Ecommerce businesses have to find ways to capture online users' short attention spans and fulfill their growing needs. Thus, to improve their customers' overall online experience, businesses must know what they want and expect from their brand.
The best way to know this is through customer feedback. Companies can collect feedback through offline and online methods, and there's even a proven success to customer feedback for gadgets.
Customers know best about what appeals to them. Getting their feedback can help the business understand where they went wrong and what they did right. From there, they can correct and improve those areas to get traffic back, along with a more refined online experience for customers.
If you own an online business, you should know that excellent customer service in ecommerce is crucial. This can't be achieved without knowing what your customers want in the first place. Customer feedback can help you determine those needs and meet their expectations. Here's a list of the different channels you can use to capture customer feedback and to help you grow your business accordingly.
7 Channels to Collect Customer Feedback
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Here is list of best 7 channels to collect customer feedback:
1. Surveys
Customer satisfaction surveys, also known as CSAT survey tools, are questionnaires that your customers answer. Surveys are a widely used tool to help you understand what your customers think about your products and services, your brand, and your customer support.
Evaluating responses from surveys tell you how to improve your products or services strategically, what features and benefits you need to highlight, how to optimize your user experience, and how to meet customer and market demands.
Collecting feedback through surveys is convenient since you can embed them on your website or mobile app. You can also send survey links through email or chat during ongoing conversations with customers, whether through phone calls or chat. Make sure your survey questions specifically help you meet your goals and are thoughtful and open-ended.
You can use survey tools like Qualaroo, SurveyKing, or Jotform Survey Maker to help you create surveys while gaining customer and market insights.
2. Social Media
Billions of people establish their online presence through social media since it provides an easier way to connect with other people—and brands. Customers can air positive experiences or grievances about a brand through various social media platforms. Thus, social media is one of the quickest ways to know what people think about your business.
Use social media to initiate discussions about your products or services. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow you to host live streams, which are perfect for conducting Q&As.
In addition, you can keep track of what people are saying about your brand by conducting searches for your brand name and your competitors, as well as keywords related to your business. Finally, your social media profile is a place for providing direct customer support, responding to positive and negative feedback, and resolving issues.
3. Emails
Customer feedback emails can be sent once a customer has purchased or received your product or once you've provided them your services. Emails allow you to get candid customer feedback since it enables a one-to-one request for more personalized feedback.
Emails are inexpensive and can be designed to maximize your response rate. For instance, an email invite can come with an embedded question that the customer can answer. Once the customer clicks in their response, a new screen will open with the complete survey and with the first question prefilled.
You can also try sending autoresponder emails that inquire about customer issues, struggles, needs, and expectations for your brand. You can automate the process if you want an easier way to gather customer feedback through email. Various email automation tools are available to assist companies with this.
4. SMS Messages
With more than 60% of people reading SMS within 5 minutes, SMS communication remains an effective channel for collecting customer feedback. Similar to emails, SMS messages can be sent right after a recent purchase, allowing you to get quick feedback about your product or service.
Avoid sending long messages that make the customer more likely to abandon your survey. Instead, ask one to two straightforward questions that the customer can respond to directly. You can also include a link to a more comprehensive and mobile-friendly survey.
5. Chatbots
A chatbot can provide customers with a more modern and improved experience than a regular survey. With chatbots, customers don't have to answer a series of questions one-sidedly. Instead, the customer converses with the chatbot, then the chatbot will ask for their opinion at the right time.
Additionally, you can customize the language used by the chatbot to appeal to particular customer groups. This feature makes the customer much more willing to answer questions.
6. Customer Interviews
Customer interviews can help you get honest feedback on what your business lacks and what you can improve on further. Interviews can also make customers feel special, increasing the chances of them giving valuable feedback.
More importantly, repeat customers are willing and happy to give input since they're most likely invested in your product or service already. These customers are the best to interview in real-time.
When conducting interviews, make sure you only ask questions relevant to your goal—finding out what your customers expect from your brand. For example, ask what made them try your products or services in the first place. You can also ask about the best features of your product, what about it disappointed them, and what they would like to change.
7. On-Site Activity
Monitoring on-site activity through web analytics helps you see how your customers interact with your business. Unlike the others on this list, on-site monitoring doesn't necessarily require communication between you and your customer to collect feedback.
In web analytics, the feedback comes in the form of data that shows the activity of your site visitors. The data you collect can include page views, traffic sources, paths taken, and conversion rates. By analyzing on-site data engagement, you can learn what pages are the most popular and which ones are driving customers away.
Turn Those Negatives into Positives
Listening to customers is key to your success. Even if one disgruntled customer shares a bad experience with your product around the internet, it can have a negative impact on your business. To prevent this, utilize customer feedback to give you a head start on what your customers exactly need.
In this day and age, both positive and negative feedback are impossible to hide from. When receiving negative feedback, go the extra mile to resolve complaints and don't take them personally. Through customer feedback, you can analyze responses and determine how to get more positive ones over time.
Measure and monitor satisfaction rates throughout the entire customer journey—from the first website visit to when they place an order and once they receive their purchase. Then, combine and implement the various customer feedback channels you've learned to level up your customer experience and create happier and loyal customers along the way.
Garry Everrett is a Tech Geek who is a writer by passion. Mostly he writes about topics revolving around the latest gadget and technology. On his free time, he likes to read sci-fi novels and play golf.