3 Ways You Can Acquire Feedback from Your Customers Online
What are some of the ways you can acquire feedback from your customers online?
- Surveys
- Feedback box
- Live chat
In every business, feedback is important for the improvement of the company as a whole. Particularly in e-commerce, where every transaction is facilitated online or through applications, feedback is more important than ever because of the nature of the interaction.
Most websites have a way of collecting feedback from their audience. Blogs have WordPress survey plugins and company websites either develop or outsource feedback software. The importance of feedback has become universally accepted within the world of businesses.
A looming problem now is the almost absolute reliance of some companies on certain types of feedback methods, the most popular being the use of the surveys. It is important to take note that surveys are considered the simplest way of collecting feedback but there are many other ways on how to acquire feedback from your customers online.
Here is a list of different ways to effectively acquire feedback from your customers:
Surveys
As mentioned above, surveys are the most popular and the most basic type of the feedback methods. They are easy to set up and send out to the people you want information from.
There are two kinds of surveys. The first is called the long survey, essentially a list of multiple-choice questions, which is the kind of survey that most people are familiar with. The problem with this kind of survey is that some are not structured appropriately. People nowadays are impatient. Surveys that would take your audience at least 20 minutes to answer will likely bore them, possibly resulting in rushed answers and thus inaccurate results.
When creating a long survey remember three key rules:
- Keep it short and simple
- Ask only what you need
- Start with open-ended questions.
The other kind of survey is called a short survey. This kind of survey is primarily found within websites and are usually comprised of just 1 to 2 questions and pop up at the lower right side of your screen. It is predominantly seen in a lot of blog articles with the help of WordPress survey plugins.
Surveys may be the easiest and simplest way of getting feedback, but it is also the most easily manipulated. Keep this in mind when using surveys as a primary feedback mechanism.
Feedback Boxes
A relatively simple but effective feedback mechanism used by some websites, feedback boxes are text fields on a website where customers can easily input their suggestions, opinions, and feedback about a certain part of your website. Most of the time it is a small sidebar or at the end of the page you are viewing. Unlike surveys and the pre-generated answers to their questions, feedback boxes enable customers to freely input their thoughts in a text box.
The data gathered through feedback boxes are much more personal when compared to data collected through surveys. Since customers can freely express, through their writing, what they want to say, the data then becomes more personalized and valuable for the company.
Live Chat
This is something that most e-commerce websites and any businesses that focus on their online platform have. When you visit a website, sometimes you might see a chat box or a chat bubble somewhere on the screen. Most of the time they are chatbots, which act as a way for people to easily inquire about things on the website. In some of the more popular websites, however, you get to chat with real people regarding your concerns.
Live chat is a great way of collecting feedback from your customers because it is one of the most efficient ways to get the information straight from the individual themselves. Apart from the data being as personal as it can be, the employee chatting with the customer can converse with them and come up with possible solutions to the concern.
The biggest advantage of a live chat is that it’s reliable. The people who are going to initiate a chat with the website are the people who really see some concerning things that need to be fixed in their perspective. Compared to the number of people who are willing to take some time to answer surveys, there are plenty who are willing to converse with the company and discuss things they think could be improved. Gaining insight into the viewpoint of the customer this way is one of the biggest importance of collecting feedback.
Key Takeaway
Feedback should be one of the most important and prioritized parts of managing a business. Be it positive or negative, feedback will always have an impact on the growth of your company. There are many ways of gathering feedback, with some better used in certain scenarios than others. Try out the mentioned feedback processes and see which one is the best for your business!