Collecting feedback is vital for both businesses and individual employees. It is one of the only ways you can continue to grow and find new clients without putting too much effort and money into it. Good service works better than any marketing strategy, and word of mouth creates the best advertisements. However, collecting and managing feedback is an art in itself.
More often than not, clients are not willing to take the time to give feedback. For instance, only 1 in 26 unsatisfied clients will complain, others will just cut you loose and stop dealing with your business. Moreover, sometimes you just do not know what to do with the feedback you received.
In this article, you will learn how to ask for and receive feedback, what to do with it, and alternative ways to collect feedback. Here are 5 easy ways to incorporate client feedback into your business strategy.
1. Choose a Focus Point
There are so many questions that you might want to ask. However, asking all of them is completely ineffective. The human attention span is only 8 seconds. Can you imagine asking your clients to fill out a survey longer than a few questions? It is not rare that clients will actually open a questionnaire but give up midway through because the questions just will not stop.
In order to get detailed client feedback while keeping your surveys short, try to choose a focus point. Aim for improving one specific aspect of your business. Let’s take a look at what kind of areas you can focus on:
- The person a client worked with and their skills (their interpersonal skills, knowledge of the subject, the usability of their answers, and consultations overall).
- Their satisfaction with your company (management, organization, whether a client is satisfied with the efficiency of your team).
- Their satisfaction with the work result (did your services help them, did they end up getting what they wanted, how did they feel after the interaction with your company).
- For real estate agents: property feedback (how did the property correspond to the listing, did they like the home features, price, time frame for moving, etc.).
You can begin working on one focus point, and move on to the other ones after you have found and fixed the initial problems, or send different focus points to different clients.
2. Look up Feedback on Social Media
People may not complain to you directly but they will often take it to their Facebook profiles, Twitter, or Instagram stories. The same goes for the positive feedback.
However, they may not tag your business in their posts so you may not know about their feedback at all until you purposefully search for it.
But, you can not track every post of every person ever to see whether they told you about your offline or for example online sales of t-shirts, right?
Luckily, there are a variety of tools for social monitoring like Hootsuite, Google Alerts, Talkwalker, etc. They automate the process and allow you to see all direct and indirect mentions of your company on social media. You can learn what your clients have said about you without having ever directly asked them. Moreover, you can get notifications when your competitors are mentioned as well. You can see what people like or dislike about them and get an idea of what the overall client expectations are.
You can add information about the negative feedback into CRM solutions such as Daylite and get in touch with the unsatisfied customers to learn more about their experience and find areas for improvement.
3. Gather Post-Project Feedback
Timing is everything in asking for feedback. You do not want to spam your clients on every step of your collaboration or send them surveys long after the project is closed or the service is done. Try to ask for feedback as soon as your service with the client is completed.
There are plenty of tools that will help you to create a feedback survey, such as:
- Mopinion (customizable surveys and results dashboard).
- SurveyMonkey (one of the most famous ones: contains 15 different types of questions, has samples for different purposes and industries, and indicates how much time a survey will take).
- Clarabridge (can analyze texts, sentiments, detect emotions, and categorize language).
The best way to ask for a client’s feedback is to send them a link to a survey via one of the free tools for sending automated emails or text messages.
4. Take Feedback into Account
Conducting a deep analysis of the feedback received will help your company identify areas for improvement and provide a better service. Here are some of the reasons why feedback analysis is of crucial importance:
- Companies will have better client retention and cheaper client acquisition.
- Employees will be able to work more effectively based on the feedback of the areas where they should improve.
- Clients will see that you are trying to provide a great client experience.
Moreover, you can incentivize client feedback by offering discounts or gift cards for their participation. For example, you can use Daylite to create email templates and automate them, in which you’re offering discounts or gift cards in exchange for the feedback provided. This useful trick can greatly improve the number of comments received as well as the overall client satisfaction level.
5. Share the Insights with the Team
You may find useful insights in your client feedback that will be of great use for your employees and management. Passing down knowledge is an essential part of managing feedback.
You could share the best practices that you have learned from the positive feedback, or you may have to explain why you are changing certain aspects of your business strategy after taking the constructive feedback into consideration.
Moreover, you can motivate your employees by praising their efforts and attentiveness to your clients and their experience, and by highlighting direct compliments from the clients’ feedback.
Conclusion
Collecting feedback is not hard when you know exactly how and what to do with it. In 5 easy steps, we have learned to:
- Choose a focus point so you can reduce the survey length to maximize participation.
- Use tools that help you monitor mentions of your brand on social media to see what your audience really thinks about you.
- Send client feedback surveys via email or text message right after you finish working with a client, and offer a discount or gift card for leaving feedback to maximize the probability of your clients completing the survey.
- Take the feedback into account and genuinely try to fix the issues.
- Pass down the knowledge from feedback analysis.
