Methods of Gathering Customer Feedback

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Customers are the core focus of the business. They are the reason companies spend a substantial amount of time trying to understand their needs and how to fulfill them.

Customer feedback tools play a significant role in identifying customer needs. They are the insights that indicate how a customer feels about your brand. Customer feedback tools and data analytics give a clear picture of what’s happening in your business.

But customer feedback is not always easy to collect. So much goes into planning and convincing customers to give the positives and flaws of your brand. Others find it inappropriate and a complete waste of time, while others see it as your responsibility to find the good and bad in your brand.

Whatever the case, you need to find exciting ways of asking for that feedback. In this guide, we will discuss the best ways to approach and gather customer feedback.

Use Periodic Questionnaires

When you use periodic questionnaires for feedback, there is always a more significant opportunity to learn more about customer needs. Asking your customers to answer periodic questionnaires makes them feel valued, and this gives them a chance to pinpoint what they value most about your brand.

Say, for example, you introduce a new check-in point at an attraction. You can send out a questionnaire inquiring whether or not a new change is satisfactory. The response you get may not give a detailed answer to your questions, but it will show if customers appreciate your business projections.

The best part about questionnaires is that you can share them through email, social media, or chats. You can structure them to be long or short, depending on the information you need to collect.

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Check Reviews on Social Media Platforms

Many people turn to social media when checking for reviews. Social media is an inexpensive way to reach out to your audience. Through social media, a business gets first-hand information on how customers view their products and services.

And since information shared on social media is not limited to one person, it shapes how businesses respond to negative comments. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are great places to gather customer feedback. But be careful about how you react to customers. One negative comment can easily blow-up and cause unrepairable damage to your brand.

Perform Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis helps you understand how customers’ feel about your business and identify areas of opportunity. Support tickets, call logs, and emails are all great for collecting customer information. But, if you do not use the sentiment analysis tools to identify specific trouble areas, then the data you collect will not be beneficial.

Sentiment analysis acts as a guide that helps you carry out staff training, improve sales through product upgrades, and deal with competitors. The information you collect through sentiment analysis can be for real-time, short-term, and long-term growth strategies.

Carry Out SMS Surveys and Follow Up Emails

SMS surveys and follow up emails are the most common methods used by businesses to gather customer feedback. This is because SMSs and emails are easy to set up, interpret, and analyze. You can offer up these surveys after a service to inquire how customers feel about your products and services.

These methods gather the most recent information and are commonly used in retail and tourist services. However, the surveys have their fair share of challenges. Because of their frequent use, customers find them monotonous. After a while, you’ll discover that fewer customers take part in the exercise.

To avoid boring your customers, send survey questions once in a while. This can be weeks or a month after the purchase. The information will still be helpful and could be more detailed than real-time surveys.

Website Feedback Comment Boxes

Customers prefer using the website boxes to tell you about the minor problems they have with your site. You can place the feedback boxes on any part of your pages. The boxes should be easily accessible when customers want them and out of the way when they don’t. The sole purpose of feedback boxes is to raise slight annoyance issues that customers find inappropriate for emails or large support teams.

Mix Them Up

Each method of gathering customer feedback has its benefits and weaknesses. What works for a particular brand may be entirely inappropriate for another. So, to learn what works for your business, have a trial process for each method.

Analyze the results and compare them with your analytics to see the best fit for your business. You can decide to go with two or more methods at a time as long as it benefits your business the most.

Remember that there are seasons in each business cycle. Therefore, you need a mix of real-time, short-term, and long-term customer feedback tools.

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Conclusion

There you have it. The methods you can use to gather accurate customer feedback. All these methods are time-consuming, and you need a plan on how to handle them. But thanks to technology, there is always a more relaxed way of collecting reviews – like Tatvam.

Tatvam offers the right tool to collect information from various platforms and put them in one place. It then helps categorize the feedback to make sure you figure out which customer, on which site, left what comment. This way, you have more time to respond to comments and build your business.