Customer Feedback - Why, How to Get and How to use. | Starting a Startup - Entrepreneurship PDF Download

Often startups skip this step or take it lightly till the product has been built to a point where there is no return. Skipping this early could be grievous. So to begin with, lets start from this quote from one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time: 

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. – Bill Gates

Now, 5 reasons why Customer Feedback is a must: 

1. It helps improve the product or service

2.  It is a good direct way to measure customer satisfaction

3. It provides actionable insight to create better customer experience

4. It helps improve customer retention

5. It helps in getting tangible data that can be used to make better business decisions

Coming to some of the effective ways to get customer feedback 

1. Customer Surveys

Customer Surveys are a great way to start the customer feedback process. They offer a medium that your customer is familiar with, and they give you the chance to ask specific questions that you want answers to.

2. Behavioral Insight Surveys

Behavioral insight surveys offer businesses the ability to conduct customer feedback on a personal, behavior-driven basis. 

3. Telephone Surveys

Surveys conducted via the phone tend to give you higher survey response ratesbecause they are more personalized and give you better reach to your customers. The challenge with telephone surveys is they are expensive. Conducting a telephone survey to gather customer feedback tends to cost a lot more than if you used an online survey tool.

4. Mobile Surveys

With 47% of your customers now opening emails via their mobile device (24% change from last year), combined with studies that have showed people look at their phones an average of 150 times a day, mobile surveys need to be a part of your customer feedback process.

This form of customer feedback is so valuable because you can tap into your customer’s feelings right at the point of delivery. No longer do you have to wait till the next day when you’re back at the office to send the survey and hope to get responses from busy business professionals, you do it in real-time.

5. Feedback Forms

Hard copy customer feedback forms that can sit around the office or be used during business meetings, offer a great means to gather feedback from customers. This is one of my favorite ways to get actionable feedback because it brings back the human element. Too many times are we expected to fill out surveys online.

Some guidelines for feedback forms

• Keep feedback forms under 10 questions and try not to ask more than 3 open ended questions.
• Use a rating scale whenever possible, this helps keep the survey simple and lets you track customer satisfaction changes from one survey period to the next.
• State a clear purpose as to why you are asking for their feedback.
• Put your brand on the feedback form, make it reflect your business… this builds trust.
• Ask for personal details (name/phone) to bring perspective and credibility to the feedback.
• Thank everyone for their feedback and follow up with customers who have given you scores that are below average.

6. Focus Groups

A focus group is a form of qualitative research in which a group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes towards a product, service or company. These are an important tool when it comes to collecting customer feedback. They are commonly used in marketing during the early stages of product or concept development, when a company is trying to determine who their target market is, and where the product-market fit is good.

7. Usability Testing

Usability testing is a customer feedback strategy that is used by a lot of web-based businesses. Software companies and eCommerce sites can benefit a lot from doing usability testing. Think about it, imagine if you could watch your customers use your online product or browse through your website? You’re able to see exactly what your customers are doing and see trends in what pages they spend the most time on and the least time.

At Help Scout, they regularly turn to usability testing to optimize the design process for new features.  Gregory Ciotti explains:

It may be 90% finished, but well-run tests guarantee that we get the final (most important) 10% right. We’ve been working for months on a new feature that will launch in the coming weeks, and did extensive usability testing with customers in order to get the details perfect. It went so well that we re-designed the whole thing to better align with customer expectations. – Gregory Ciotti (Gathering Customer Feedback)

8. Monitor Social Media

Social media is the ultimate medium to listen to your customers. Customer feedback is a plenty when it comes to sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. The challenge is how to monitor it effectively and use it meaningfully.

I often like to ask customers questions that can produce further feedback so I can understand their problems in more detail, thus give them a more detailed response. - Tesco Social Media Head

Tesco are a great example of a company using social media to gather customer feedback. A recent study by SocialBakers found Tesco to be the world’s most socially devoted Twitter brand. They’ve accumulated a whopping 75,904 twitter followers, whilst clocking an impressive 65.88% response rate with average respond time of only 81 minutes. That’s a lot of feedback!

9. Quarterly Business Reviews

Quarterly business reviews give you an opportunity to sit down with your clients, discuss what’s happened in the previous three months and discover ways you can deliver an even better service to them.

Often times, businesses get caught up doing quarterly reviews and talking too much about the numbers and the results. Yes, that’s important for the client, but I recommend you use them to also get customer feedback. It’s the perfect situation to ask the more detailed questions and get really insightful feedback from clients. You have their undivided attention, so why not use it?

10. Website Activity

Do your customers actually use your website or are they getting stuck somewhere?

That’s a piece of feedback that your customer doesn’t have to tell you, but you can definitely find out. Tracking customer activity on your website is a form of customer feedback that requires very little investment from your customer, but can yield some extraordinary insight. Google Analytics is a free tool that can help you track website activity.

11. Community Groups and Discussion Boards

Customers love being a part of a community. Online community groups and discussion boards provide a great platform to engage customers for feedback. Customers can vote on what features they want to see and provide comments to provide more information.

12. Customer Feedback Portals

Customer feedback portals are 24/7 feedback machines that make gathering feedback from customers super easy.

Swiftkey, a developer of award-winning keyboard apps for Android smartphones and tablets, uses customer feedback portal, User Voice, to engage and communicate with their customers. They found that feedback forums provided a great way to communicate with their customers and show them the company is listening and making progress.

UserVoice forums also helped shape Swiftkey’s product roadmap and have influenced how the company decides to prioritize product decisions. – UserVoice Success Stories

To date, Swiftkey has completed more than 800 ideas submitted by customers via their feedback platform.

13. Personal Emails

Taking a personalized approach to customer feedback by sending emails can help you get more responses. This is a strategy I recommend if you are looking for more detailed feedback from customers, that goes beyond the basic survey questions or feedback forms.

Here are some quick tips to help you get started with personal emails to get customer feedback:

• Identify your most engaged customers that you have a strong relationship with.
• Send a personalized email with a maximum of four questions (any more than that it becomes a hassle).
• Note a deadline you’d love a response by, but don’t be too pushy – tell them that you respect their time but really value their feedback.
• Follow up if you don’t hear anything after a week.
• Combine all feedback into a Google Doc / Excel sheet. Look for trends in feedback, whether that is product-related or marketing messages – depending on the questions you asked.
• I don’t generally like offering incentives, but if you want to… offer things that don’t cost you anything (free training, free consulting, free credits).

14. Suggestion Boxes

Suggestion boxes are used more when it comes to getting customer feedback in offline environments like restaurants, B2C services, and B2B services in the financial and insurance sectors. This form of customer feedback gathering has been around for decades and still provides a great medium to engage and listen to customers.

Questions like, ‘we value your input, how was the service today?’ are commonly seen in suggestion box questionnaires.

Remember to keep questions simple, and ask questions that bring context to the situation. 

15. Customer Feedback Widgets

Tools like UserVoice and Get Satisfaction give you embeddable widgets that you can place on all your pages, so customers can easily provide you feedback.

16. Customer Reviews

A 2014 study by BrightLocal found that 88% of consumers trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations. Customer reviews are a form of customer feedback and provide you with great insight into what your customers really think about your business.

They are also a lot more public, so it’s important to make sure you are not only monitoring reviews from a feedback point of view, but also ensuring you are engaging with the customers who leave the reviews by posting follow up comments and questions.

17. Live Chat

Forrester Research completed a study called, “Making Proactive Chat Work”, which found that men online consumers want help from a live person while they are shopping online. In fact…

“Implementing Live Chat into our own software has been a roaring success. We didn’t expect to get such great feedback from our clients however it truly has revolutionized the Support desk.” – Rushcliff Customer Story

When using live chat to collect customer feedback, remember to push the data back to your main system. 

18. In-app feedback

In-app customer feedback gives you insight into how your customers actually use your product. Intercom.io offers a great solution to help you reach out to the right users for feedback. It works by letting you identify certain segments of users, like “users last visit more than seven days”, then enables you to push messages and engage in conversation with them.

19. Email and Ticket Closing Surveys

The last customer feedback strategy I want to present today is the use of email ticket closing surveys. 

For example, R&G Technologies uses ticket closing surveys after every IT Support job they complete. 

Ticket closing surveys are great for getting feedback on a project or job basis. So if you want to know what you client feels straight after you have finished some work for them, these are perfect. The down side is they often can get quite annoying for the customer if you’re sending them after every job.

Making the Most of Customer Feedback: How to Use Customer Feedback

Once you gather customer feedback, it's important to use that information to address specific challenges. The action you take is what makes the customer feedback truly powerful, after all.

When considering a survey, define your scope so that you can get relevant feedback about a particular challenge, Wood says. For example, she says, if you realized that your customers are constantly demanding that you lower your price, and when you don't, they go to your competitors, you might decide to leverage an outside firm to help your management team better understand what's going on and what to do about it. One plan of attack might be to interview 10 existing and major customers, and survey 100 current accounts and 100 past (or defected) accounts, asking particularly about repurchase decisions and price. "Your problem is specific, and so is your game plan," Wood says.
    
Act on customer feedback. Getting the organization ready to act requires dividing customer feedback into what Wood calls "strategic horizons," which correspond to the way in which you will act:

• Horizon One: Immediate tactical adjustments, such as quick wins, red-alerts, and lifelines
• Horizon Two: Revenue interlocks, including actions that impact revenue not this month, but over the next year
• Horizon Three: Game-changing ideas and suggestions for the long term

Once the feedback is divided into action buckets, Wood says, ensure that each organization or function in your company has three roles to play: to receive the feedback, to be conditioned by the findings, and to participate in the determined course of action.

Devise and test smart solutions. When coming up with solutions to issues you uncover through customer feedback, think in stages. First, consider the insight and gather input for change from front-line employees and senior managers, Wood says. Next, define the plan for change and test it against your budgets and resources, and talk to your best customers to determine if the idea or change is even worth testing. Finally, Wood says, benchmark the test's success with metrics over a reasonable period of time and assess how well targets were achieved.

Close the loop with those giving feedback. It's amazing how many companies neglect to get back to customers even after they've implemented changes. When you have made a change that is customer-driven and meaningful, close the loop with the customers (personally or via other channels) who were part of the feedback process, Wood advises. "This step is critical, because customers will be encouraged to give input if they know they are being heard and know they may be driving change." You might set up your customer feedback mailbox to generate an automatic response initially thanking customers for their feedback, but you still need to follow up after the problem is corrected and get back to that customer with a more detailed response. "One of the most important things to remember is that these are human beings and if you don't have that kind of communication and close the feedback loop, you don't have the human touch between yourself and the customer," Finkelstein says. "That's a very big loss for any company."

Track the results. Customer feedback can spur everything from short programs and initiatives to business transformation. "The chore is not in the listening, but in the implementation and follow-up," Wood says. "As you launch feedback-driven changes, track which and how many of your customers offer up additional ideas and input. In my experience, the more you can get the right customers to participate, the better your business is growing."