According to a recent Microsoft study, “52% of people around the globe believe that companies need to take action on feedback provided by their customers”.
It’s evident that today, customer feedback is integral to enhancing the overall experience and improving satisfaction. This is especially true recently, where a desire for heightened health and safety precautions has become increasingly critical.
In this article, we take a look at the importance of gathering customer feedback, the questions you should be asking during this challenging time and lastly, how you can start surveying customers in a way that garners a greater response rate.
The Importance of Gathering Customer Feedback
Customers hold a considerable amount of information just waiting to be tapped into. As a business, it’s critical to look for ways you can enhance the customer experience while keeping costs at a minimum.
Firstly, gathering customer feedback benefits businesses by providing management with clarity on the experience and the quality of the product being offered. This insight is extremely useful for enhancing your current offerings and helping you pinpoint any issues with your product or service that may have been overlooked. Think of it as a fresh pair of eyes on a product or service to help you continuously improve.
Secondly, obtaining customer feedback also showcases that you value your customers’ opinion, are willing to listen to their comments and make changes to better the overall experience. Further, if you’re able to make real-time changes or address comments with the customer, it will show greater commitment to improved satisfaction. This not only builds loyal customers who feel more a part of your brand but also creates brand advocates who will share their positive experience with others.
Thirdly, customer feedback can expand your COVID-19 efforts. Today there are a number of precautions to take, and opinions on service that should be considered. With customer feedback you can see what customers have to say about your safety practices and you can obtain new ways to improve preventative measures. Safety and prevention is key today, and will continue to be over the coming years.
Lastly, customer feedback is critical for business decision making. Reliable and straight from your market, customer feedback gives you insight on how your customer perceives your product or service, and the trends they demand. This provides management with a better idea on where to allocate money, time and resources, for better results. If your customers love the product but aren’t too happy about service, time and resources can be spent on better team training and community building, rather than product enhancements.
Customer Feedback Questions To Elicit Relevant Feedback
Customer feedback clearly comes with its set of benefits, however, there’s a lot to consider when designing your feedback program. This is especially true when it comes to deciding on what questions your business will ask customers, because there are a myriad of customer feedback questions to consider. From service experience to safety protocols, in this section, we break down the customer feedback questions you should consider.
On a scale of 1-10 how likely are you to refer our service/product to a friend or family member?
A universal metric utilized by a multitude of businesses, NPS is a great question to help you understand customer sentiment in relation to your service/product. This metric shares, in a general sense, if you are building brand advocates through your product or service, and can be followed with more detailed questions for further insight. For brands looking for an overarching metric, NPS is an integral addition to your customer feedback questions.
How satisfied are you with the procedures taken to ensure cleanliness?
Health and safety are paramount today. In fact, according to Statistics Canada, 31% of youth aged 15 to 34 reported that they were very concerned about the health risks of going to restaurants and bars, 82% Canadians consider health and safety measures to be the most important factor when considering returning to a retailer and 58% of hotels guests want to know what the property is doing to protect guests.
It’s evident cleanliness is an important factor for customers, so why not measure your current cleanliness efforts through a feedback survey to see if you’re meeting the customers demand? If you’re not meeting expectations, it may be time to look at what more you can do and how to invest in greater cleaning measures.
How satisfied are you with the level of service you received today?
Are your employees providing world-class service? With this customer feedback question you can get a better understanding of employee performance including which employees are over and underperforming. In addition, having this data over a given time can help you understand peak periods of your business, which employees consistently excel and how service is performed throughout the day so you can schedule employees for maximum results.
During this challenging time, we’re trying our best to meet your needs. In what ways could we improve our COVID-19 response efforts?
During this uncertain and complicated time it can be confusing on what is best practice for your specific business. Aside from the obvious increased sanitization, mask wearing, maximum occupancy and social distancing rules, it’s important to ask customers what they prefer and what would make them feel more comfortable. In addition to altering practices in real-time, responses from this question can help you navigate changes to your business for long-term results.
Are the channels we provide meeting your expectations?
In order to build a thriving contactless communication plan that aligns with customer preferences, it’s important to ask customers if the channels you’re providing are sufficient. Today customers communicate on a plethora of channels, from Facebook Messenger to WhatsApp and Text, and if you’re not leveraging their channel of choice, you could be missing an important opportunity.
What channels would you like us to continue evolving as time goes on?
Posing an open dialogue between customer and business, this question pinpoints the exact channels to invest in moving forward. If 80% of customers are saying they want Facebook Messenger, yet none have mentioned email, it may be time to consider a channel strategy that focuses on Facebook Messenger. With customer feedback you can ensure you’re leveraging the right contactless channels to effectively connect with them.
Please leave us any final comments you may have!
An option that allows customers to express themselves freely, this statement is great for businesses to uncover specific issues at hand, while getting to know your customers on a more personal level. Providing open dialogue from customer to business, it can provide greater detail on their experience. For instance, if a customer has a great experience with an employee, a comment box allows them to be vocal and share details of the employee, what happened, and how they felt.
What’s more, giving the customer the opportunity to air out their grievances on your terms can deter them from navigating to social and expressing their negative sentiment online. Further if you have a customer experience management solution that lets you see responses in real-time, you can respond to the comment immediately and reduce the risk of losing valuable customers.
Streamlining Customer Feedback With Feedback Technology
When it comes to collecting feedback there are a plethora of ways you can reach out to customers. With increasing health and safety measures, contactless communication has become the tried and true way of connecting. Whether you utilize Facebook Messenger, Email, or WhatsApp, leveraging a customer experience management platform can help streamline the customer feedback process.
With Benbria Loop you have a flexible solution at your fingertips to not only Collect feedback from your customers, but directly Engage with them in real time with the Loop Inbox. This will allow for a faster resolution time of issues and an enhanced customer experience. With 10 channels of engagement, you can connect with the customer at several touch points throughout their customer experience collected feedback and engaging them, in a contactless way.
With a modern CEM, you can gather information from customers on a variety of channels while also providing insight on customer sentiment and trending topics. Accessible from a single inbox, you can read and respond to customer inquiries without toggling through different applications. In addition, employees can easily search through inbox conversations and auto-route specific inquiries to the appropriate department. This further encourages employee collaboration.
Lastly, with a modern CEM you can respond to customers in a more informed manner. Using sentiment analysis, trending topics and information pulled from social profiles, you can become better equipped to respond and engage.
As the businesses landscape continues to shift and customer the journey evolves, obtaining customer feedback becomes more critical than ever. Whether it becomes a conversation had 1:1 in-person or through a contactless channel, knowing how the customer feels and what they want has become vital for long-term business success.
