Customers are the whole and soul of any company. Customer acquisition and retention is a tough job.
Customers play a major role in the growth of the organization. Many satisfied customers become your brand advocates, who voluntarily start talking positive things about your business. If unsatisfied customers start sharing their negative experiences on the internet, it can damage your image in the market and will impact your sales.
Customer feedback, whether positive or negative, acts as a guiding force for the company. It helps understand the problems faced by the customers, and their pain points, and also helps in improving the User/Customer Experience that results in an “Aha!” moment for future customers.
In the digital era, where information is available at your fingertips, consumer buying behaviour has changed significantly. Consumers search about the products/services, reviews, competitive prices, etc. before making a buying decision.
The key is to take the feedback of the customers in time i.e. before they start sharing their negative experiences on the internet.
The article covers various ways to collect the feedback of the customers while they are using your products/services.
Proactively take feedback from the customers
Proactively asking for feedback ensures that the product/service is delivered the way it was intended. It also indicates that we value the customer’s satisfaction.
Many brands do not take feedback from their customers. Just because the customer is not complaining, doesn’t mean that the customer is fully satisfied.
In a world full of competition, you should not miss a chance to find a way to serve your customers in the best way possible.
- Schedule after-sales calls with the customers to check:-
- If they are satisfied
- If they faced any difficulty
- If they have any concerns
- If after-sales calls are not possible, send feedback survey links via SMS or Email.
- In case of doubt, arrange a visit of your technical person in case of physical products.
Provide different ways for the customers for sharing their feedback
Most customers would contact your team before putting their feedback online. Providing very limited ways for sharing feedback can act as fuel to the fire of an unsatisfied customer.
Make sure you have provided all different means that will allow the customers to share their feedback with your team.
You can make use of the following -:
- Toll-free support number
- Support email address
- Support portal with ticketing system
- Live chat with the support team
Also, make sure that all the support requests are processed by the support team and that a reasonable resolution has been provided to the customers.
Create a trigger-based feedback system
This is easily possible in SaaS products where certain events happening in the system can alert the support team.
For example-: If the user added an item to the cart 3-4 times, but didn’t finish the process, there could be a problem during the checkout of that particular product.
A trigger can be used that will open the support window on the checkout page while that user is live on the page. If there is a bug in the checkout page, such triggers can help you save your dollars from getting wasted because of a minor bug.
Schedule interviews with the customers
Create a set of questionnaires and schedule interviews with the customers in exchange for some incentive. As a general rule of thumb, always keep open-ended questions. Never use the “Yes/No” type of questions. An open-ended question helps you collect more information about the doubts, anxieties, fears, and feelings of the customers after using your product.
This will help you understand why that particular customer is satisfied or dissatisfied with your products/services.
You also get to know positive stories that your sales team can use during their sales calls to close more deals. The negative feedback can be used by your product development or service team to improve it.
Develop a self-help customer education portal
We have covered this topic on the following link.: Customer Education: A way to earn customer loyalty
Customers, who like to explore on their own, can benefit from the content specifically developed for the purpose of customer education.
If you plan it properly, the customer-education strategies can reduce the burden on your support team as these self-help articles or videos will solve many of the common queries of your customers.
Usability test
With the help of recorded sessions, you can find out exactly what problems your customers are facing and accordingly, you can find ways to improve your products.
For websites and web applications, you can use ‘Hotjar’ which provides the recordings of user sessions. It also provides you with the heatmaps that help you understand the areas where users are taking the most and least actions.
Don’t forget to take the consent of users before recording such sessions. You can add cookie notice on your website. Especially in the regions where ‘Data Regulatory Laws’ are strict, you will be in deep trouble if you don’t take the consent of the users before recording their sessions.
Conclusion
Customers play a major role in the success and growth of any organization. The increased competition has also increased customer acquisition and retention costs. Ignoring and overseeing customer satisfaction is not affordable today, as this has a long-term impact on the future sales and revenue of the company. It will be much more difficult to recover from the damage caused by the negative reviews shared by your unsatisfied customers on the internet.
So, make sure that your customers are satisfied, their doubts are solved, their complaints are resolved or at least a reasonable solution has been provided while they are still using your products or services.