Our business is our baby, we want the best for it and want each customer experience to be the best it can be. We are constantly making tweaks to every area of our business to improve the customer experience, but how much so we really know? How can we really get to grips with what the customer is actually going through with each purchase or each order?
Gathering Feedback Data
With “Big Data” being the new buzzword for quite some time, managing huge amounts of data from customers is a breeze. With the use of databases, you can keep all of the customer feedback in one place, this also means you are able to make queries to the database and have it display the results you need to make those changes in areas where they are needed.
Let’s say for example, you send out a customer feedback form via email and you have option boxes of how the overall experience was from ordering on-line, you then wanted to find out how many scored you a 2, you can send a query to the database and have it spit out how many people overall scored you a 2. These are important statistics you need in the boardroom, if you wanted to go a step further you can add another option to the feedback forms and ask them why then scored you x amount.
Not only will the data help you make better decisions when it comes to making changes in the company, you can also change the feedback forms to gather laser targeted information which in turn will completely revolutionize your decision making.
Ways To Gather Feedback
New companies that have only been operating for a couple of years have knowledge of Internet feedback solutions such as via E-mail and offering customers to be entered into prize draws for filling out a customer feedback survey after an order completion. Many of the huge organizations that have been going for a long time incorporate older methods still, such as snail mail, SMS message, cold calls and more. As customers are used to all of the “junk mail” and “junk emails” they do tend to be ignored and fall upon deaf ears, nobody likes to fill out feedback forms these days about their experience, this is why businesses include some sort of incentive such as entering form fillers into a prize draw to win items or cash prizes.
Know What To Ask
Knowing what to ask can also be important, try incorporate some of the following questions into your feedback forms;
- Ask them if they would like anything changed-yes, actually asking them straight will achieve extremely good results, people will tell the truth, especially if it is anonymously over the Internet.
- Ask them if they would like to see anything new – Asking them if they would like to see something added in the future will also see great results, for example, you may get overwhelming results for the website to be simplified. With such a big response, you may want to get the wheels in motion to simplify things a little more.
- Ask how the staff were – if your business works mostly off-line, ask them how the staff were and how they dealt with the order or service. Knowing your staff is also very important because if cracks form there, your business could start to fail due to human incompetence rather than your actual product or service.
What Not To Do
Once thing your and your business should never do, is bombard the customers with e-mails or junk mail to their homes requesting feedback. We all hate having to sift through junk mail, some companies have become quite savvy at it, they come up with some very creative ways to force us to open the envelope, only to discover it is yet another letter begging for feedback. From my own personal experience, you should only make a feedback acquisition if the customer has made a purchase within the past 5-7 days, after this, I recommend you let them go as 99% of the time they will not even remember the experience anyway and could not care to comment.
Shared by http://www.360degreefeedback.co.uk/
