Understanding and meeting customer needs is paramount in today’s business landscape.
But how do you figure out what your customers want and need?
Well, that’s where customer feedback comes into play. It’s like getting a sneak peek into your customers’ thoughts about your brand, experience, and offerings.
If you’re not sold on the importance of customer feedback yet, you will be by the end of this blog.
I was once where you are right now, so I’ve compiled the top reasons you should start collecting customer feedback to sustain your business. I have also included tips and best practices for collecting and using customer feedback to improve your business.
What is Customer Feedback?
Customer feedback is the opinion or sentiment customers express about a business or its offerings. It can be collected through various methods, such as surveys, reviews, ratings, testimonials, social media comments, emails, phone calls, chats, etc.
It can help you understand what customers think, feel, need, want, expect, and value. You can identify your strengths and weaknesses, measure customer satisfaction, monitor customer behavior and trends, and discover new opportunities and ideas.
6 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Ignore Customer Feedback
No business can stay in business without customers. How you treat or mistreat them determines how long your doors stay open – Harvey Mackay, Businessman and Author.
Now comes the most important question: Why is customer feedback important?
Here are the 6 reasons why:
1. Improves Your Products and Services
You may be doing your best to keep your customers happy and satisfy their needs, but how can you be sure your efforts meet their expectations?
As customers’ needs and expectations evolve with time, you, too, should adjust your products or services according to their needs.
To build a great experience for your customers, ask them the following questions:
- What do they think about your product?
- What do they like about your products and services?
- What do they think can improve?
Without asking these questions, you may not be able to give them the best experience.
Listening to your customers’ opinions and complaints will allow you to find out what they like and dislike about your offerings.
You can then use this information to improve features, fix problems, add features, and so on. This way, you can enhance the quality and value of your products and services and increase customer satisfaction and retention.
2. Measures Customer Satisfaction
By collecting customer feedback, you can assess how satisfied your customers are with various aspects of your business, such as product quality, service delivery, pricing, support, etc.
You can also track customer experience metrics, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), etc. These metrics can help you track your experience over time and compare it with your competitors.
One way of doing this can be using post-chat surveys to let your customers speak their minds. Platforms like ProProfs Chat let you gather customer feedback with detailed post-chat surveys, allowing you to measure customer satisfaction with chat ratings.
3. Improves eCommerce Conversion Rates
Collecting customer feedback from the website, mobile app, or product when customers are still active on them allows businesses to collect real-time, context-sensitive customer feedback.
Qualaroo is an online survey tool that launches popup surveys on these platforms to collect contextual feedback.
These insights can help identify gaps in the offerings and user experience and facilitate data-driven optimization. By acting on feedback, e-commerce sites can address issues related to user experience, messaging, trust, and more and increase conversion rates.
4. Helps Your Brand Stay Ahead of the Competitors
If you want to survive the cut-throat competition, you must refine your price and product differentiation strategy to ensure you offer great prices and products.
But today’s marketing and your financial performance are mainly dependent on the experiences customers have with the products, services, and brands. Brands that put their customers at the core of everything are the ones winning in the marketplace.
You can put your customers first by asking them what they want and showing how much you value their opinions.
5. Reduces Customer Churn Rate
The churn rate is the percentage of customers who stop doing business with you over a period.
After every chat session, you can quickly identify and retain leaving customers using the NPS feedback form. The detailed feedback helps you understand your customer’s pain points so you can work on improving the product accordingly.
Such feedback helps reduce the risk of high customer turnover and convert them into loyal brand advocates.
6. Generates Positive Word-of-Mouth
Remember, it takes years of exceptional customer experience to build a strong brand reputation and a single bad one to destroy everything. Which is why keeping the word-of-mouth marketing in check is critical.
Remember, it takes years of exceptional customer experience to build a strong brand reputation, and a single bad one to destroy everything. And so, keeping the word-of-mouth marketing in check is critical.
Especially in today’s hyper-connected world, where information spreads quickly, very little is required to tarnish a brand’s image.
That’s why you must react quickly to your customers’ concerns or issues to avoid negative word of mouth, which can increase customer churn. Online customer satisfaction surveys or questionnaires are a great tool for understanding and resolving customers’ problems.
What Questions Should You Ask Your Customers for Feedback?
Here are some more specific questions you can ask your customers to gather valuable feedback:
- What challenges did you face before using our product/service?
- How has our product/service helped you overcome those challenges?
- What specific features or aspects of our product/service are most valuable?
- Are there areas where you think our product/service could be improved?
- How happy are you with our products?
- What other products/services would you like us to offer in the future?
- How would you rate the overall value for money of our product/service?
- What made you choose our product/service over competitors?
- How satisfied were you with the customer service that you received?
- Are there any other feedback or suggestions you would like to share?
You can customize these questions to suit your business needs and ask them through surveys, emails, question cards, or casual conversations. Remember, the goal is to gather feedback that helps you understand your customers better and make informed decisions about your products or services.
How to Leverage Live Chat for Customer Feedback
Live chat is one of the most effective methods of collecting customer feedback because it allows you to communicate with your customers in real time and get instant feedback. Live chat can help you collect customer feedback in various ways, such as:
1. Ask Customers for Feedback Before a Chat Session
You can use pre-chat forms to ask customers for feedback on their expectations, needs, or preferences before they start a chat. This can help you understand their context and provide them with personalized and relevant service.
To collect customer feedback via live chat, you need reliable and user-friendly live chat software to create and customize pre-chat forms. These forms can be integrated with your website and other platforms to analyze and act on the feedback insights.
You can use forever-free tools like ProProfs Chat to try your hands on pre-chat forms for collecting user information.
2. Ask Customers for Feedback at the End of a Chat Session
Post-chat surveys are an effective way to collect customer feedback after a live chat session. To create a post-chat survey, you should first establish clear goals and objectives for the survey to determine its purpose.
For example, your objective could be to measure customer satisfaction and identify areas for improvement in the live chat experience.
Once you have identified the objective, ask for feedback immediately after the chat session ends to get real-time feedback. Keep the survey short and simple, with 2-3 questions at most, and ask questions that engage customers and provide real insights.
Here are some question examples you can ask:
- Did the live chat agent resolve your issue or answer your question?
- Were you treated with courtesy and professionalism during the live chat session?
- Do you have any suggestions for improving our live chat support?
Consider finishing with an open-ended question that allows customers to express themselves further. Finally, measure your post-chat survey results to identify areas for improvement and track progress over time.
Learn More: Conduct Online Surveys with Live Chat Tool
Tips to Improve Customer Service With Actionable Feedback
Customer service and feedback is essential for any business that wants to retain its customers. But the real challenge lies in strategically collecting and utilizing this feedback. And this begs the question: What methods work best for this purpose?
Here are some tips to collect customer feedback and improve customer service:
1. Collect Feedback From Multiple Sources and Channels
To get a comprehensive and accurate picture of your customer service performance, you should collect feedback from multiple sources and channels, such as surveys, reviews, ratings, testimonials, social media comments, emails, phone calls, chats, etc.
You can also collect feedback from new customers, repeat customers, loyal customers, dissatisfied customers, etc., to understand your customer experience throughout the customer journey.
2. Analyze Feedback Data and Identify Patterns and Trends
If you don’t track the effectiveness of your feedback-based improvements, it’s the same as not improving. You should monitor your feedback data and measure the results of your actions to see if those strategies worked.
You can track metrics such as retention, churn rate, referrals, revenue, etc. With ProProfs Chat, you can easily track customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and identify where your support service is lacking. It will allow you to improve customer support and score effectively.
3. Act on Feedback and Implement Improvements
To enhance the overall customer experience and truly understand the importance of customer feedback, you must actively incorporate it into your products, services, processes, policies, etc.
You should also communicate with your customers about the improvements you made and thank them for the feedback so they know their pain points are not ignored.
Harness the Power of Customer Feedback With These Powerful Tools
Customer feedback isn’t just a tool for improvement; it’s the lifeblood of a thriving business.
By actively seeking and listening to your customers’ opinions, you better understand their needs, preferences, and expectations. This knowledge lets you fine-tune your offerings, address pain points, and create memorable customer experiences.
To harness the full potential of customer feedback, you can use tools like ProProfs Chat and Qualaroo.
ProProfs Chat is a reliable and easy-to-use live chat software that helps collect customer feedback in real time. At the same time, Qualaroo specializes in capturing valuable insights through surveys and feedback forms.
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