Whether you're in a product, marketing, sales, or customer success function, your customer experience is mission critical. But effectively gauging customer feedback and sentiment can be challenging. Even the simplest approach - asking your customers directly - can pose challenges if you aren’t asking the right questions or timing your inquiry effectively.
With these challenges in mind, below you’ll find a number of proven pathways for collecting feedback from your customers. Leverage them all or a combination to help support your existing brand and growth strategies.
1. Create customer feedback surveys
Sending out a survey to all of your customers after an interaction is a good way to get an overall idea of how things went for them. The idea behind this strategy is to collect as many responses as possible so that you can identify any trends in the feedback you receive.
Here’s how Uber, the popular mobility app, collects feedback from customers via surveys. The company targets two audiences — the drivers and the passengers — and collects feedback from both.
While the passengers are asked to leave ratings after they take a ride, the drivers are made to rate the passengers. This survey method is fair and transparent and impacts the reputation of both parties.
Pro Tip: Consider using a free form builder to create such branded survey forms with ease.
2. Send short email NPS/CSAT surveys
You can send short email NPS/CSAT surveys at any stage of the customer journey.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score are two of the most popular customer satisfaction metrics out there. HubSpot integrates both into their Service Hub, which creates a powerful, real-time baseline of how your customers are feeling about your company and specific components of your offering.
NPS is a metric that measures how likely your customers are to recommend your product or service to others on a scale from 0 to 10 — those who respond with 9 or 10 are called Promoters, 7 and 8 are Passives, and 0-6 are Detractors.
CSAT scores range from 1-5 and ask a single question: “How would you rate your satisfaction with [your company]?”
These surveys can be sent in response to a variety of events, including:
- Order completion
- Support issue resolution
- Shipping update
- Product upgrade/downgrade
Here’s where to find more detail and examples of setting up NPS within HubSpot, and below is an example of a CSAT email. It asks the customers to leave a rating about the product they receive
3. Use live chat
Live chat is a great tool for engaging your customers and gaining useful insights about their experiences with your company.
Here are some ways to use live chat to gain customer feedback:
- Use the transcript from live chats as a way to find out where you can improve your website.
- If you notice trends in what customers ask for, perhaps you should update your FAQs or add more content to your site.
- When a customer mentions something good about your product or service, ask them if they would mind leaving a review on platforms like Google or Yelp.
You can also use the transcript from live chats as a way to monitor employee performance. If agents are making mistakes during live chats, they might need additional training. You'll also be able to see if they're being too aggressive with sales pitches and potentially turning customers off.
Looking at the stats, 46% of consumers prefer live chat as opposed to 29% for email, so it is no surprise that b2c and eCommerce business have embraced live chat. Doing so for your SaaS organization can help you gain a competitive edge while also better understanding your customer needs.
4. Run a social media contest
If you're looking for a way to get your customers talking, social media contests are one of the best ways to get the ball rolling.
You might ask entrants to submit photos or videos related to your product or service — with the prize being the chance to be featured on your website or in a marketing campaign.
Here’s how Ginsoy ran a social media contest and collected feedback by providing incentives and letting people have their say:
5. Analyze your various website pages' performance
In a world where shopping happens on mobile screens, first impressions matter.
You want your customers to feel at home on your website and easily find everything they need. To do that, you need to understand what they think of the website design.
Use analytics tools like Google Analytics to understand different valuable data about your website, such as number of page views, number of visitors, how long visitors stay on a page, top content, and so on. Also, using a heatmap and user session recording tool like Hotjar, you can gain insights into how people are interacting with your pages.
Over to You
If you haven’t been collecting customer feedback, start today. You are going to find out things about your business that you don’t know and will act on those insights to make your business better. Collecting and working on customer feedback is one of the most effective strategies for business growth.
We hope that you’ll be able to put some of these suggestions into practice over the next few weeks.
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