Customer Feedback Is An Essential Part Of A Great Customer Experience Strategy
When it comes to organic marketing, word-of-mouth is often hailed as the most revered strategy. It solely relies on creating a positive customer experience to gain more personal recommendations about a brand. In this pursuit, companies employ various customer feedback tactics, such as surveys, to understand what customers think about their brand.
But the question is – do customers even take the time to complete a survey?
Well, it might be surprising but studies say that about 89% of active 17 million users are more likely to complete a questionnaire with ten questions on average or less. So, contrary to what many of us think, not all customers are averse to offering feedback, which is an all-important tool for brands to flourish.
But why is customer feedback so important?
Customer feedback is not merely some words; it is the most reliable and the best means to gather knowledge about your business. Customer feedback comes with layers of implications, pointing out where your business excels, and the areas of improvement. It also creates an overall positive impression about a brand that is committed to delivering excellence. And very importantly, it shows what customers expect from you, which is essential information to keep your clients happy.
What makes a solid customer experience strategy?
To provide a great customer experience, one needs a great CX strategy. Any customer-centric organization must devise a CX strategy that takes care of all customer touch-points. Here are the main elements of a reliable CX strategy to heed.
- Seamless Communication: Incorporating seamless communication is paramount to achieving an efficacious customer service experience. For this reason, employees must have good communication skills to adhere to the customer-friendly culture of the firm.
- Multiple Channels: Mediums like websites and social media can be incorporated to enable effortless access to information. Using numerous channels lets a business diversify its CX strategy with an omnichannel customer experience.
- Timely Response: Attending to customer concerns and timely resolving them can significantly impact the overall customer experience. This approach improves the brand recall value of the company and helps set responsible customer service.
- Looking for Opportunities: An effective CX strategy must have a fallback plan to transform any unpleasant customer experience into a top-notch one by a sincere response to their grievances. Looking for such opportunities will lead to building a dedicated CX process.
- Stressing on the Human Touch: Creating a cordial relationship with the customers is imperative to a delightful CX strategy. Your tactics must create an effortless in-person experience with the Human Touch element in it.
How Is Customer Feedback Linked To CX? And How Can It Be Used To Improve CX?
Customer feedback can help build a robust and satisfying customer experience.
How?
Customer feedback can unravel where the service created a positive influence and areas where its performance was poor. This way, your business can understand and modify your CX strategy to improve the customer experience. Directly or indirectly, customer feedback can influence customer experience by facilitating involvement and nurturing a relationship of trust.
Here are some ways feedback helps your business with the CX strategy.
#1: Customer feedback can generate positive reviews and actualize personal recommendations. According to a study by Kellerfay, “Personal recommendations are the top motivation for purchase decisions, not just while finalizing the sale but at every step of the purchase cycle.”
#2: Customer feedback and testimonials help gain new customers. Positive customer feedback generates a sense of faith and reliability among those who want to interact with your brand.
#3: Asking for feedback instills a sense of importance and belonging in your customers; they realize they are important to your brand and their opinions matter. This helps develop and strengthen the brand-customer bonding, which is a brilliant way to help you retain old customers creating a loyal customer base.
#4: Negative feedback highlights the areas that need your focus and improvement. It allows you to improve your service and CX strategy as a whole.
Some Of The Most Effective Practices To Collect Customer Feedback
Facilitating a buoyant growth of a business must involve the effective collection of customer feedback. Figures show that 52% of customers want companies to ask for feedback about customer experience. About 90% have a favorable view of companies who ask for any feedback at all. Here are some ways to prioritize your customer’s preferences via compiling their feedback.
- Use NPS: Using Net Promoter Score will ask simple questions where the customer will rate the service on a scale of 1-10 based on their experience. This strategy is effective as customers don’t need to fill up pages after pages of exasperating surveys.
- Instantaneous Feedback Requests: Immediately after an appointment is complete, send them quick text messages asking for feedback. This approach helps you devise a remedy for any grievance swiftly.
- Incentivize Survey Participation: It takes a significant amount of time and energy to fill up a comprehensive questionnaire. If you want honest feedback to improve your products and services, you can encourage your customers to take the survey honestly by offering them compensation for their time.
- Live Chat Data: Live chat can be an excellent source of customer feedback. Live to chat is a touch-point that can give you meaningful and real-time feedback data.
Final Thoughts
Prominent brands such as Starbucks, Slack, Airbnb, GoIbibo, Dollar Shave Club, and Microsoft employ various feedback instruments. These include social media polls, live chats, NPS, and survey questionnaires for practical sentiment analysis of customers to find if their feedback is positive, negative, or neutral.
In recent times, customer experience has been deemed as the numero uno factor that can differentiate brands. Research suggests that nearly 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a more pleasant experience. This further highlights the significance and power of collecting customer feedback when almost 90% of customers favor brands that ask for their views.
