The Simple Way To Collect Valuable Customer Feedback

You already know customer feedback is critical to improving your business, but how do you keep the process manageably simple?

It’s easy to get excited about all the valuable insights you gather from customer feedback surveys. After all, a 10% increase in customer retention levels result in a 30% increase in the value of the company.

It’s also easy to go overboard. When you start to collect feedback and you see how much information you can get from it – how much valuable intelligence – your hunger will grow for more.

Due to this it’s important to make sure you’re getting the most from the customer feedback you’re already collecting.

Here’s some simple tactics that you can follow to make sure your feedback process is not only working for you but working with maximum efficacy:

Listen at the right customer touch-points 

The easiest, most natural place to implement customer feedback surveys is where you meet the customers. That could be on social media, at a trade show or in a shopping cart check-out page online. Surveying customers at this touch-point is easy and convenient.

However, convenient doesn’t always mean effective. You also must take relevancy into consideration.

• What is the focus of your customer feedback survey?
• What information are you trying to gather?
• What purpose will it serve at your company?

If you want to understand the customer’s experience with your customer service department, surveying them on a check-out confirmation page won’t get you the well-rounded data you need. Instead, surveying them after they called your customer service department would probably be more effective.

If you want to understand the customer’s online buying experience, surveying them at a trade show doesn’t make sense. Instead, it would make sense to survey them for this information on the online shopping cart check-out confirmation page.

Consider your customer’s buying journey when you are picking the touch-points where you want to conduct surveys.

Send short, targeted surveys

Not every survey needs to be five pages long. Think carefully about the information you really need, and start simply. Ask a few, targeted questions.

From there, you will learn what information you need more of, and you can go more in-depth with future surveys. Develop your customer feedback solution sensibly over time, and adjust them as your data needs change.

Ask frequently, but not too frequently

We often encourage you to survey frequently, but there is such a thing as too frequently.

Think through the timing and pacing of your surveys. Before you start, ask yourself:

• When is it appropriate to ask?
• Is it feasible to ask again?
• Is the survey relevant to your business?
• How detailed was the last survey?
• How personalized was the last survey?

If you just sent your customer a detailed questionnaire via email, you probably don’t need to send them another one the next day. Instead, wait for a period of time. In a couple of weeks, they may have had to call your customer service department, and they will have more opinions to share with you in a survey.

Conclusion

There you have it! Insight from customer feedback can change the game for your business, but you have to be set up and prepared to collect your feedback in a manageable way.

Keeping the data collection process simple, means you can spend more time on understanding and implementing your valuable insights – rather than merely collecting and storing data.

Do you know of other ways of simplifying the customer feedback collection process?

Read more about Customer Satisfaction Surveys.