How to Make Customer Feedback Work for Your Business

Real-time customer feedback programs are the key to improving CX, unlocking loyalty, delivering stronger results and beating competitors.

You’ve been there. You’re making a purchase and things don’t go quite right. You are frustrated and want to give feedback, but you don’t have a clear idea of how to do that. So you tell a few friends, you post it on Facebook and you may visit the company’s website to try to fill in a form.

In that moment, you simply aren’t feeling the love. So much so that you may never purchase from that retailer again. Next time you’ll be on the lookout for an alternative, even if it is more expensive because you didn’t feel valued at all.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As an organization, how many of your customers are going away feeling like they aren’t heard? Or like you don’t value their purchase?

If you don’t know the answer to this question, you cannot afford to guess. The answer is probably too many. In a global, hyper-competitive economy, you cannot leave your customer love and loyalty to guesswork.

Across all industries, customers are speaking louder and clearer and through more mediums than ever before. Data shows that poor service or undifferentiated experience are no longer satisfying, no longer acceptable. Customers want meaningful and memorable brand experience. Businesses that deliver that experience will win their loyalty.

Ask systematically

So, back to our scenario: what would have happened if the customer was able to provide feedback about their experience in real-time? With that feedback, your team would then be able to identify the problem and follow-up with them within a matter of hours.

Suddenly, that dissatisfied customer would feel like a total rock star because she was heard and you told her she matters. She wouldn’t be able to help but tell her friends because unlike all the other retailers out there, you went out of your way to make it right. Her friends would buy from you next time because they remember how responsive your customer service is.

That is the power of real-time feedback. Your company’s customer satisfaction, repeat customers and brand loyalty hang in the balance. And if you are a large company, getting it right means 100s of millions of dollars, which is why you can’t leave customer feedback to outdated methods where you rely on customers to tell you what’s wrong, possibly months after the fact. You need a systematic approach to collecting insight when customers are engaged with your brand and method for reporting on it effectively to drive decisions and improvements.

Real-time feedback = real results

To better understand customer attitudes and behaviors, feedback is best collected in real-time – at the moment of experience or not long after. As humans, our memories are imperfect and open to influence from outside factors, which means if there’s a lag between when we experience something and when we are asked about it, the results may not be entirely accurate.

Which is where solutions and apps like Questback “mobile first” surveys and feedback tools come in. They operate at every significant touchpoint, on any device, on any channel. In real-time you get customer event-driven data so that things can be addressed as they are happening, and you have analytic software to influence and inform business decision-making.

A great example of real-time feedback in action is SWISS. The airline implemented real-time feedback using QuestBack and created a continuous real-time survey to capture more relevant customer and flight details. This enabled them to respond instantly to customer issues. Now they can actively address issues before they escalate.

Conclusion

Real-time feedback offers a powerful way to win your customer’s love and loyalty. To make sure your company is getting ahead set up the proper processes to collect and report on customer feedback systematically and continually. Your customer loyalty increasingly depends on it.