How to Easily Capture Customer Feedback Online

Question: What do customers want from your business?

Now... Imagine if you could get the answer straight from your customers. 🤔

That’s what customer feedback is all about. When you collect customer feedback, you gain access to your customers’ minds. Not only is customer feedback the voice of the customer, but their feedback would also give you ideas on how you could improve your business based on their wants and needs.

Here are some methods you can use to easily obtain customer feedback online:

1. Social Media Channels
2. Customer Analytics
3. Customer Surveys
4. Email

Let’s get to it! 🙌

Social Media Channels

Billions of people engage with social media communities on a daily basis.

According to Statista, as of January 2020, there are:

• 2.44 billion active Facebook users
• 1 billion active Instagram users
• 340 million active Twitter users

Many of these active users follow businesses on social media. On Instagram alone, 90% of accounts follow a business. And not just that, users interact with these businesses too! According to The Manifest’s survey report, 96% of consumers interact with the brands they follow on social media.

Social Listening

Social listening is what you call the process of tracking mentions and conversations related to your brand on social media platforms. It’s a good way to keep tabs on how people feel about your company and allows you to respond right away to positive or negative feedback via online social channels.

For example, Adobe XD released a February 2020 update and mentioned it on Twitter — to which a lot of users replied. Some of the comments of that thread are feedback like this one:

This feedback came in organically by the user and allows Adobe to hear the frustrations and features users are still waiting for. And you don’t have to do this process manually. There are tools like Hootsuite and Buffer that would help you track your social media presence.

Do you see now how social media platforms could be a nest of customer feedback? 🧐

Feedback Experiences

There are also digital platforms — like Tapkit that enable you to collect feedback through fun mobile-first experiences. Tapkit merges social learnings and mobile-culture to create feedback that is both engaging and fun to design and experience for the customer. Here’s an example:

Designed right inside an easy-to-use mobile canvas builder using drag and drop style widgets you can tinker away to your heart’s content. Once published you’ll be able to share your experience with the world in all your favourite places through a unique URL. Pop the link in a messenger of your choice or behind a button in your email campaigns. It’s all up to you!

You can even connect it naturally behind your instagram stories for a truly native experience.

Social Media Polls

Most major social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn have a built-in polling tool. Take a look at how Evernote uses Twitter’s polling feature to ask users where they access the app most often:

Using social media polls to collect feedback would enable you to engage your customers through fun, witty, and easy questions. 👍

Customer Analytics

Using customer analytics to understand your customers is easy since this method doesn’t require your customers to answer a question from you.

In fact, all they have to do is use your product. Then, you could use tools like Mixpanel to analyse user behavior across your sites and apps.

Customer analytics tell you how customers use your product and how they interact with your company. This is a great way to spot weaknesses before they become complaints. 👍

Customer Surveys

In the world of customer feedback, the most ancient way of collecting feedback is through surveys. 📜Some even say that surveys are the bread and butter for getting feedback. However, you should know that customer surveys come in different forms and sizes.

Long Surveys

For all intent and purposes, long surveys aren’t really that long (nor should you make them long). But they are considered long since they usually contain more than 3 questions. When using long surveys to collect feedback, ask only the questions that matter. Also, use open-ended questions rather than limiting the possible answers through a multiple choice.

Net Promoter Score

Have you ever seen one of those questions with a scale of 0-10 that looks like this?

NPS is a management tool that helps measure customer feedback and their willingness to recommend your products or services to others. This is one of the most common methods you see that helps gauge customer’s overall satisfaction and loyalty to the brand.

With NPS, customers are classified into three categories depending on their rating:

• Detractors: Those with scores lower or equal to 6. These people aren’t satisfied with the service or product and will probably not purchase again.
• Passives: Those who gave a 7 or 8. They are considered “satisfied” customers but would easily switch to a competitor if given the opportunity.
• Promoters: These are those who answered 9 or 10. Their score says it all — they love your products or services and would likely buy from you again and recommend your business to others.

What’s good about using NPS in collecting customer feedback online is that it’s efficient and easy for both you and the customers. 😀

Feedback Boxes

Providing customers with a quick and direct way to give feedback works. You might’ve noticed some sites with feedback boxes or forms below or at the side of their site that usually has a variant of this question:

“Are you satisfied?”

For example, Hotjar always pops a little box in their blog articles to ask readers how they feel about the article/post. Even Google has one on their support articles and guides asking “Was this helpful? Yes or No”

Email

Reaching out through email does work wonders. Compared with all the methods described above, sending an email to your customers and asking for feedback would help you understand the context of their experience. Of course, you don’t have to craft every single email from scratch (imagine having to do that when you have thousands of customers).

However, make sure your emails sound like it comes from a real person.

For example, here’s how GetResponse does it:

Noticed the low-key question asking for feedback? Plus, the wording and GIF make it sound like it’s really for me. Doing this would not only help you dig deeper, reaching out to your customers would create a personalised engagement between your company and them.

Wrap Up

As you can see, it’s not difficult to collect feedback from your customers online and through social media. However, it does need some work on your side whether you’re using social media channels, analytics, surveys, emails, or all of them.

What’s important is that you do it regularly so you would have a constant understanding of how your customers feel about your business. 👍