Your customer feedback is extremely valuable. According to statistics, for every 1 customer that complains, 20 or more remain silent when things go wrong. Yet, many business remain distant from the direct experience and input of these few customers that bother to blew the whistle.
Fortunately, there are several methods to collects decent amount of useful feedback that can give better insight to your business performance.
1. Request a feedback when customer abandon a conversion
Over 68 percent of customers browsing e-commerce sites abandon their shopping cart after spending some time on the site. Customer feedback at this stage plays a critical role in understanding what went wrong and in improving conversions.
A non-intrusive popup with a small text box would suffice to lets customers explain why they did not proceed to the checkout. Alternatively, you can provide the customers with a multiple-choice options to share the reasons of why they changed their minds. For example, Amazon often uses options such as (a) unexpected costs at checkout , (b) spotted a better deal at another site, (c) few shipping options, etc.
2. Provide Proactive Live Chat Support
Live chat is one of best ways get closer to your customers by better understanding their needs and challenges. It also helps identify patterns if there are any recurring issues and helps find long-term solutions for those issues.
Online services such as Zopim let you introduce live chats on your website. As with other types of feedback. However, the quality of your response plays an important role in achieving optimum results. You should do your best to make sure all customer questions are addressed promptly and with helpful information for your customer.
You can increase the efficiency of your online chat by making it proactive: set the live chat window to appear whenever a customer has been reading a particular page for a period time, e.g. 1 minute. According to statistics, proactively displaying the chat window can increase the number of chats by 300%.
3. Create online community
Online community groups such as forums, discussion boards and chat groups provide a great platform to engage customers for feedback, because many customers love being a part of a community where discussions of their favorite products take place.
A great advantage of having a community is that it provides customers with information relevant to them. It also empower your support team to proactively listen and address customer suggestions, issues, and concerns, in a timely and cost effective manner.
4. Reach out to customers in social media
Social media is a great medium to listen to your customers. Customer feedback is plentify when it comes to sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. The challenge is how to monitor it effectively and use it meaningfully.
Tools like Sprout Social and audiense can help you keep a finger on the pulse of social media mentions. You can setup mentions that you want to track, for example at Client Heartbeat, we would want to track mentions of “Client Heartbeat” or “Clientheartbeat”.
What Sprout Social does then is notify you whenever your keywords are mentioned on social media sites. I can then pro-actively engage customers that are talking about you, and either solve their problems or provide answers to their questions. While doing this, you are gathering customer feedback, indirectly.
5. Offer incentives for feedback
As mentioned earlier, most customers don’t voice out their concerns and frustrations, they simply pursuit their needs somewhere else, and never come back. This happens as many of them think that their complaints and request will either be ignored or not responded on time.
Nonetheless, when incentives such as discount or refund are provided beforehand, customers are likely to ask for help or even give an honest feedback.
Incentives works best when they are displayed before or after conversions such as product checkout, order confirmation or even after submitting an enquiry form. This way, customers will be assured that they will not be left in the dark when problems rises or when their expectation weren’t met.
