5 step customer feedback - fi

7/28/2019 5 Step Customer Feedback - FI

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ContentsIntroduction: 1

STEP 1: Set goals 2

STEP 2: Choose a solution 3

STEP 3: Put it everywhere 5

STEP 4: Respond in a timely manner 6

STEP 5: Measure, measure, measure 8

Conclusion: Rinse and Repeat 9

Sources: 10

Steps to

Collecting

Amazing

Customer

Feedback



1 | 5 Steps to Collecting Amazing Customer Feedback

Introduction:

You’re probably reading this because you want customer eedback.

But hold your horses! You need to ask yoursel a ew questions rst.

Most people would say that you should start getting customer eedbackby simply listening to your customers. Most people would be wrong.

Customer eedback is not an end in itsel. Sure, it will make your custom-

ers eel warm and uzzy inside when you ask them i there is anything youcan do to improve their experience with your brand. But warm and uzzyeelings are impossible to measure and don’t provide concrete business

value.

Beore you solicit customer eedback, step back and think about whyyou want to collect customer eedback in the rst place. Do you want to

improve your customer experience? Build better products? Identiy bugsin your code? Drive more sales? All o the above?

Once you have a single, ocused goal in mind, you will be able to begin the

process o determining how your company will collect customer eedback,where that eedback will go, what should be done about the eedback col-lected, and how to respond to eedback in a way that lets customers know

that you are listening.

Customize Your Getsatisfaction Feedback Widget




STEP 1: Set goals

You know you want to solicit customer eedback, but what type o

eedback? Perhaps you’re launching a new product and want your existingcustomers to tell you how it can be improved beore launch. Maybe youhave a lot o visitors coming to your website but none o them are convert-

ing into customers and you want to know why. Or maybe you have a loyalcustomer base and want some testimonials to spruce up your marketingmaterials.

Beore you start chatting it up with your customers, you need to knowwhat type o inormation you want to collect rom the conversation. Notevery word needs to be pre-determined and you will denitely learn about

things you would never even think to ask about along the way, but you needto start out with an end goal in mind or you’re setting yoursel up or disas-

ter.

Think about it this way: does your company use social media just or the

sake o using social media? Or because everybody else is? Or because it’sthe hot new thing? O course not! You might use your corporate Twitter

handle to tweet out the latest and greatest cat video here and there, but,

or the most part, you use social media as a business tool. Otentimes, themarketing team owns social media and so the goal is to raise brand aware-ness and educate consumers about your product. Other times, social me-

dia is driven by the support sta and used to answer customer questionsand increase customer satisaction. What and how you tweet is driven by

why you tweet. Collecting customer eedback is no dierent.

Once you establish your eedback goals, you can determine how to in-tegrate customer eedback into your daily workfow. I you want eedbackrom existing customers, you need a solution that opens up communica-

tion channels with existing customers. I you want to measure and increasecustomer satisaction, you need to integrate a eedback mechanism that

lets customer report problems or annoyances they encounter with yourproduct. We will get to how to do these things later. For now, just make sureyou have an explicit goal in mind. Got it? Good. It should be ocused enoughthat you can write it on a single line.

My customer eedback goal is:




STEP 2: Choose a solution

Traditionally, customer eedback was collected through tools such

as surveys, polls, or expensive, time-consuming ocus groups. These canbe distributed in a variety o ways, including email, your website, or on so-cial media sites. Surveys and polls are based on pre-set questions and al-

low a statistical review o answers. I you are want customer eedback on aew specic areas o interest, a survey might be the right tool or you.

The drawback o surveys and polls is that they are private and thereore,

or reasons o scalability, orce customers to give eedback in a quantita-tive manner. Let’s say you run a chair company and want to survey all yourcustomers who have bought you latest model, the Purple Pedestal. With a

survey, you can reach out to all o these customers by emailing them a sur-vey. You let them know that it is just 5 questions, you’re asking them to rate

their experience on a scale o 1-4, and it will take no more than 3 minutes tocomplete, so you get an impressive 20 percent response rate.

You now have 300 responses. Lucky you! Wait… but what do these re-sponses mean??? Oh yes, your company has a snazzy data analyst who willdice up the replies and let you know that your customers are a 3. Wait, what

does that mean? This example illustrates the limits o numerical customereedback. It can be great or tracking improvement in customer satisac-tion, but in and o itsel it tells you very little.

I you’re not convinced, consider the ollowing rom Kampyle’s co-ound-

er and CEO, Ariel Finkelstein:

You can use surveys and polls to ask ‘site-level’ questions such as: “Where

did you hear about our site?” “What are you looking or?” “Who are you?”

The answers to these questions can help you to know your users better, but

they will not provide quantitative inormation on why your customers behave

they way they do on your Web site. In addition, your survey and polling data

is ultimately reviewed rom a statistical analysis view, which may cause the

solution to be relevant mainly to large Web sites with a lot o trac or to a

specic group o your customers. This means that not all types o businesses

can benet equally rom these tools.

What Finkelstein is saying is that surveys and polls are great or certaintypes o eedback, but not or all types o eedback. The frst shortcom-

ing o a eedback mechanism where you determine the questions isthat it is a eedback mechanism where you determine the questions.Otentimes, your customers are acing hurdles that you can’t even imagine

exist, like not understanding basic eatures o your service or having prob-lems with something that you take or granted. Choosing a eedback toolthat lets your customers give open-ended eedback is essential to getting

a 360 degree view o your customer experience.

How can you gather eedback that gives you the deepest insights intoall aspects o your customers’ experience? Here are some criteria to thinkabout:

1. Is it scalable? Let’s ace it: you want customer eedback, buthow much time do you have to read and respond to each piece

o eedback? At the same time, customers shouldn’t eel liketheir eedback disappears into a black hole. Beore you choosea customer eedback solution, make sure it will allow you to

communicate with your customers on a one-to-many basis.




2. Does it enable conversations? Open conversations allowcustomers to give more nuanced inormation on what they arelooking or. At times, they might even fnd that you already oer what

they are asking or, but didn’t even know it. I it’s publicly available,uture customers with the same eedback will fnd the conversationand the company’s answer without requiring a direct interaction with

your company.

3. Is it where your customers are? I your company only sellsproducts to people in Argentina, should you advertise in TheWashington Post? Probably not. Buenos Aires Herald? Defnitely.

Likewise, you need to know where your customers are — and thengo there — to get their eedback. For gaming companies, this mightbe on Facebook. For most people, Google is the deault channel

or fnding inormation about, well, anything. Finding a solutionthat can reach your customers through the channels where yourcustomers already are is crucial.




STEP 3: Put it everywhere

Going along with the theme o being “everywhere your customers

are,” once you start collecting customer eedback, you need to make iteasy or customers to give you eedback anytime, anywhere. Here aresome suggestions or places you can ask or eedback:

1. Your website’s homepage (eedback rom rst time visitors)

2. Your shopping cart (eedback rom potential buyers)

3. Facebook (eedback rom your most social customers)

4. Your Help page (eedback rom people how are encounteringproblems)

5. In your company’s email signature (eedback rom everyone you

communicate with)6. Within the customer interace (eedback rom current customers)

7. Mobile devices or ‘anywhere’, literally

O course, there are many more places you could include a eedback

widget or link, but these are some suggestions to get you started. Providingan online eedback channel in many dierent areas o your site greatly in-creases the chances a user will give you his or her opinion ensures and you

are getting eedback rom current customers, potential customers, andeverything in between. Providing eedback widgets with product-speciceedback (such as eedback on your stroller on the stroller product page) is

another great way to encourage communication. Asking or general eed-back can overwhelm a person, but asking or eedback on something veryspecic is easier and thus will increase your response rate.

Time to get interactive again. Now that you have our seven suggestions

o where you can include a eedback channel, name three places you wantto ask or eedback and why:

1.

2.

3.




STEP 4: Respond in a timely manner

We know what you want rom your customers, but what do they want

rom you? Surprisingly, it’s oten much simpler than actually creating thatleopard print iPhone case they requested. They want to eel heard. Con-sider the ollowing rom Inc. magazine:

When you have made a change that is customer-driven and meaningul, close

the loop with the customers (personally or via other channels) who were part o

the eedback process, Wood advises. “This step is critical, because customers

will be encouraged to give input i they know they are being heard and know

they may be driving change.” You might set up your customer eedback

mailbox to generate an automatic response initially thanking customers or

their eedback, but you still need to ollow up ater the problem is correctedand get back to that customer with a more detailed response. “One o the

most important things to remember is that these are human beings and i you

don’t have that kind o communication and close the eedback loop, you don’t

have the human touch between yoursel and the customer,” Finkelstein says.

“That’s a very big loss or any company.”

Part o the benet o customer eedback is getting honest, actionableeedback rom your customers. Obvious, right? A less obvious benet ismaking a personal connection with your customers, which is simple as long

as you get back to your customers in a timely ashion.

Dierent types o eedback require dierent levels o eedback. A prob-lem should take rst priority, ollowed by a question, ideas, and nally,

praise. Don’t misunderstand: all types o eedback should be replied to bya company employee. Prioritizing your workfow around topic types, how-ever, will help you keep customer satisaction high. The Get Satisaction

platorm includes topic statuses, which allow you to set a status such as“under consideration” or “not planned” on a piece o eedback to let cus-tomers know that the company has viewed it.

The guide below gives useul inormation on when to set a particular sta-

tus on a topic. To get started with planning your own eedback responsestrategy, determine the response times that are appropriate or your

company by flling in the blanks below:

Problems

Response

Actual hours to 1st response

Goal: hours to 1st response

Status:

• Not a problem: Obviously not caused by our product

• Acknowledged: We can reproduce the problem and have led adeect. Make sure a corresponding bug number has been led withinproduct development system, and that tracking number is added as

a tag or UDC

• In Progress: Problem is currently being addressed

• Solved: The x has been implemented. Use re-direct (when

applicable) to point to Company Update announcing the x.

Questions

Actual hours to 1st response

Goal: hours to 1st response




Status:

•Answered: Questions related to your company or service should beanswered

• Doesn’t need an answer: Anything unrelated to your companyor service, or topics that are created to be responded to by other

members.

Ideas

Actual: Post a reply and, i possible, an opinion w/in ___ hours

Goal: Post a reply and, i possible, an opinion w/in ___ hours (Development and Productteam highly encouraged to join these conversations)

Status:

• No Status: Keep all new ideas without a status. Status isdetermined in cooperation with the development or product team.

• Under consideration: When the development or product teamdetermines that the idea is worth pursuing, but a project plan hasn’tbeen created.

• Planned: When a product plan has been created and the idea is

slated or release

• Not Planned: When it’s either clear that an idea won’t be developed,

or the development or product team rejects it.

• Implemented: Once implemented, update topic and use the

Redirect tool to point to the company update/blog post announcingthe new eature.

Praise

Actual: Acknowledgment within ___ hours o post

Goal: Acknowledgment within ___ hours o post

Status: Mark as “Complete” in Management View so these don’t come up under “Needsattention” flter.

Archive: Only i Praise reers to a change that is no longer relevant to the service, thuscausing conusion or other community members.




STEP 5: Measure, measure, measure

“Data collection is not the goal of customer feedback;

humanizing and improving your business is the goal”

You’ve done an incredible job o setting a goal, choosing a tool, put-ting it everywhere, and responding to customer eedback. To get any value

out o this eedback, aside rom those warm and uzzy eelings rom yourcustomers, you need to take the inormation you’ve gathered and put it togood use.

While every customer eedback goal requires a dierent set o measure-ment criteria, here are some suggested metrics to get you started:

1. Total number o eedback submissions collected

2. Total visitors to eedback site or widget (note: only applies to

publicly available eedback tools).

3. Most active eedback topics (by number o replies and/or up votes)

4. Most visited eedback topics

5. Overall customer sentiment (note: this is easily measured with

Get Satisaction’s sel-reported sentiment but may be possible tomeasure with other platorms as well)

6. Number o employee responses

Measuring and reporting on metrics is essential, not just to know i youare xing individual customers’ problems, but because putting an ecient

process in place or dealing with customer eedback helps you cultivate aloyal customer base. Consider the ollowing rom The Wall Street Jour-nal:

Learning rom ailures is more important than simply xing problems or

individual customers, because process improvements increase overall

customer satisaction and thus have a direct impact on the bottom line.

But companies generally obtain and study only a raction o the service-ailure

data that could be gathered rom customers, employees and managers. Even

when managers agree that customer eedback is essential, there is oten poor

inormation fow between the division that collects and deals with customerproblems and the rest o the organization.

In some cases, one study revealed, the more negative eedback a customer-

service department collects, the more isolated that department becomes,

because it doesn’t want to be seen by the company at large as a source o

riction.

Which is why the nal step o measuring eedback is sharing your nd-ings with your team and, when possible, your entire company, on a regularbasis. A weekly email update with customer eedback stats and commen-

tary is an excellent way o keeping everyone up to date. This also keepsevery department accountable or improvement with regards to customersatisaction.




Conclusion: Rinse and Repeat

The dierence between a good company and a great company is not

a dierence in technology, money, or super-genius brainpower. The dier-ence lies in how well you know your customers and how well, through know-ing them, you cultivate a loyal customer base.

There are many reasons you might be interested in customer eedback,but all o these reasons require connecting to your customers and havingopen, productive conversations. Building a community o customers can’t

be done over night and is a continuous process, but its value cannot beoverstated. Ater you’ve gone through the ve steps in this ebook, it’s timeto go through your own eedback process to evaluate:

Have your goals changed?

≤ Are you happy with the tools that you’ve chosen?

≤ Is there anywhere else you should be providing eedback channels?

≤ Are you responding in a timely, riendly manner?

≤ Are you measuring the right things?

Continuously iterating on these ve steps will bring you urther and ur-

ther along the process o building excellent products that your customerstruly want.

Engage Your Customers with the Get Satisfaction Feedback Widget

Click here to set up your own “Feedback Community” powered by Get Satisfaction

http://getsatisfaction.com/plans/

http://getsatisfaction.com/plans/




Sources:

Step 2:

http://chiemarketer.com/online_marketing/0216 -eedback-engagement/

Step 4:

ttp://www.inc.com/guides/2010/07/how-to-make-most-o-customer-

eedback_pagen_2.html

Step 5:

http://www.ehow.com/acts_5163600_denition-customer-eedback.html#ixzz1gdOm6GdF

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122160026028144779.html

Conclusion:

http://getsatisaction.com/explore/widgets

http://chiefmarketer.com/online_marketing/0216

http://www.inc.com/guides/2010/07/how-to-make-most-of-customer-feedback_pagen_2.html



http://getsatisfaction.com/explore/widgets

http://getsatisfaction.com/explore/widgets




http://chiefmarketer.com/online_marketing/0216

5 step customer feedback - fi

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