Customer feedback, both negative and positive, serves as a guide to help you make improvements to your business that will ultimately lead to growth and success. Furthermore, it is a tool for measuring the satisfaction among your current customers, which will help you determine what you need to do in order to keep their business.
All things considered, customer feedback is invaluable to your company. Without it, you won’t know where you stand with customers, and you probably won’t be able to strategize effectively for growth. However, not all customer feedback systems are created equal. If you notice these signs in your own system, it may be high time to make some changes.
1. Customers have a hard time giving you feedback
Customers shouldn’t have to jump through multiple hoops just to give you feedback because a) giving feedback is optional and 2) making it hard for them to give feedback quickly makes them decide not to do so at all. This is true for companies that have customers answering unnecessarily lengthy surveys or signing up for an account on their website just to give a review. If your company is guilty of this, then you’re probably missing out on a lot of customer feedback that can help put you on the right track.
Luckily, there are many ways you can address this problem. The best one is to adopt comprehensive feedback collection systems such as the voice of customer survey platforms. By providing customers with easier ways to give feedback, they are more willing to do so and are often more honest about their answers. Furthermore, they feel heard and valued, which ultimately motivates them to become loyal to your brand.
2. You ask for feedback too early or too late
Yes, there is a right time to ask for feedback, and that depends on the nature of your product or services. For instance, if the feedback is for the resolution of a tech problem, then customers should be prompted for feedback right after the call. But if the feedback is for a skincare product, it is better to ask customers at least a few days after their receipt of the order to give them enough time to test it out.
When you ask too early and a customer doesn’t have enough experience with the product or service to provide feedback, they likely won’t give feedback at all and forget about it altogether. When you ask too late, on the other hand, customers will probably already have forgotten about their initial experience with the product or service. Either way, it’s an ineffective way to gather customer feedback.
3. Feedback is used against employees
Feedback should be used to improve products or services. However, it shouldn’t be used to humiliate or punish employees in any way. Aside from being unethical, it’s not an effective way to use feedback for the betterment of the business. If anything, it only makes things worse by disgruntling employees, which often leads to lower productivity, high attrition rates, and poor customer service.
Instead, feedback should be used to provide constructive criticism to employees. For example, if surveys say that some customer service employees cannot customer queries well, identify the reasons behind the issue. Then, determine appropriate actions, such as additional employee training or improvement of resource materials.
4. You’re not following up with complaints
Few business owners want to deal with complaints, but it is a part of business that will never go away no matter how well you perform. Resolving complaints can mean the difference between losing a customer (and having them speak negatively about your business to others) and keeping them despite their dissatisfaction with your business. However, it is not only crucial to resolve customer complaints; it’s also important to follow-up with customers and see if their complaints have been resolved satisfactorily. Why? Because complaints may have been resolved, but that doesn’t mean customers are happy about it.
Following up on complaints can give you valuable insight on what you can to do avoid complaints in the future, as well as what you can do improve complaint resolution as a whole. Remember that resolving complaints is just one thing; you also have to know if they are being handled effectively.
Customer feedback gives you tangible data to use as a basis for improvements, strategies, and corrections in your business. That said, having an effective customer feedback system is paramount in ensuring customer satisfaction–and ultimately, optimal business growth. If you notice these signs in your own system, however, you may need to make some modifications–or perhaps reform your entire system altogether.