by Jonas Christensen
If you’re not actively gathering customer feedback—and acting on this feedback—you’re losing out. Why? The happier you make your customers, the more likely it is that you’ll retain them. Bearing in mind that it’s six to seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one, I’d say you should definitely invest your time and effort into making the most of your customer feedback.
Let your competitors run their ads aggressively—you’ll be able to achieve bigger results (and sales!) by looking inward, and making the most out of your customer feedback. Here are a few tips to get you started:
1. Get people to use your site, and observe them
You’ve probably read a dozen “10 best practices to optimize your website for conversions” type articles, but guess what? There’s no one size fits all solution, and the easiest way to figure out if your website is user-friendly to your consumers is to simply observe them whilst they’re using your site.
Do they skip past your image carousel at the top without waiting for the images to rotate? Do they head straight for your testimonials page? Take notes diligently, ask questions afterwards, and then improve your website accordingly.
2. Use post-purchase questionnaires
You’re probably already sending post-purchase emails (which contain shipping details and other important information) to your customers. What you should also be doing is sending your customers post-purchase questionnaires to measure your Net Promoter Score among other metrics.
For the uninitiated, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an index which measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company to their friends. This gauges your customers’ overall satisfaction with your product/service, as well as their loyalty to your brand. Collecting these post-purchase questionnaires is straightforward enough, with tools such as AskNicely, Promoter.io, and Delighted. Once the questionnaires are set up, they’ll trigger automated emails to your customers (requesting that they participate in a short survey), and compute your NPS from there.
3. Contact users who had bad experiences
Once you set up your NPS tool, you’ll now be aware of the negative experiences some of your customers may have had. (Without a feedback system in place, these would have slipped through the cracks.) Once your company receives any feedback indicating that a customer has had a poor experience, your front-line staff should reach out to them, and try and fix their problems.
Keep this in mind: You have an opportunity to make things right here—and as long as you do manage to resolve the issues in a way that satisfies your customers, they will return to do business with you.
4. Get reviews on products and users
Customer feedback comes in many ways, shapes and forms. There’s the feedback that you get in the surveys you send out, and then there’s the feedback which you get from online reviews. Whilst we’ve been talking extensively about the former, it’s important to beef up your strategy for the latter as well.