with the survey process, although they may have never started a survey. They are created using online survey tools and then by sending the link to a customer list through email or social media platforms. After this, you will can gather feedback in days or even hours in some cases.
Many times, these types of long surveys lead to poor results due to incomplete responses from bored participants. It may seem easy but filling out a survey that takes over 20 minutes is tedious work. Therefore, try to keep the survey short and precise. If at all possible, include about 5 questions in the survey but try not to exceed 10 questions.
- Feedback Form
Customers don’t always reach out to the support team for issues, and a feedback form allows them to tell you when something isn’t working quite right.
Once feedback starts coming in, make sure you respond to it. Give that responsibility to someone on the team so that someone is always replying to each piece of feedback within a few days, ideally within 24 hours.
- Direct Access
While customer surveys are great, reach out customers directly if you want to truly understand them. You really need to talk to them to prevent from missing out on important contextual information.
If you can directly converse with your customers, such as through interviews or focus groups, they can provide important insights to help you improve or solve any problem you may have.
Conclusion
Collecting feedback from your customers consistently will help to build your business in the right direction. Other than feedback emails and surveys, you’ll have far more ideas than you could ever act on. So, consider the above-mentioned effective methods to gather feedback. You can experiment with the methods to find the right combination for your business.