Customer Feedback: How to Collect and Handle Feedback from Customers

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

Selling is a vital business activity. However, many businesses forget how necessary it is to collect and handle customer complaints and feedback. In today's cutthroat competition, neglecting the customer experience is one of the fastest routes to being eliminated. Most businesses understand that customer feedback is a precious source of information for business operations. Let's take a closer look at the importance of customer feedback and professional customer care skills in the article below.

Why Do Businesses Need Customer Feedback?

Improve Products and Services

To launch any product, a business needs time to research customer needs and tastes. But testing whether the product fits — and what its strengths and weaknesses are — depends on customers' experience after using it. Customer feedback is the most comprehensive, objective view of the product or service, helping the business improve and raise quality even further.

Measure Customer Satisfaction

Today, businesses pay special attention to customer satisfaction and contentment. This is a factor tied to the company's interests such as market share, revenue, and profit. At the same time, satisfaction means customers will come back to buy more often and recommend your brand to more people. The best way for a business to meet customers' wishes is to listen to and record their opinions and complaints. The company can use questions to gauge satisfaction levels through customer feedback.

Retain Customers

As mentioned, satisfaction and contentment retain customers — turning strangers into potential customers, and potential ones into loyal ones. When customers' opinions are acknowledged and your company takes steps to improve the quality of its services and products, they will love, trust, and stay loyal to your brand.

Whenever you receive customer feedback, the business should find the fastest, most fitting, and most appropriate way to handle and fix the problem. This is the key to winning customers' complete trust — even from the most demanding customers.

>>>> See more: After-Sales Customer Care: Professional Processes and Scripts

A Trusted Source of Information for Other Customers

As media and social networks keep growing, advertising and product marketing have become saturated. Customers today no longer place much trust in online advertising claims about a new product. Instead, the reviews, feedback, comments, and observations about products and services from people who used them before become a more trustworthy source of information. From a single regular customer, the business can tap into the many connections around them.

Provide Data That Helps the Business Make Business Decisions

If a business owner makes decisions based on vague, general guesses, it cannot create strong competitiveness. They need to collect information and data from surveys, manage that data, and listen to customer feedback about products and services to develop an effective company growth strategy.

Customer opinions are the most reliable data source, because product development must not focus on broad promotion but on adjusting quality to fit the potential market.

How to Collect Customer Feedback

With the strong support of technology and the Internet, collecting customer feedback is no longer difficult. Here are 5 effective ways to get customer feedback that you can apply:

Be Present Across Channels and Collect Feedback Fast

Keep in mind that customers today can interact with your brand through more channels than before — and naturally, they expect a great experience at each one. Traditional communication methods are still common, while interaction rates over the Internet are rising fast. Therefore, the business must ensure it can manage all information channels, so that whether customer feedback arrives via website, email, fanpage, or hotline, you can support them as fast as possible.

Ways to collect customer feedback across channels:

• Show a popup when a visitor stays on the page a long time

• Add a comment/review button

• Offer incentives in exchange for completing a survey

• Live chat on the website

• Collect additional information at purchase, such as interests and preferences

• Intent popups: when leaving the website, trigger a popup survey asking why they left

• Behavior flow analysis: Google Analytics can be used

• A/B Testing

Send Emails to Increase Customer Feedback

Email is the most effective method for collecting customer feedback. To run an effective email strategy, you need to pay special attention to purpose and send timing. There are also countless other factors to consider, such as content and information. If you send spam, your email may well end up in users' junk folders.

Personalization can increase email open rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. So before hitting send, check once more that the recipient's name is correct in every message you send out. The more customer information you have for personalization — capturing buyers' preferences, trends, and concerns — the more you raise your response rate, and vice versa.

You can use Email Marketing or CRM software such as SimCRM to optimize personalization when sending emails. For example, SimCRM's Email Marketing module can automatically personalize your email templates. The only thing you need to do is prepare one great email template; the sending and personalization of information is SimCRM's job. Personalization makes readers feel respected when they receive an email. Try email marketing and CRM for free with SimCRM.

Boost Online Review Pages

Online review websites are a wonderful way to find out what customers think of your brand. People leave feedback about products and services, and the whole world can see it.

Encourage your customers to leave feedback on the website, fanpage, and groups. According to one report, customer reviews are 12 times more trustworthy than a company's product descriptions. On top of that, up to 90% of potential customers typically search for and read online comments and reviews before deciding to buy. You must also reply quickly to negative feedback and customers' questions. Only then will they feel cared for and heard.

Collect Customer Feedback via SMS

You think text messages are only for promotional campaigns? That is not entirely accurate. Statistics show that up to 90% of text messages are opened within 3 minutes of the customer receiving them, with a response rate of about 30%.

These numbers show SMS is an effective way to reach and engage customers. That is exactly why it is surely an indispensable part of a customer feedback collection strategy.

To collect customer feedback via text message, you can use these two approaches:

• Send 1 or 2 questions the recipient can answer immediately on the spot

• Attach a shortened survey link in the message

Community Groups and Discussion Forums

Customers always enjoy belonging to a community or a group. Online groups and discussions give the business a wonderful platform to blend in with customers. Buyers usually share their feedback and opinions in such groups. This feedback plays an important role in the company's development. In addition, customers may offer recommendations for improving and perfecting products in the future. You should listen to customers and reply to their comments.

How to Handle Customer Feedback

Handle It Quickly

In business, whether you like it or not, you will receive customer complaints. When customers complain, it means they have pressing problems that the business needs to resolve quickly and promptly. In such cases, you need to skillfully calm their irritation, listen sincerely, and take notes so nothing they report gets missed. Then, following the company's handling process, offer solutions that are satisfactory and reasonable.

Manage Customer Complaints and Feedback Transparently

No matter how negative customer feedback is, you should not hide or delete it. The owner or the staff member responsible for managing complaints must handle them openly and transparently, and be ready to take responsibility toward the customer if the fault lies with the company. Then put forward the right course of resolution.

If the problem is not the company's fault, the most correct way to answer the customer's feedback is to explain reasonably and persuasively so the customer clearly understands where the issue lies.

Empathize with Customers

The problems customers complain about all relate to the products and services your company provides — they are not aimed directly at you. However, because you are responsible for managing complaints, you may have to hear heated, hot-tempered words. If you react subjectively, the situation will get worse. What customers expect is that the problem gets solved quickly.

The first thing to do is soothe the customer's mood so they can present things calmly. At the same time, listen attentively as they speak and take careful notes so no part of the complaint is missed. Remember: don't make excuses — show empathy toward the customer, which will make them feel more satisfied.

Apologize and Compensate If Necessary

You must record the content of the customer's complaint accurately so you can determine a concrete course of action. Then find the root of the problem using open-ended questions. Show the customer that you are striving to resolve their problem in the best way possible. Finally, give the customer options that satisfy both sides. Never promise the customer anything you cannot deliver. That would be an extremely serious, unrecoverable mistake, and you will certainly lose the trust of the customer — and of the people around them, who are your potential customers.

>>>> See more: What Is Customer Engagement? How Do You Increase It?

Provide a Concrete Solution

When a customer takes the time to complain or give feedback on a product or service, what they need is not an apology but a thorough, satisfactory resolution.

If your solution still does not satisfy the customer, ask for their contact details — phone number, email — to talk directly. You can send a text message to the customer to resolve the problem, because as mentioned above, SMS open rates on phones are higher, and response rates are higher too.

Learn the Lesson and Thank Customers

Treat every piece of negative customer feedback as a defect the customer is reporting to you. Face customer feedback with confidence and use it to improve product and service quality. Sometimes the company itself cannot spot its own weaknesses, and it is customers who help you find them. This is your opportunity to fix and perfect things. So thank the customers who honestly pointed out the problems and sticking points, and learn from them for next time.

Conducting yourself this way not only proves the business's care for its customers — it is also an effective method for retaining your loyal customers.

Customer Feedback Matters Enormously

Customer feedback is extremely valuable — but are businesses actually encouraging customers to share their thoughts and impressions? Make sure customers can send feedback to the business easily and quickly, and that it is always received with the utmost sincerity. With this feedback, the business can turn the information into useful factors for accurate management decision-making, and gain a basis for building more sustainable development plans in the future.

Show customers that the outcome they receive is worth the time they invest. We hope the information above helps you handle the feedback you receive more professionally and effectively. Good luck!

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