You’ve done your research and development; you’ve cleared testing, the marketing campaigns have built up the awareness, and customers are waiting to make their purchase. Now that your business is ready to launch its latest product or service, how can you capture customer feedback and identify the next steps to improve? Here are four methods you should have at your disposal.
Website
Offering a form on your website where customers can fill out their details and comments is a surprisingly easy way to gain useful feedback. Navigating to your website is one of the easiest things for a modern customer to do on their mobile devices. Keep the form simple to facilitate ease of use, and you’ll find a lot of comments coming in which you might otherwise have missed, although you may still have to filter for relevance.
Beneath the surface, your website analytics also tells you more about the patterns of user behavior on your website. If you can drill down to the customer level, you can see how they used your website, which products or services they were interested in, and whether or not they ended up purchasing, among others.
Surveys
Customer surveys are among the most popular methods of collecting feedback. In the modern scene, there are ever-increasing ways to connect with your customers. Whether through email or various social media channels, it’s incredibly simple to post a link or create a poll. With an interface that’s accessible on the device which most customers are constantly using, you make it effortless for them to submit their feedback on your products and services.
However, the effectiveness of translating this raw information into useful data is still highly dependent on the platform and construction of your survey. To make the most of the surveys’ high potential, consider client feedback software with features such as data visualization and deep integration into your existing systems and workflow.
Customer support
Most businesses offer a combination of at least three channels to handle inbound customer contacts: email, chat, and calls. All of these interactions are a potential source of customer feedback which you can harness for product improvement. Email correspondence and chat transcripts are easier to parse while listening to a call recording can be time-consuming.
You can work with your in-house team or partner with a call center to capture feedback as part of the customer handling flow and facilitate its submission in a form that is easier to analyze. Still, there is less consistency with this method because not every interaction generates useful feedback that gets captured.
Interviews and FGDs
Don’t forget the traditional methods of capturing customer feedback still work. Reaching out to individual customers to conduct interviews and focus group discussions (FGDs) may be old fashioned, but can give you a unique opportunity to understand the profile of your customers.
This is a time-consuming process, but within the scope of an interview or FGD, you’ll get to ask more detailed questions that will help you perceive and solve the needs of your customers. Perhaps more importantly, you’ll be able to build a personal connection with them as well as demonstrate that you care. Make sure that you select the right customers for your interviews and FGDs to make the most of each session.
Improving never stops, and customer feedback is crucial to that process. Make sure you capture a high quantity of feedback and take time to filter the quality so that you identify the best way to move forward with your products and services.
