Find out how to collect and use customer feedback to boost performance
According to a study by Deloitte&Touche, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than non-customer-centric ones. There's no denying it: it's now essential to place customer experience and listening at the heart of your marketing strategy.
Today, more than ever, customer satisfaction is a priority for companies, especially in such an unpredictable and uncertain post-pandemic world. Keeping and retaining customers is just as important as customer acquisition and conversion.
And what could be better than analyzing your customers' feedback to constantly improve your offers and better meet their expectations? Whether positive or negative, customer feedback is a powerful growth and management tool for your company.
What are the different types of customer feedback? How do you collect and analyze it effectively? What are the different collection strategies and appropriate tools? Find out in this article.
What is customer feedback?
Customer feedback: definition
Customer feedback refers to all assessments, criticisms, opinions or observations made by a customer about a product, service or customer experience. It therefore refers to customer feedback that can be collected via several digital channels or even physically, at a point of sale for example.
There are, of course, positive and negative customer feedbacks.
It's undeniable that positive feedback is more pleasant and encouraging for your company, but you shouldn't neglect negative feedback either, which, when constructive, is an excellent way of proving your responsiveness and ability to listen!
💡 Remember to make small commercial gestures; often simple and much appreciated by customers, they considerably improve your brand image!
Why is customer feedback important for companies?
Identify areas for improvement in the customer journey
Who better than your customers to offer suggestions for improvement? From the color of a product to its quality, not forgetting the ancillary services on offer, it's essential to gather customer feedback. This will enable you to adapt your offer accordingly.
👉 Of course, a customer can be wrong, but the fact remains: never lose an opportunity to review your customer journey and improve!
Make sure you meet customer expectations correctly
Analyzing customer feedback also means taking pleasure in your customers' satisfaction (and happily so!). You're striving to provide a tailored offering, and it's only natural to want to make sure that these efforts pay off and that your customers are satisfied.
💡 It also helps motivate your teams and enhance your employer brand. Working for a company that satisfies its customers and is useful in their daily lives is an excellent motivator.
Value your customers and show them you care
Customers are the foundation of your business. As such, they need to feel listened to and considered. They may be paying for a product or service, but they also expect a minimum of consideration.
This will give them emotional reasons to be loyal to your brand and keep buying your products.
Anticipating market trends
Customer feedback is also an excellent way of discovering market trends.
By studying your customers' feedback, you can identify their expectations, which are often representative of current consumer behavior in the market in question. This will enable you to create and develop an innovative offering and stand out from the competition!
👉 F or example: you run an online medical appointment booking site. You notice that several of your customers are complaining about not having access to teleconsultation, a mode of medical consultation that has become popular with the pandemic and containment. Analyzing their feedback has enabled you to get "up to speed" and prevent your customers from going to the competition.
Which customer feedback strategy should you use?
The "Pull" strategy with spontaneous feedback
This strategy involves letting customers give their opinion spontaneously. This can involve :
- a customer review left on your website,
- a comment on your social networks
- a complaint or claim via your customer service department, etc.
👉 Despite the fact that this type of strategy concerns spontaneous customer feedback, you can push (subtly and without forcing) your customer to give their opinion. For example, you can :
- set up a tablet or touch-screen terminal at the point of sale where customers can rate their satisfaction,
- highlight a toll-free telephone number on your website where they can contact you if they have a complaint or query,
- inform them via your social networks or newsletter that a "Customer Satisfaction" page has been opened on your site, without asking them directly to add their opinion.
Push" strategy with solicited feedback
This strategy involves clearly and directly inviting customers to give their feedback. This can be done :
- by sending satisfaction questionnaires (annual or monthly) by email, SMS or via your social networks,
- a post-purchase rating system,
- customer satisfaction indicators (NPS, CSTA, CES).
How often should you collect customer feedback?
When it comes to solicited feedback, i.e. when you choose to collect customer feedback yourself, you have several options open to you:
Ad hoc customer feedback gathering
This type of customer feedback collection is carried out for a very specific purpose:
- to study customer satisfaction following a specific event,
- obtain feedback on a service modification,
- or to gain a better understanding of a one-off phenomenon such as a drop in the average shopping basket.
One-off customer feedback surveys
Monthly, quarterly or annual customer satisfaction surveys are very popular with managers, as a means of periodically monitoring changes in customer satisfaction.
Gathering customer feedback in real time and on an ongoing basis
This involves collecting feedback from all your customers, on the fly, after each interaction evaluated:
- a product order,
- a telephone call with an advisor
- an in-store experience, etc.
How to gather customer feedback?
Social networks
Social networks (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook...) are an excellent way to gather your customer feedbacks for 2 main reasons:
- Consumers are more active on social networks than on any other platform;
- The opinions collected are generally more authentic and meaningful, since they are spontaneous and, in the vast majority of cases, written immediately after the customer experience.
Quote: In 2020, 87% of French people said they looked at customer reviews before making a purchasing decision. (IFOP)
👉 Tip: on Facebook, for example, you can integrate a "Customer Reviews" tab on your page. This way, all reviews, whether positive or negative, from consumers who have purchased your product or service, will appear on your Facebook page.
Emailing and satisfaction surveys
As we saw earlier, emailing is also a very good way of collecting customer feedback, this time solicited. As we've seen, whether it's for feedback on a particular event, an annual survey or an ongoing survey, email is a highly effective channel for communicating with your customers.
Here are 4 tips for creating an effective customer feedback email:
- Personalize the subject line to make customers want to click;
- Write a personalized introduction with the customer's name, so that they feel that this is not just an automated message, but a targeted request;
- Contextualize your request to remind the customer of the context in which they should note their experience (following a purchase, a reservation, a call...);
- Include an action button (CTA) in your e-mail to encourage the customer to click on it.
Store or point of sale
It's also possible to collect customer feedback in-store or directly via your points of sale. This is probably the most relevant of all, since :
- you have live, face-to-face feedback from your customers:
- you can ask them any questions you like;
- for the more patient among you, you can open up a real dialogue and discuss your product/service in more detail, and even ask for potential points of improvement.
👉 Nevertheless, this type of collection also has a few drawbacks:
- it's difficult to write down all feedback, so there's no paper trail to keep over the long term,
- opinions are not quantifiable, so it's difficult to integrate them into your KPI analyses,
- not all customers are receptive to this kind of solicitation, and it's harder to be honest face-to-face!
Website comments
Last but not least, comments on your website! There's nothing more effective and practical for customers than scrolling through a product page or catalog and getting consumer feedback.
🚨 Unfortunately, a study carried out by the DGCCRF has shown that the rate of false online reviews is estimated at 35% across all sectors.
👉 Customers have become more wary of reviews left on an e commerce site, but this doesn't mean we should abandon this channel, which is still demonstrating its power and influence on the final act of purchase.
💡 Tip: you may receive negative reviews on your website or GMB (Google my business). Don't delete them! Show your responsiveness and professionalism by responding to them in a kind and skilful way.
3 effective customer feedback tools for your company
Avisplus
Avisplus is intelligent feedback management software that lets you simply and centrally solicit and analyze your customers' opinions, with intelligent redirections at your disposal.
Key features of Avisplus :
- an emailing system coupled with analytics technology that lets you edit and send emails directly from the platform, while analyzing open rates, conversion rates, etc,
- complete tracking and statistics of your notices , automatically recording all user actions and key indicators on sendings,
- a workflow system that defines rating links (Google, Facebook, Instagram...) with intelligent redirection.
Harvestr
Harvestr is a comprehensive, ultra-intuitive and easy-to-use product management software that helps you store, centralize, enrich and exploit your customer feedback to create quality digital products.
Harvestr's key features :
- centralization and categorization of your feedbacks via integration with many recognized customer service tools (Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk...) and CRM (Hubspot, Salesforce) ;
- automatic calculation of feedback occurrence and prioritization according to fully configurable criteria,
- centralization and categorization of feedbacks to facilitate their exploitation,
- creation of engaging and intuitive product roadmaps, connected to your feedbacks to facilitate prioritization;
- notifications sent to your teams and customers on the status of their feedback for improved product communication.
Harvestr
Wizville
Wizville is a comprehensive and efficient customer feedback management software package, designed to help companies collect, enrich and exploit their customer opinions, data and information for a better e-reputation.
Wizeville's key features include
- continuous collection of published reviews, measurement and analysis of satisfaction via key indicators and automatic suggestions for actions to be taken to improve them,
- verification of each customer review by Trustville, an AFNOR NF Z74-501-compliant trusted third party , and distribution via all your channels directly via the review platform,
- creation, distribution and analysis of your questionnaires or satisfaction surveys,
- aggregation of verified reviews published on Facebook and GMB (Google my Business).
In a nutshell
As you can see, feedback is an essential lever for companies that place the customer at the heart of their marketing strategy. Having feedback, whether positive or negative, considerably improves your offer and your customer service, by providing your customers with products/services that are increasingly adapted to their needs.
Article translated from French