Customer Feedback

Feedback on how feedback forms could be

Customer Feedback

Feedback is vital for growing businesses, we just can’t afford to let bygones be bygones. Most of us rely on the one commonly used method to gather feedback – surveys. Yes, the pop-up that asks you if you’ve got a few minutes to spare. Customers aren’t interested in filling out long survey forms or to write 500 words on how your business could be better.

The customers who do bother to respond are likely to be doing so due to a particularly good or (more often) bad experience. This means your customer survey findings don’t give you a true picture of how the majority of your customers are feeling. They are therefore much less useful. It’s the “non-response bias” in action.

I’ve been looking at some of the reasons why response rates are so low, and what changes businesses can make to address the problem.

20-survey questions that belong to the 20th century

We’re all increasingly short of time, so we make quick choices about what we’re prepared to devote our attention to. If you ask your customer to complete a lengthy survey that will eat into their time, they probably won’t do it. People know the value of their time, and they’re unwilling to give it up. This is one of the key reasons that only 2% of consumers will bother to complete a questionnaire. Especially when it’s boring than a board exam.

Moreover, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence to show that a long survey can itself prompt a decrease in customer satisfaction – meaning that the whole purpose of the feedback itself is compromised. It’s alarming to think that a survey originally intended to help you promote customer happiness, could ultimately end up damaging your brand.

So, it’s more important than ever to be considerate of your customers’ time and ask as little as possible. If you can be ruthless about cutting your survey down to the bare minimum, it’ll be a better experience for your customers, you’ll see arise in responses and your overall survey data will be much more valuable as a result.

The attention span of a goldfish

The average person gets distracted in eight seconds. Short, sharp bursts of information are the best way to counteract this issue, and this approach should be key when building up your feedback survey. Get to the point quickly—focus your key message right at the start, before you lose them.

It’s also important to look at how you expect your customer to access your survey. If they must go through a series of clicks and pages to reach it, you run the risk of that eight-second attention span expiring before they even read the first question. Instead, try embedding your surveys right within screens, emails, or pages that your customer is already visiting.

Make it ‘to-go’ please

Almost 80 percent of email users access their email accounts via a mobile device, and we’re already seeing 30-40 percent of all online surveys being completed in this way. This trend will certainly continue, so it’s vital not to be left behind or you’ll lose even more responses.

If you issue a survey that isn’t optimized to display on mobile devices, then your audience will immediately skip away – do they care enough about completing your survey to put up with pages which are difficult to read and fiddly to complete? For most people, the answer will be “no.”

Businesses must actively keep up with technological trends such as this. Ensure that your surveys are mobile optimized, and test them out yourself to make certain that they’re easy to complete.

The Survey makeover

If you find a camcorder and a book lying next to each other on a parkway in the middle of the night, what would you pick up first? Consumers are drawn to visual content, given that we all expect increasingly low effort interactions, and images give us exactly that. What is surprising is that so many businesses still rely solely on text-based surveys.

Businesses need to shake off the temptation to simply keep going with the same old style of wordy, long-format survey. You can actively grab your customers’ attention and drive their interest by using images resembling ‘stickers’ and ‘emojis’ used in social media – it’s what people expect, and it’s what they react most readily commit their attention to.

Everyone likes to feel valued

It can be difficult to keep your customer at the heart of your company, but having a well-structured customer retention strategy is vital if you want to be a successful customer-serving business. Ongoing customer feedback is the best way to ensure you don’t lose sight of what your customer really wants and needs – if the feedback process is too long, slow, or complicated, then your customer will quickly feel that you’re expecting too much of them. As a result, they won’t feel truly valued or appreciated.c

Customer feedback must be sought genuinely, proactively and considerately in order to gain meaningful results—and this means moving with the times, recognizing behavioral and cultural shifts, and adapting your processes accordingly. Give the customer an appreciation that actually makes them smile, on contrary to the old, “Thank you for your valuable feedback.” Go with something like, “You just made a difference! We’re glad that you could be a part of our next version”.

Kapture – Your feedback sidekick

Kapture CRM is not just a sophisticated excel replacement. We’ve addressed every aspect of your business in the making of the most awesome CRM of all time. Gathering business intelligence aside, using it efficiently is the idea from the start of the pipeline.

Connecting hundreds of platforms to setting up your own interactive surveys and batch processing it through your mailers, we’ve got everything covered. Your surveys can also be made easy with a simple conversation with any customer from the chat/messaging section.

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