Creating an Action Plan For Your Customer Feedback Strategy

Customer feedback is a direct line to how your consumer base feels about your business and its products. It’s invaluable information that enables you to address problems, make changes where necessary, and give your customers more of what they love.

How customers react to your products and services is vital data, but it’s only accessible if you put together a sound customer feedback strategy to obtain it. Knowing what your target customers want and pivoting to keep them happy, are not only the best way to maintain customer satisfaction, but it’s also how you gain repeat customers and attract new ones.

What’s the importance of a customer feedback strategy?

Let’s look at exactly what kind of information you can mine through the right customer satisfaction survey questions and having a thorough customer feedback strategy.

How you design and set up your website is one area where feedback from customers can be incredibly helpful. If you ask the right questions, you’ll get a picture of what sends customers to your website, and what encourages them to convert or puts them off converting.

Feedback can also help you improve your products, it can assist you in ensuring your pricing is competitive and can help you spot any issues with your customer service, deliveries, site security, or how your brand compares with its competitors.

In fact, it’s a fantastic way to find out what you’re doing well and what you need to work on. Helping you to improve your service and grow your business.

What are the types of customer feedback?

There are numerous forms your survey could take, and a wide range of question types, for example, psychographic survey questions or simple yes/no questions. There are also different formats for collecting feedback, ranging from email surveys, pop-ups, live chat, telephone surveys, or text messages.

Think about who your customers are as people. Would they prefer a survey via a mobile device or a phone call? To maximize the responses you get, give your consumers a survey via the right channel, and of the right length.

It’s always wise to play the role of the customer and try out the survey for yourself. Think about whether the questions posed to give you the opportunity to express what you think about the products or services fully. Make sure the way you answer, selecting options or commenting, is clear and logical, and check that the functionality is user-friendly and fit for purpose.

Which type and format you opt for may also depend on your business sector and brand, and who your customers are, and exactly what you want to know.

For example, it’s common for online clothing stores to have a short pop-up survey asking customers to comment on whether they found the style, size, and type of item they were looking for. Likewise, a company providing a VoIP phone service like Dialpad might ask about call quality and usability of the system. 

You’ll also need to consider whether your survey will be limited or extensive. The scope of your questions will depend if you’re looking for specific information in one particular area or trying to gain general information which you’ll sort through and make observations about once it’s gathered.  

How do you create a customer feedback strategy?

Your feedback strategy should be coordinated, coherent, and carefully crafted, in a sense, it should be as precisely worded as a contract, and just as you might benefit from enterprise contract management software, it can be worth looking at your competitors’ surveys, and even some survey templates to get a feel for how to put yours together. Here are some important bases to cover.

Be Clear

The most important thing to bear in mind is that good answers can only be provided if you ask the right questions. By this, we mean questions that are clear, specific, and targeted.

Vague questions produce vague answers. If you want to know what customers think of a new product, think very carefully about exactly what aspects of your product you should ask about. Is it the style, quality, or price bracket? Make sure your questions are posed in a way that focuses the consumers’ minds on the relevant aspect of your product.

Don’t overload customers with complex questions that attempt to answer several things at once. Be sure to target one aspect at a time; don’t cluster topics in a way that’s confusing.

For example, ask: How satisfied are you with the quality of the Patreon Telegram Bot integration? Rather than: Is the Patreon Telegram Bot integration good quality and value for money?

Vary the Questions

Vary the types of questions to gain different information. For example, open-ended questions will give you different outcomes than closed questions. Both questions are valuable in different ways; again it will depend on the kind of answers you are hoping to gain. 

Closed questions which supply a yes/no or simple answer, are really useful in terms of making comparisons. Data gathered from these types of questions can show concrete percentages that you can put in a spreadsheet and see clearly.

Open-ended questions, on the other hand, can give more nuanced information, which will take more effort to analyze and process; but nonetheless can show tendencies and general themes very effectively.

Of course, a combination of the two types of questions is usually ideal. An example of a closed question would be: Would you shop with us again? An open-ended question would be: Can you tell us what you think of our visual voicemail service?

Be Consistent

If your questions require your customers to rate a product, service, or business itself, be consistent and logical with the options you provide. It makes no sense to have smiley faces on one part of the survey, but words, numbers, or percentages on another. 

Similarly, the format should be consistent too. Asking customers to click on one question, but tick, circle, or select from a drop-down list in another, comes across as messy and confusing. Moreover, it will make the data you collect harder to process and compare.

If you have to vary the format for a specific reason, group similar formats together into groups so that the responses can be compared and consumers see a logic to the survey layout.

Ask to Follow Up

It’s really important to take the opportunity to ask customers if you can follow up. It’s better to establish this at the time the consumer is doing the survey. They’re far more likely to give permission at this stage, rather than if they receive a request at a later date.

By following up on survey questions you can gain deeper insights into the questions you have asked. You can also be selective, and make sure you follow up with the consumers who have provided the most useful information. It could also be that in response to negative feedback, you want more detail in order to fix the problem.

Be open to contacting them using their preferred method. Some customers may be open to a video call or a quick chat via your Canadian business phone number. Whereas others would be happier with email or SMS. 

What do you do with customer feedback?

Customer feedback can guide you to go in different directions with your business, it might lead you to make changes to customer service procedures, find ways to drive more traffic to your online store through using an affiliate marketing template, or take a hard look at your pricing structure.

But initially, when you first start looking at the responses you have gathered, what should you do?

First of all, look at customer suggestions, is there anything that chimes with any ideas you have considered before? Are there any surprising but revealing insights? Are there any repeating patterns? Pay particular attention to these; recurring themes, comments, or answers are usually the most illuminating.

Crunch the numbers, and convert the responses into hard figures. What are the numbers telling you? Is a new product popular or is it failing to hit the mark? Are customers planning on using your services again or do they prefer a competitor? Do they want access to something specific like a Paypal transfer Telegram integration? Convert the data into actionable plans for your business.

Communicate with your team, pass on the feedback, especially if it’s good, and communicate the negative feedback in a way that your team can digest and react to it. Make time to talk it over with your employees, and ask for their input on how you respond to what you’ve learned.

Finally, it’s vital to store and record the data and log how it compares with previous customer feedback surveys and look for trends or issues that have come up before.

Final Thoughts

It can be challenging to take the plunge and be prepared to find out exactly what your customers think of your brand and what it has to offer. But getting a clear picture of your business’s offering can only ever benefit the company.

Ultimately the aim of gaining feedback and having an effective customer feedback strategy, like using HubSpot integrations, is to grow your business and boost sales. But to reach this goal, a customer survey needs to be well planned, and the way in which your customers will respond is anticipated. 

The phrase, knowledge is power may be overused, but when it comes to receiving customer feedback, it’s very appropriate. A good customer feedback strategy will arm you with the information you need to nip problems in the bud and strengthen and grow your business.