Your businesses’ livelihood depends on customer feedback. As it turns out, a customer that’s unhappy with a product or service will usually tell up to 15 other people about their experiences, according to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs.
Asking for customer feedback is great for pinpointing weak areas in your business, but what’s more important in this context is that you show your effort in understanding what went wrong and fixing it to mitigate effects of a bad review.
In this article, we’ll cover 4 ways you can persuade your customers into giving invaluable feedback (because most don’t!).
Using software to do it for you
Managing customer feedback can be a tedious and time-eating process. If you don’t have enough hands already, you can sign up for client feedback software such as Broadly that will handle the after-sales services for you. Software like this not only creates thank you campaigns for customers but invites them to write reviews of their experience. They’ll also notify you of bad reviews so you can quickly address them.
Simply put, you won’t have to worry about bad customer feedback until you get notified of one. Of course, this is not only about spotting and managing negative feedback, but also about improving your conversions and sales.
Giving your customers a call
As a customer, there’s no better feeling than to feel that they’re being heard. Calling your customers is effort-intensive, but you’re able to get firsthand feedback about your business. If a customer had a bad experience, they’ll be more open to speaking out rather than filling out survey forms and e-mailing your business without knowing it will mean anything.
It’s a personal way to establish a good relationship with your customers and encourages customers to give you a second chance if things didn’t go so well the first time. It is important that the person making the call has a great personality and is genuine about helping the customer, rather than another scripted phone call that anyone could do.
Offer incentives for giving feedback
Offering a reward such as gift codes and vouchers are a great way to get feedback from customers. Customers feel like they are getting something in return for their time. According to peoplepulse, you can increase your feedback response by up to 15% if customers are given some sort of incentive.
A study done by Maastricht University found that in long questionnaires, vouchers are the best incentives while prize draws are better for short surveys.
Establishing an online community
This one will require some effort, perhaps may require full-time moderator depending on the size of your community. But establishing a community platform or forum allows your customers and fans to start new discussions, voice out their opinion on their experiences with your business, and serves as a one-stop center for most of their questions and answers.
To keep things fun and your customers sticking around, you should encourage customers to share pictures and videos of them using your product. This too is a subtle way in identifying trends to how your customers use your products!