Customer feedback is no less than gold. It tells you what customers think about your products and services. It is the best way to know about their likes, dislikes, improvement ideas, ongoing issues, and mistakes. In short, customer feedbacks help you to evolve your business and takes it to one step further.
The other important reason to collect customer feedback is they help you to avoid Google negative reviews. But how? When you take feedbacks, you will come to know all the existing problems. And when you solve them, customers will stop pointing at them, and obviously, your negative review count will go down. As a result, you will not have to think about how to remove Google negative reviews.
Collecting customer feedback is not that easy. Most of the time the customers are too lazy to give feedbacks. Walking to the customer and directly asking for feedback may not always work. You need to be innovative when you are in digital marketing or online reputation management world. Here are the 9 best ways to collect customer feedback.
1. Send a follow-up email
Sending follow email solely to get feedback is not a good thing to do. A follow-up email has a high potential to improve customer relationship. Consider you were admitted to a hospital. And two days after discharge, the hospital sends you a follow-up email enquiring how you are doing. How will you feel? You will feel cared, right? All you need to do is write a personalised email and add a link to the feedback page. Keep it simple. There should not be any sort of obstacles.
2. Read online reviews
Make a list of various review sites, where your business has an online presence and develop a habit to read your reviews regularly. Reviews are that feedbacks that are publicly visible. As online reputation management experts, we suggest you take online reviews seriously. Potential customers are more interested in reviews and find them trustworthy.
These reviews can significantly change their buying decision. Here are some of the best practices you need to follow.
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Make the list of all the improvements required.
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Reply to both positive and negative reviews.
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Promote positive online reviews.
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Try to take the issue offline.
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Try to delete negative Google reviews.
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Detect fake reviews and flag them.
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Encourage your satisfied customers to leave a review.
3. Talk to your employees
This is something which most of the business owners are unaware or tend to overlook. Your employees are the ones who interact with the customers more than you do. They have a better understanding of what exactly is happening on the ground level. They can help to answer some of the very important question, such as:
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Where the customers are confused?
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What frustrates them?
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What they value more?
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How to make them happy?
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How to convert an unsatisfied customer into a happy customer?
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What are the areas of improvement?
4. Sentiment analysis
After a certain period of time, read emails and listen to recorded business calls. All your business conversation is nothing more than a feedback data. All you need to do is analyze it to understand the sentiment of the customers. This data is more credible compared to others. That is because this data is generated from day to day interactions. There is less scope of extreme positive or negative feedback. Further, sentiment analysis helps you in discovering employee training opportunities, product or service deficiencies, and customers who are on the verge of opting the competitors.
5. Conduct customer interviews
Conducting customer interviews should not be limited to big businesses. Irrespective of what size your business has, you should not hesitate to conduct customer interviews. Regular and loyal customers tend to attend interviews and give valuable feedbacks.
Do not forget to provide incentives to the customers who attend interviews. This will encourage not only them but also others to attend future interviews. In the long run, it will help you to build a loyal customer base. After all, by building a loyal customer base you are securing your business’ future.
6. Social media listening
Customers these days have developed a habit of expressing their views on social media. Whether it is a movie review, football, mobile, bike, car, political party, or any other thing, people are most likely to write down what they feel on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Quora, etc.
Since the feedback is not directly expressed to the brand, most of the time they are genuine. People on social media do not shy to praise you and also do not hesitate to criticize you. How you can know what they are saying about you? There are many tools available on the internet to track your brand mentions. These tools are usually used by social media marketing experts or digital marketers. You can use the same to gather feedback on social media. Mention, BuzzSummon, Social Mention, Hootsuite, Google Alerts, etc. are some examples.
Other than this, you can conduct interesting online polls. Major social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. allow you to conduct online polls.
7. Analyze session replay
What is session replay? It is the ability to replay the online visitor’s journey on your website within a web application. It usually includes users view, keyword input, mouse points, console points, etc. This information is usually tracked to improve the user experience of a website.
However, if you analyze this information keeping feedback in mind, you can obtain valuable feedbacks. Hotjar and Yandex are two amazing tools that help you to record user interaction. Although it sounds creepy, it is not. It helps you find out what on your website is interesting for your visitors and what’s not. Further, it also finds all the probable obstacles faced by visitors.
8. Make use of paper feedback cards
Few things never go old. Believe it or not, customers find giving feedback over paper feedback cards more convenient. However, it is your duty to make the content easy to scan and understand. Here are some of the best practices to follow:
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Make the card professional. That is, add your business logo and other elements that help the customers to relate to your business.
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Use simple and customer friendly language.
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Make use the pictures and graphics.
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Don’t increase the burden by asking complicated questions.
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Make sure filling the entire feedback form takes less than 5 mins.
9. Take the help of SMS surveys
Most of the business owners underestimate SMS surveys. However, it is one of the most efficient methods to gather feedback. We are living in a digital word, customers are just a few feet away from the phone at any given time. With a higher open rate than email, SMS survey is your ideal way to obtain feedback. Here are some tips to improve the chances of getting feedback.
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Send the SMS at an appropriate time.
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Keep the words count to a minimum.
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Do not spam.
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Note down the response time and response day.
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Provide incentives.
