Data and analytics allow businesses to get many actionable insights into their customers’ needs and preferences. However, sometimes, you might want to get some answers directly from your customers. That’s why customer feedback is useful.
Thanks to customer feedback, you can not only understand what people are doing but also why they’re doing it. Why do they prefer one feature and ignore another? What makes your customers stop creating an account at some point? Why do they use your products less frequently and eventually stop using them?
You can clearly understand what’s going on if you match your analytics data with customer feedback. This way, you’ll be able to determine the main problems and to fix them. However, you should be able to collect feedback effectively, which can be a challenge.
One of the best ways to collect feedback is to use customer surveys. Surveys are easy to set up and easy to analyze. The main thing is to design your survey in the right way. In this article, we will consider the most effective ways to get high-quality feedback from your customers. But first, let’s consider the benefits of customer feedback for your business.
Why Customer Feedback Is Important
Customer feedback is important for any business, and the main reason is that if you see negative feedback from one customer, the chances are that there are dozens of other dissatisfied customers who simply don’t complain.
Collecting high-quality feedback is difficult, and the main reason is that most customers are unlikely to share their feedback unless their customer experience is absolutely terrible. They just decide not to use your products or services again.
Lost customers are not the only problem. Unfortunately, when people are dissatisfied with products or services, they share their opinion with others. You don’t know how many people will learn about one customer’s negative experience.
Given the popularity of social media, negative feedback can quickly go viral, damaging the reputation of your brand. Besides, quality feedback is necessary if you want to boost customer loyalty.
Customers want to know that you care about them, and when you ask for feedback, you can demonstrate that their opinion is important to you.
How to Get Feedback from Your Surveys
1. Your Branding Is Important
Strong branding is always important because if you have a recognizable brand and a good reputation, you can use it to improve your credibility. For instance, your brand can help you increase the credibility of your survey.
According to research, the credibility of a website is one of the most important factors that determine the way users interact with it, especially given the fact that there are many websites that cannot be trusted.
Your users should know who created the survey and they should keep your brand in mind while completing it. Therefore, make sure to use your brand’s logo, fonts, and colors.
The emotional connection with your brand will also make your customer’s answers more meaningful. Your responders will take the time to provide the most detailed and accurate answers.
2. Your Survey Must Be Accessible
Modern users don’t want to waste their time searching for something online. They are used to getting any information immediately. Given that most customers are not really motivated to provide their feedback, making your survey accessible is extremely important because you need as many respondents as possible.
The more responses you get, the more accurate your data. You should make your survey easy to find so that the participants can feel relaxed. In this case, they will be more likely to put extra effort into writing their responses.
In addition, according to research, about 53% of people who visit your website are using mobile devices. Therefore, we recommend that you always optimize your surveys for mobile.
3. Keep It Simple
If your survey takes an hour to complete, nobody will respond. A high-quality survey should be short so that your respondents can stay focused. According to statistics, only 16% of users comprehend more information than individual keywords and short sentences. Therefore, all the questions in your survey should be clear and straight to the point.
A good approach is to include up to 10 questions and to limit the text areas for the users’ responses. On the one hand, open-ended questions are very useful if you want to figure out what the issue is. On the other hand, such responses are difficult to interpret and compare.
4. Personalize Your Surveys
If you’re looking for high-quality actionable data, you’ll unlikely get it from anonymity. You may have seen many sources that claim that anonym surveys have higher response rates but this point is arguable. According to research, anonymity has a negative impact on the accuracy of measurements.
The main reason is that anonymity decreases accountability and doesn’t motivate respondents to provide thoughtful answers. Besides, personalized surveys allow you to evaluate the relevance of each particular participant’s responses in the context of a certain issue.
5. Measure and Track the Feedback
Any kind of data is only useful for a certain period of time. Having knowledge is good, but what you actually need is to be able to use this knowledge in practice. The point is that your customers’ opinion towards your business constantly changes. You should track these changes over time because, otherwise, the data from your surveys won’t be actionable anymore.
Tracking the changes in your customers’ sentiment towards your brand allows you to properly evaluate your improvements. We recommend that you create monthly or quarterly surveys. This way, you’ll be able to see a historical context, monitoring trends in your data and being able to understand how you can improve your services.
Wrapping Up
The importance of customer feedback is hard to overestimate. Feedback surveys allow you to determine which areas of your business need improvement and whether or not your business is going in the right direction. Follow our simple tips and you’ll be able to create effective surveys that will provide you with actionable insights into your customers’ needs and preferences.
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Author
Rhonda Martinez is a digital marketer with a strong passion for social media. She spends a lot of time on Reddit, enjoys writing analytical essays and manages LegitWritingServices. As a moderator of a popular subreddit, Rhonda likes to have interesting conversations with fellow redditors and share her knowledge.
