Organisations have always been gathering customer feedback. Through every complaint, interaction or touchpoint there is an opportunity to ask your customers for feedback.
Driving action from these insights is the sole responsibility of the organisation and if the business truly wants to become customer-centric, then it needs to be a priority.
If you went to your complaints team and started to delve into what your customers were saying then you would very quickly uncover insight and trends that would enable you to make positive changes.
But what about more structured feedback channels? Do we need to do more to convince customers to give feedback?
Make it easy and customers will respond
One of the ironies is that a lot of customers are saying that they find it quite hard to speak their mind, it's essential for every organisation, business or brand to make this easier. If you really want to delight your customers though, you'll go a step further and close the loop, customers get frustrated when they offer feedback and fail to see anything happen.
From working with a diverse range of brands we know that if you have the right approach and make it easy to give feedback you'll engage customers and see response rates increase. Keep your feedback requests short and sweet, there’s nothing worse than a long survey, consider your own experience, how often are you actually prepared to complete a lengthy survey? Probably not all that often, probably never. Research from Gartner tells us that 96% of consumers do not tell the brand after they've had a bad experience, knowing this, why would any of these consumers complete your survey further down the line?
We suggest that you keep it simple, ask for a score and the reason behind the score. This approach gives customers the chance to share verbatim feedback, which offers much richer insight than a score alone; it shows you what customers are thinking and more importantly - what they're feeling. We see a lot of people getting fixated on CX metrics and KPIs but you'll extract more insight through emotional data because it's unstructured and uncovers how people feel about their experience.
The quantitative data (the score) is relatively easy to interpret. But it’s the why behind this number that’s really important; this is where we find the insights that can make a real difference.
What about the role of incentivisation to increase feedback responses?
You actually don’t need to incentivise. Typically, when we work with a new client that used incentivisation, we don’t see any drop in response rates when we take this away.
Incentivisation can unfortunately leave a brand with poor insights, some customers may just rush through the feedback process with little thought, or it can be seen as an organisation trying to buy the feedback, rather than waiting until the customer has an experience (positive or negative) they want to share.
Instead of offering vouchers or prize draws, offer customers the promise that you'll listen. If they have feedback, encourage them to share, with the incentive that you’ll make changes on the back of the feedback.
Using real-time feedback increases response rates
Lots of traditional survey methods receive very low response rates, often between 1-3%.
With this level of engagement, it's impossible to have enough meaningful data to make significant changes to your organisation. Our top ten customers receive response rates around 31%, which gives them a much more representative spread across their customer base and allows them to make better-informed decisions.
Instead of trying to trick, cajole or pay customers for their feedback, look at ways to make giving feedback as easy and relevant as possible. Not only will this approach increase response rates, but it will also help you gather more honest and insightful feedback data.
Let’s be honest, some companies have been mistreating customer feedback for far too long. They’ve made it boring. They’ve made it time-consuming. They’ve made it all about them... and not about their customers. Find out How to Put the Fun Back into Customer Feedback and grab yourself a free copy of our eBook:
