Asking For Customer Feedback: 5 Ways To Listen Better!

Is your business in the habit of listening to both unhappy and happy customers? Asking for customer feedback provides one of the best ways to learn, make better decisions, and build customer loyalty. After all, retaining loyal customers is much easier than attracting new ones! By collecting feedback from customers — both positive and negative — you can better understand where your business needs improvement. This article covers five key tips to help you get better at asking for customer feedback.

Use Surveys To Gauge Customer Experience

While there are many ways to gauge customer satisfaction and loyalty, one of the most useful ways is through a customer survey. A survey is a questionnaire that helps you gather data from your shoppers, clients, business partners, website users, or potential customers. If you want to learn how to use surveys effectively, it is important to understand what information they can provide. And, it is important that you work with someone who understands how to ask unbiased or leading questions. While there are many “DIY” survey tools on the market that anyone can use, valuable feedback and meaningful insights, leading to informed decisions, come from asking the right questions, the right way!

Ask Open-Ended Questions

When you have specific items you want to rate or measure, a set of pre-defined survey items makes the most sense. But, when you want to know more, like the “why” behind a rating, open-ended survey questions are a great way to get some additional qualitative feedback. These type of questions allow the respondent to provide responses by writing out their answers, providing details and valuable insight that you won’t get from simple star ratings.While this type of feedback isn’t as easy to tabulate, it often provides additional details and candid feedback that might be otherwise missed.

Welcome Negative Feedback

It’s easy to accept when people say nice things about your organization or give a positive review or rating. But oftentimes, the biggest opportunity comes from critical feedback, so it is important to welcome these responses and realize that this provides not only meaningful and actionable feedback, but truly is a gift from unhappy customers that will help you improve your products or services. So welcome negative feedback from unhappy customers right alongside the positive feedback!

Listen Using the Right Customer Feedback Methods

An important aspect to consider is using the right channel to collect meaningful customer feedback. In some cases, it might be a singular process through a quick survey, and your request for feedback might take place by doing an email survey. In other cases, email feedback may be one channel, used in conjunction with a survey post on your social media channels, app feedback, promotion of the survey in advertising, and so on. What’s really important is to find the times and places to get the best response rate from the busy people from whom you are looking to collect beneficial feedback.

Communicate and Act On Key Takeaways

After you have asked the relevant customer feedback questions, as well as collected and analyzed the  meaningful feedback you have collected, a vital part of your customer feedback strategy is then to  communicate the findings to internal stakeholders so that action plans can be developed. Since your customers took the time to provide genuine feedback, you owe it to them to make sure that you thank your customers for feedback by working to improve!

Customer feedback provides a wealth of valuable information from actionable product insights to ways to improve the checkout experience, and everything in between. Keeping these tips in mind as you run customer satisfaction surveys, evaluate product ideas, ask for input from users of your products or services, or undertake online experience surveys will help you and your team get the most out of asking for customer feedback to improve your business!