How can we make the mechanism around giving feedback more fun for the consumer?
At the moment, most feedback is left through web forms, via mobile phones or IVR. It’s very much a 1 to 10 scale. If you’re lucky, you might get some stars or smiley faces thrown in. But what else can brands do around this? How can we embrace new and emerging technology, so that our feedback programme is efficient both now and in the future?
One way we can all be more creative is with the feedback mechanism itself. Rather than asking people to press buttons or use simplistic scorings, why are brands not exploring other forms of feedback?
We all have mobiles, so why don’t we use them more effectively to collect feedback? The barrier to speaking down the phone is minimal. We’re all used to making calls, using phones for dictation and also directly asking our phones questions. So collect verbatim feedback, with all the intonations and emotions that your customers’ voices offer. As a brand, it means you can access the raw passion, anger or dissatisfaction from the voice itself - it’s naturally far more emotive than text on a page. As well as this, you’ll be able to use this type of feedback to amplify both the positive and negative feedback internally. Everything from playing the voice clip explaining someone’s gratitude, right through to taking a serious issue up to the board to show them just how bad things are right now.
Another option you can explore to make feedback more real and more interactive is to enable customers to include photos. Allow them to take and share a picture of exactly what it is that they’re experiencing. If they’re in a bank and the queue is long, it’s hard to express how bad the situation is in words. But a photo with a verbatim comment beside it gets people thinking in a different way. Likewise, there are now more possibilities around video. With 4G connections and unlimited data packages, consumers increasingly have the ability to take and share a video of their experience.
But before we get too excited about future possibilities, it’s worth remembering the impact that these new channels could have. While positive feedback via photo and video will be even more powerful, so will negative feedback - it’s the difference between reading about the unclean hotel room and seeing how bad it actually was (grime and all). There will be challenges in terms of managing the brand estate, so it has to be handled and managed with care.
With the opportunities that come with things like photo and video feedback, there is also a real risk that brands fail to respond in a timely manner and therefore the consumer gets more frustrated and fed up.
As technology advances, the challenge is not just about using it in an innovative way, it’s about keeping on top of the basics. What you do with feedback and how quickly you react to it will still be one of the most important things in your customer’s eyes.
To find out more about how to make your customer feedback more fun and engaging for your customers, grab a copy of our eBook: How to Put the Fun Back into Customer Feedback:
