Finalising wedding spaces, vendors, boutiques, movie tickets, best service providers and much more, the “check the review first” bug has bitten us hard. History states 70% of customers rely on online reviews to make any product purchase in the modern age. Online reviews worked for Rohan, an upcoming event management specialist. For his first project: a big-fat-Indian wedding, Rohan, and his team were flooded with appreciation and their business cards were all sold out! The guests were so impressed by the decor and arrangements, that they went on social media, Google, and other online spaces to write testimonials about the wedding. Soon, Rohan’s calendar was full of events and less time to breathe! This is the power and importance of customer feedback, reviews, and appreciation.
Online customer feedback is the ultimate marketing tool, which can either make or break your business! In this blog, we will focus on the importance of customer feedback and how it helps shoot up your sales almost instantly.
Importance Of Customer Feedback
Best Ways To Collect Customer Feedback
A satisfied consumer is the best person to share your success stories!
Experts say that to be exclusive, be inclusive. So, when customers or buyers are asked to pour in their feedback or reviews for your service or products they feel highly valued and inclusive. This sense of inclusion engraves deep trust and loyalty in the customers in the long run. There are multiple ways to include customers in your business growth at several stages.
Pro-tip: The best mix is that of traditional and modern ways!
A) Traditional Ways
1. Phone calls
Remember the days when your landline would ring and a lady from a telecom service provider or leading brands like AquaGuard would ask a few questions about their services and products? It still happens and it still works! Making phone calls to customers is a good business practice as it brings you up and personal with them. Listening to your customers keenly makes you aware of their tone, gives a fair idea about their happiness or resentment with the product and also lets you build a rapport with them.
However, there are a few guidelines to keep in mind while making use of this tradition:
- Best timings: 08:00 am – 09:00 am and 04:00 pm – 05:00 pm
- Best days: Wednesdays and Thursdays
Image Source: CallHippo
- Best duration: 5 mins minimum and 12 mins maximum
It is absolutely alright that your customers do not answer your call, slam the phone down or show less interest in your call. You need to be persistent and patient with them. The latest research suggests that making 6 calls to your customers over a span of 90 days is healthy.
Image Source: CallHippo
2. Emailers
The most commonly used method of getting online customer feedbacks are “Detailed surveys”. 86% of professionals prefer emails for business communications and 89% marketers use emails as a primary channel for lead generation. A perfect emailer is the one which has:
- Best and catchy subject lines: Eg: Take our survey & win prizes, We want to hear your thoughts?, Have something to say? Say it here, etc.
- To-the-point body content: For surveys, avoid spending space on introducing your company or being too wordy about the topic. Get to the point swiftly.
- Highly interactive and engaging surveys: Ask a maximum of 10 best questions which are both open-ended (eg: rate on the scale of 1-5) and closed-ended (eg: what more do you expect from our service?).
3. Couriers/Post
You might wonder that in 2018 why anyone would use couriers or posts or mails for customer feedback leaving online surveys aside?! Prestigious and legacy brands make use of couriers to maintain their tradition, exclusivity, and personalization. Just like phone calls, sending survey couriers to customers make them feel more inclusive and highly valued. One drawback of this particular way is, it involves cost and time investment from both ends: your end and your customers end.
b) Modern Ways
1. Website Survey Form & Feedback Form
Typically a website survey form is a detailed and very detailed piece of design specially crafted to peep inside the minds of customers. In a website survey form, you can include the overall experience instead of just interrogating about a particular product feature before or after launching it. Usually, websites redirect customers to another landing page comprising of a survey form.
Image Source: SurveyLegend
Quick Takeaways:
- Ask 5-10 questions only in website survey form to avoid customers fleeing away or increase in bounce rates
- Optimize your website with less load time. Make sure it is mobile savvy as well
- Test your forms before you make them live
Customer feedback via feedback forms is well structured and precise than website survey forms. The questions are mainly close-ended, which makes it quick to answer. They could be in the form of pop-up, a static feedback form at the bottom of the website in the sidebar or in individual product or service pages. CleverTap, Survey Monkey, Mailchimp are useful tools to create and run web-survey forms.
Image Source: Surveys by Feedback Cat & Google Adwords
Quick Takeaways:
- Make it a point to respond to feedback as soon as possible. This helps to build business value & credibility
- Introduce a customer care agent or a chatbot to collect feedback to churn the feedback process faster
2. Social Media Reviews
With all said and done about social media’s reachability, accessibility, easy to use nature, we cannot leave it untouched when it comes to customer feedback! Getting customer feedback on social media is fairly simple as the users are pro-active and more welcoming than rest of the channels.
Image Source: Facebook
At first, you need to figure which social media channel works best for your product or service. You can use Google Analytics to retrieve such specific information. Learn how to use Google Analytics to find out the site that drives the most traffic. Here are some wise words from Doron Vermaat on the same:
[bctt tweet=”Consider asking your fans or followers on Facebook and Twitter to review your business once every while. You will have to open yourself up to criticism from people but it could be an effective way to build up a volume of reviews.” – Doron Vermaat username=””]
Quick Takeaways:
- Turn on your ‘review’ tab. Only then your customers will be able to give their feedback
- Respond quickly to customer feedback. This will keep you in their good list!
- Make use of Twitter and Facebook polls to engage your customers better and receive the best results
3. Suggestion Boards
If you have noticed, every established business has “Suggestion Board”. It is a community where customers come to share their grievances and give their feedback. a suggestion board is an open platform where anyone can address these feedbacks or grievances with their expertise.
Image Source: Atlassian
Quick Takeaways:
- Stick to keeping the board easy to navigate and use.
- Include features that make it easy to sort the most popular ideas
- Wait till you get a good number of customer feedback to analyze the result
5. Live Chat For Customer Feedback
Installing a live chat feature on your website helps your customers to reach out any time for issues or feedbacks.
44% of online shoppers felt that is the best feature in an e-commerce website.
Image Source: Olark
It is a convenient and affordable way to fix customer issues from providing refund status to product availability. Live Chat helps you understand the most asked questions or repeated issues. This gives you enough time clarity on what needs to be fixed or addressed on priority. Live chat provides instant gratification to your customers.
Quick Takeaways:
- Check whether the Live chat feature is evidently visible on your website or other pages
- Be quickly responsive
- you can use chatbots too instead of hiring a chatter!
Must-Have Customer Feedback Tools
The importance of customer feedback tool lies in the fact that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than those that are not. Here is a list of some of the free and paid customer feedback tools which can help you and your customer simplify the whole feedback process:
- Free Online Customer Feedback Tools: Typeform, SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, Surveys by Feedback Cat, UserReport(you can directly create survey forms using these tools)
- Paid Customer Feedback Tools: Clarabridge, TrustPilot, UserSnap, Olark, Atlassian, Sysomos (you need to integrate these tools with your website after purchase)
With markets getting highly competitive day-by-day and customers being spoilt with choices, it is advised to stay abreast of what they want, like and are looking forward to. This is where the importance of customer feedback lies. Customer feedback is no more a choice or luxury it is close to a mandate for any business(online or offline). By keeping all the above-mentioned factors in sync with your business, using the best tools for customer feedback and being interactive with your customers is a sure shot best recipe to increase your business growth and sales rapidly!
With all your marketing efforts for your business in place, it’s a good idea to have an all-in-one payment solution in place as well. Now to enjoy the best payment gateway experience and grow your business effortlessly! 
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