Your customers often have something to say, but not everyone goes out of their way to share ideas, complaints, compliments, and so forth. Often, it’s up to us as customer-focused companies to solicit feedback from our customers. The benefits are indisputable. Honest, thoughtful customer feedback provides an incredible outlet for improving our products and services, fine-tuning the customer experience, and making our customers feel like their opinions matter.
While we can all agree on the importance of gathering and actually hearing customer feedback, the methodology can quickly become a point of contention. How will we collect feedback? What are the channels? What questions should we ask? And the larger the organization, the more muddied the waters can become.
With this mind, here are a few tips on how to best gather good, actionable customer feedback.
Ask good questions, not gobs of them
While many of your customers may have helpful information to share, none of them have an unlimited amount of time to dedicate to helping you. Be respectful of this simple fact. Rather than asking customers to provide essays on their experience, or 25 multiple choice questions, get down to the nitty gritty. Ask three-to-five highly impactful questions that will elicit responses you can take action on.
Don’t waste your customers’ time and they’ll be far more likely to engage.
Get ‘em while they’re hot
Don’t wait to ask customers for their feedback. By asking for feedback at the point of customer interaction, you’re far more likely to get fresh, honest feedback. Naturally, a person’s memory of an event, and their overall impression will be most clear and meaningful soon after it happens.
Rather than asking vague and often infuriating questions such as, “did you have an exceptional experience today?â€, be direct with your questions. Be specific. If you ask your customers to list one or two things about their experience (positive or negative), they can quickly provide answers that might actually help you get a better idea of how customers perceive your company, its products, and its services.Beat NOT around the bush
Multiple channels call NOT for varied questions
Because your customers interact with you on multiple channels, be sure to ask for their feedback through these same channels. Also, be sure to ask the same questions across channels. You’re trying to gauge the overall customer experience, an experience that incorporates all of these channels. From a purely practical standpoint, this will also make it much easier to collate and analyze responses.
By employing these simple tips into your customer feedback processes, you’ll greatly improve your chances of getting great feedback from your customers without wasting their time.