In today’s highly competitive market, companies cannot afford not to have an informed Customer Experience (CX) strategy backed by a strong Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme. You need to be able to understand and adapt to ever-changing customer needs and to identify and fix pain points to improve the customer experience.
Collecting customer feedback will give you valuable insight into customer perceptions, their product and service needs, as well as how they want to engage with you and what they want from the brand experience. Identifying customer needs allows you to build your business on a strong foundation of customer-centricity, with the outcome of improved CX, customer retention, and the ultimately, the business bottom line.
Although businesses have prioritised obtaining feedback to win over prospective or lost clients, the focus has mainly been on negative feedback and damage control. A shift in perspective on customer feedback is needed so that businesses move to a more pre-emptive approach, rather than a reactive one. We outline 7 channels that you can use to gather feedback and listen to the voice of your customer.
1. Email
Most people have an email account that they check regularly, which means you have a large potential reach. Sending out regular emails that request feedback will give your customer confidence that you value their feedback, particularly when it relates directly to a purchase they made or an interaction they had with your business recently. There are numerous benefits to making use of email as a tool to collect customer feedback.
2. SMS
The average mobile phone user picks up their phone around 215 times per day. It’s no wonder then that SMS is one of the most reliable and widely used forms of B2C communication. It’s cost-effective and a quick and easy way to collect feedback with a high engagement rate. You can increase response rates by 67% when using two-way or conversational SMS as a survey channel.
3. Social media
A third of consumers use social media to talk about their experiences with brands and, as such, this platform may provide you with a more honest view of customer feedback. It also affords you with an opportunity to engage in real-time dialogue with customers.
4. Website
If you have a high volume of visitors to your website, consider a short survey on a dedicated page or pop-up box where customers can quickly answer a few questions without disrupting their browsing, thus increasing the response rate. Website analytics is also a source of feedback, particularly into customer behaviours.
Moreover, a good way to get unsolicited feedback is through reviews, particularly on third-party websites where your products or services are listed. Most consumers today are reluctant to buy goods and services from businesses with negative online reviews that have not been addressed by the company in question.
5. Interviewing customers
Engaging directly with the customer to ask pertinent questions often provides the most relevant and valuable feedback. Based on the customers’ response, follow-up questions can be asked to gather additional insights and clarification. Furthermore, personal interviews also cultivate a deeper relationship with customers.
6. Listen to recorded customer calls
This is a particularly useful way to collect feedback within the contact centre or from customer-facing employees. Conversations that your customers have with agents or employees can provide you with insightful information into perceptions, expectations, and areas of improvements. It also provides an opportunity for sentiment analysis.
7. Post-call surveys
Post-call voice surveys are undoubtedly the most effective way of gathering customer feedback after a call within a contact centre environment. A post-call survey is a recorded survey that plays once the call between the agent and customer is complete. Customers use their dial pad to select the rating they wish to leave per question and, in some solutions, are asked to leave a voice message. Across all survey channels, post-call voice surveys receive the highest response rate, with most contact centres comfortably exceeding 60% response rates (with many reaching closer than 80% response rates).
It is important that customers feel that the feedback they are sending is being correctly received, interpreted, and that you will respond to their concerns. Gathering customer feedback is essentially a data-gathering exercise – and to be effective, the process should support all customer engagement channels, enable real-time data collection, and seamlessly integrate into your telephony environment. This means that, as the owner of the VoC programme, you can focus on the results and interpretation of the data and not the collection mechanism.
Our revolutionary software, Eyerys, helps you spot pain points and weak links that are damaging the customer experience. Take the next step and proactively respond to insights that will increase customer loyalty, advocacy, and profitability. Let customers tell you what they think of your business via multiple channels that work for them. Our software helps you to listen to the voice of the customer and attain healthy response rates across the entire channel spectrum. Eyerys surveys include call-centre IVR, social, email, SMS, USSD, weblink, kiosk, web-chat, QR code, tablet, near field communication (NFC), computer assisted telephonic interviews (CATI), and computer assisted personal interviews (CAPI). Book a demo now.