Customer feedback is absolute gold dust in the modern age. It is a direct hotline to what your clients think of your business and it gives you valuable data on which to base your future strategy. What’s more, it doubles as an invaluable user-generated marketing tactic, building trust among your potential clients.
However, figuring out how to get customer feedback online isn’t always the easiest task. Between drawing out the results in the first place to making sure it is accurate, striking the balance is crucial.
But help is at hand! Our 10 easy ways for getting customer feedback will help you take control of the information you receive and capitalize on potential extra benefits as you do it.
1. Connect all your forms to your CRM
Before we delve into the creative process of how to get customer feedback online, we’ve got to get the technical side in order. It’s no use gathering forms from all your customers if you’re then going to spend the next week copying all your responses to somewhere useful.
Instead, equip your team with a CRM that connects to your forms. This way, all your useful information is automatically put into your CRM where you can segment, filter, and analyze it at the click of a button. Platforms like Bitrix24 integrate all your business tools by default, saving you a chunk of time and frustration when getting customer feedback. For example, you can send your forms out in a mass email, and automate a personalized thank you email after every submission — easy, right?
Not only that, by asking for email addresses, each user’s profile is updated with their new responses so you can speak to each respondent on an individual level as well as gathering vast amounts of data on a broader level.
2. Just starting out? Offer free samples in return for feedback
It’s no easy feat getting that first sale, and online reviews can really make a difference. Therefore, many companies offer free samples or trials to random customers or influencers to get the ball rolling on their online reputation.
While it is a great tactic for how to get customer feedback online, it is the least natural of all the tips on this list. That’s not to say it’s not useful. In fact, it is one of the most effective ways of getting feedback. By pre-arranging your response, you can have a frank, open, and honest conversation about what you’re offering and ask questions on the spot to get more detailed insights.
But most importantly, this approach provides more than the usual benefits of getting feedback from customers. Pack your user (or influencer) generated feedback into a slick video and you’ve got a great resource for strutting your stuff online.
3. Link to surveys through social media
If you’re already hot on your marketing, you’ll know that emails can often fall on deaf ears. That’s why, when considering how to get customer feedback online, you simply can’t ignore social media. Your users spend far more time on their apps than in their inbox (especially after working hours), so meet them where they are.
Create a buzz with some slick designs and killer copy and include a link to a blog post with your survey in it. We would recommend keeping these surveys short and sweet — holding user attention for more than a minute is out of reach for most brands.
Similarly, remember that the feedback you receive from these surveys is likely to be extreme — either really good or really bad. Therefore, make sure to include text boxes to add context to your responses.
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4. Incentivize users to complete extensive feedback forms
If you’re looking for more detailed feedback, be aware that users aren’t often as enthusiastic as you about spending their valuable time doing a survey. But don’t let that put you off!
To get your users moving, incentivize them with a discount or a freebie for participating. You don’t need to break the bank handing out a reward for every submission — enter each respondent into a competition to win one well-thought-out prize and you can be sure to get a broad selection of feedback to draw insights out of.
5. Use chat widgets for interactive feedback
When considering how to get customer feedback online, it’s always important to think of the secondary benefits. Chat widgets achieve the same goals as a feedback form, but have the added benefit of opening a conversation in real time. Set up your process with a couple of automatic questions so your team can categorize the issue at hand, then get a human on the job.
Your automatic questions will help guide your analysis, with the subsequent conversation going into finer detail. The one drawback of this method is that the information you gather isn’t as structured as with direct questionnaires. However, chat widgets still save entire conversations in your customer relationship management tool for later analysis.
But the real benefit of chat widgets is that you can receive feedback and deal with any issues immediately. This is one of the most proactive ways to get customer feedback and gives a massive boost to your sales and customer success teams.
6. Get instant responses through stories on Instagram and LinkedIn
With stories, there are multiple methods for how to get customer feedback online, including: polls, open questions, and quizzes. Although much more limited than standard feedback forms or surveys, it is one of the easiest ways to get customer feedback both for you and your users themselves. But a word of warning — in the fast-paced world of social media, you can’t demand much time from your followers, so keep questions on your stories concise and to the point.
The platform you choose to get your responses depends on what kind of answer you’re looking for. For example, if you’re running a serious poll on which SaaS your followers find easiest to use, LinkedIn is probably your best bet. However, Instagram is great for restaurant owners who want to get suggestions on how to improve their menu.
As a final note, stories combine the benefits of getting feedback from customers while also generating buzz, so keep an open mind as you launch your campaigns.
7. Keep an ear on the ground for indirect feedback
Getting your feedback through social media competitions or stories is a great tactic, but you can mine social media for much more than just your company-created initiatives. Search for your company name on all platforms and find out what people are saying about you behind your back!
We’ve discussed the quality of feedback throughout this article, and it’s fair to say that information found through community management could be the most reliable of all. This is what people are saying when they don’t think anybody is listening and is therefore more open. Similarly, you can pick up on aspects that you didn’t know you needed to cover in your feedback forms.
If you run all your social media channels from one central console, it is likely that your software will pick up on all your mentions. You can even program the best tools to monitor your competitors and identify their strengths and weaknesses.
8. Send post-purchase feedback forms via email
It’s never more important to get feedback from customers than after a purchase. You want to know how satisfied your customers are with your products, but also if the buying experience was easy for them and many more factors.
Sure, it’s hard to keep tabs on every purchase and to remember to send a feedback form. But that’s where automations come in. When strategizing how to get customer feedback online, always bear in mind that algorithms can do a lot of the hard work for you. For example, you can set up a trigger so that when a purchase is made, a feedback form with a preset message pings straight out to your customer.
With dependencies, you can take it one step further. Rather than sending a form straight away, you can delay the email until a week later. This way, you know your customer has had a chance to get to grips with your product so they can give you more reliable feedback.
9. Find out what went wrong when purchases aren’t made
The best ecommerce website builders have advanced methods for how to get customer feedback online. Among the most useful tactics is to monitor each client’s basket. If they choose some items then abandon their cart, you should want to know why.
There are two ways to get customer feedback after an abandoned cart. If your user is signed in, you can automate an email to land in their inbox. Alongside your feedback form, include a reminder and you might just end up making the sale anyway — win-win.
Similarly, you can set an exit popup box on your checkout page. These handy little tools detect when a user is going to leave your page and present them with a feedback form to give you real-time reporting on why customers back out at the last moment. The advantage of exit popups is that your users don’t have to be signed in, so you can collect valuable information from new customers.
One of the main benefits of getting feedback from customers is to increase your trust with the customers. However, addressing why users abandon their carts ultimately helps you understand what makes your customers pull the trigger, thus improving sales overall.
10. Improve your customer service with online feedback
It’s great to monitor successful sales, but you should also consider how to get customer feedback online for your customer service department. If your team can turn a negative situation into a positive one, you stand a great chance of getting return customers and a nice review online. Therefore, it’s important to refine your approach and provide the best service possible.
Whether you’re speaking to your customers via text or over the phone, let them know that you would like them to fill in a survey afterwards, while it’s all still fresh in their head. Remember to explain the “why” — to help you improve your service, and let them know it will last less than 30 seconds. This way, you’re more likely to get participation that you can act upon in the future.
With your CRM integrated, you can keep records of the reasons behind the customer service issue as well as the feedback you gather at the end of the conversation.
Throughout our list of how to get customer feedback online, you can’t have ignored the tools that make your efforts so much easier. From a fully integrated CRM and social media hub to chat widgets and the forms themselves, you can get a much more professional approach simply by having the right apps.
That’s where Bitrix24 comes in. As one of the best all-in-one business platforms on the market, it comes packed with features that mean you can get feedback from customers with ease. It’s no surprise that over 10,000,000 organizations already use Bitrix24 to power their business.
Now all of that might sound outside of your price range, but you’d be surprised at how affordable all these tools are. Even if you’re not ready to get out the company credit card just yet, you can
sign up to Bitrix24 for free and test it out for an entire month before you commit — so why wait.
FAQ
How often should you get customer feedback?
To avoid saturating your customers, restrict extensive feedback efforts to around twice a year. However, shorter, more focused forms can be used more frequently, for example after a sale.
How effective is customer feedback?
Customer feedback is as effective as your forms are. For the best results, follow these simple rules:
- Ask precise questions.
- Link everything to achievable business goals.
- Allow users the opportunity to explain their opinions.
- Be consistent in your structure.
- Avoid leading questions.
