What’s the best way to learn about the customer experience? Ask your customers.
A strategic approach to soliciting and using customer feedback supplies you with valuable insights into how your marketing is working to improve the customer experience. However, a haphazard approach can reflect badly on your brand. Try these tips to give your organization the edge it needs to solicit better customer feedback.
Do you expect customers and prospects to intuit what you need from them, or do you give them strong calls-to-action that encourage them to share feedback? Feedback won’t lead directly to a sale, but you need to apply the same principles to engage customers in sharing feedback as you would at any stage of the buying cycle.
Don’t hide requests for customer feedback or assume that your customers will volunteer their opinions. Ask clearly and directly.
Center your quest for feedback on one or two questions at any given time. Just as prospects will be reluctant to fill out an overlong request for personal information, customers will be less likely to complete a lengthy survey. Make it a quick and easy process for your customers to share their opinions. Similarly, don’t present your customer with vague questions such as “How are we doing?” Get specific. You might ask “Is there anything you want to find on our website but don’t see?”
Limiting the questions you ask at any given time need not mean limiting the information you gather. Monthly, sit down with the marketing team and discuss the burning questions that have come up over the past few weeks. Whittle it down to one or two to ask customers about this month, and pick new questions the following month.
Customer feedback provides actionable, valuable insights to your organization, so offer your customers something they want in return. Consider offering customers a discount on their next month of your service in exchange for feedback, or provide them the chance to try out a new, highly-demanded feature for a limited time if they fill out a survey.
Your customers have their most valuable insights for you when they’re on your site, reading your marketing material or talking with your sales team, so take the opportunity to ask them for their feedback in real time. If you wait weeks or months to ask them about their experiences, you may have missed your chance to learn the things you need to know most. Add a feedback plugin to your site that is triggered when a user takes a specific action, like scrolling to a particular place on your pricing page or spending more than five minutes on your site. These can be great opportunities to ask specific, targeted questions that pertain to what the customer is currently doing.
Once you’ve gathered all this information, use it to assess and improve your marketing tactics. Especially in remarketing to existing customers, feedback is invaluable insight into how your audience responds to your strategy. By refining your tactics in response to customer feedback, you can continually improve and delight customers.
If customers feel that their feedback is taken seriously and see your brand responding to their needs, they’re more likely to stay loyal. Did you know that research from the Harvard Business Review found a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits from 25 to 100%? Learn more:
Photo by ITU Roundtable via Flickr Creative Commons
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