7 Most Effective Methods to Collect Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is invaluable to any business. It lets you know things that people like about your product or service and helps you determine the weak points you need to improve on. Moreover, feedback can guide you through creating or re-building a roadmap for your brand.

Nevertheless, before you start gathering feedback, you should be clear about your intentions for getting your customers’ insights. Make sure to design a process that will produce the kind of results you want to get. Furthermore, you need to define how you plan to use the data you’ll be collecting.

There are different methods of collecting feedback as well, and you should be able to determine which channel is best suited for your goal. Here are seven ways to gather feedback from your customers.

1. Surveys

It’s easy to set up and send out a survey. Analyzing the results won’t be a problem either. There are tools that you can use to create surveys such as SurveyMonkey and Typeform. When you’re done designing the questions, you can simply send your customers a link to your survey. Just make sure to keep it short. When surveys take too long to finish, you won’t be able to encourage your customers to participate.

You can also try putting up a quick survey on your website. This type of survey should only have one or two questions that are specific and relevant to the page where it appears.

2. Emails

Reach out to your customers through email or let your customers reach out to you through email. With the latter, you need to ensure that you are able to give a swift response. Keeping an organized feedback system will make the process more efficient. Don’t forget to send a follow-up email as well.

3. Contact forms

This is one way of enabling your customers to contact you when they want to comment about your product or service. Just like in the emails, make sure to reply to them quickly. This will surely make them feel that you are actually taking note of their comments or suggestions, and it will encourage them to send you more of their insights in the future.

4. Interviews

Conduct interviews with your customers. This will fill in the gaps that you may find in surveys or other feedback collection methods. However, it can be challenging to invite customers for an interview. Some of them may simply refuse to participate, while others may not have the time for it. When you do get an interview, though, make sure to focus on their user behavior. Find out which features on your website they are having trouble with as well as particular scenarios when a functionality worked well for them.

5. Social listening

Some of your customers may send their feedback through social media channels, so you need to monitor your social profiles as well. Make sure to respond to their posts, comments, or messages. When dealing with negative feedback, maintain a professional tone and show your concern for their issue. Always aim to resolve their problems so that you can earn their trust. You might want to get virtual assistant services so that you have a person who is solely dedicated to this responsibility.

6. Usability tests

Usability tests can give you an idea about how to make the experience on your website better for customers. Run tests on the processes and features so that you can align the design of your site with your customers’ needs and expectations.

7. User activity

Use a web analytics tool to see how users interact with your site. Analyze the reports and craft a data-driven response to the common issues that your customers encounter. Moreover, you can measure the results of the changes you have implemented on your website. This way, you’ll know if your response was effective or if it needs more work.

Gathering feedback from customers will surely take up a lot of your time, but it’s necessary. Consider outsourcing a virtual assistant to have a professional assist you with these efforts.