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Some customers are determined enough to go out of their way to express pleasure or disdain after their experience with a company, but not all customers will. The more a customer has to do to share their thoughts and feelings with you, the less likely they will be to make the effort – unless your company has done something to really make them happy, or really make them mad.

As a company, customer feedback, both positive and negative, is important. Without knowing how your customers feel about something, you can’t make improvements to products, services, or policies and procedures to keep serving them well. At the same time, you can’t assume that if you don’t hear anything from your customer, they’re okay with the way things are going.

What can you do to make it easy for your customers to leave feedback?

Send Follow Up Emails

When a customer makes a purchase, send a quick email to thank them. In that message, you can ask them to leave a review. This type of feedback may not directly relate to your business, but user-generated content helps establish trust with future prospects and customers. People tend to trust peer recommendations more than advertising.

Send a Survey

Customer feedback surveys are valuable, but, there’s a fine line between getting valuable, actionable, feedback and bugging your customers with long surveys. People are busy, and even if they love your company, they’re not likely to spend a lot of time providing feedback in long or multiple surveys.

To increase the chances your customers will take the time to respond to your survey, it must be quick and convenient. Focus on a minimal number of questions. Leave room for an open-ended response, so that if a customer wants to go into more detail, they can, but they are not obligated to do so. Your survey should be optimized for mobile, since research shows more internet traffic comes from smartphones and tablets than a desktop device.

Less is more — a one question survey can do more to help you gauge customer loyalty than a longer one. Try using a Net Promoter ScoreⓇ survey.  With this simple and effective method, you ask your customers, “How likely are you to recommend our company to your friends and family?”  After this question, the customers have the opportunity to give additional feedback in an open-ended question.  You can use an NPS feedback tool like Delighted to send a survey and measure the responses based on the NPS scale of 0-10.

The customers who rate you anywhere from 0-6 are considered detractors, or people who are not loyal to your brand at all. They may even be working against you, encouraging their network to go to your competition. Those who rate you at a 7 or 8 are considered passives, or people who could go either way when it comes to brand loyalty. Those who rate you either a 9 or 10 are your promoters – they are your brand ambassadors, out there singing your praises and remaining loyal.

To calculate your NPS, use this formula:

% of Promoters – % of Detractors

Your NPS can range from -100 (all detractors) to 100 (all promoters).

Remember, the key to getting feedback from a survey is using it to improve.  So, use NPS as a baseline and see how you can improve your products over time.

Effortless Feedback – Users Don’t Know They’re Giving It

This kind of feedback is helpful for your business, but takes place passively. Users don’t have to do anything extra to provide it. However, all of it relies on the fact your customers are spending time on your website.

  • Website Analytics: Using a platform like Google Analytics, you can find out what types of content are resonating with your audience. You can see which pages they’re spending the most time on, which keywords are bringing them to your content, which social media platforms are bringing to them to your website, and some basic demographic information about them. You can also see how much of your traffic comes from desktop vs. mobile devices.
  • Heat Maps: Installing a heat map on your website – there are several out there to choose from – allows you to see where people are spending the most time on each page on your website. This helps you learn if they’re seeing or paying attention to the areas you want and need them to for conversion purposes.
  • Split Testing: Want to know how people are responding to certain elements, or test new copy, colors, layout, or other elements? Split test. This will deliver one variant to part of your audience, and another to the other part. So you don’t muck up your results, you should run one split test at a time. In theory, you could engineer the perfect website for your audience this way – split testing everything and taking the winner from each one to craft the ideal website.

Social Listening

Through social listening tools like Mention, Hootsuite, and Brandwatch, you can keep an eye what people are saying about your brand, and where they’re saying it. These are helpful in helping you maintain solid customer service, because the sooner you act, the better. Taking a few minutes to respond to negative comments, on social media and review sites, can help your future customers see that you’re responsive and willing to help your customers resolve issues.

Paying attention to customer feedback, and then making the effort to implement it whenever possible, improves your company and goes a long way in improving customer loyalty. Customers want to know they are heard and respected. If you make it easy for them to share their thoughts with you, they will. But, if you don’t do anything to show them you’re listening, you’re increasing the chance they’ll go to your competition. If you’re taking the time to gather feedback, have a plan in place for doing something with it.

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