About 7 in 10 Americans say they are willing to spend more on companies that provide great customer service. Conversely, 91% of unhappy customers are not likely to do business with you again. It’s a fact of life and just plain common sense: better customer service is good for both you and your customer.
Where to start?
Customer feedback is one of the best and fastest ways to improve your customer service. It tells you exactly what customers think about your business and gives you a clear picture on what you need to improve.
Moreover, asking for feedback shows your customer that you care. It provides both an opportunity to address customer concerns and complaints and a possible turning point for a bad customer service experience. It’s that powerful.
Here are 5 Efficient Ways To Gather Customer Feedback On Your Website.
- Surveys
Surveys are the most basic way to gather feedback from your customers. They’re surprisingly easy to set up and distribute. Plus, they’re repeatable and easy to analyze.
What is more, they’re even easier to do over the Internet. Survey applications like SurveyMonkey and GoogleForms allow you to create and distribute survey forms for free. Now that’s a great investment!
Surveys come in two forms: short and long. Short surveys like are ideal for short, specific questions that you can place on your website pages. They’re fast, efficient, and more likely to solicit a response from your customers. Long surveys, on the other hand, are for comprehensive studies that require a lot of details. Although they’re more difficult to distribute, they can give you plenty of information.
Each type has its own advantages and disadvantages. The key is understanding which survey type is appropriate per situation. Ideally, you should limit on-site surveys to 2-3 questions and save the long surveys for focused groups.
- Social Media
Applications like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram let you interact with your customers at a personal level. This translates to greater trust and, consequently, more business. 51% of Facebook users and 64% of Twitter users prefer to purchase from brands they follow on social media. Given that there are 2.34 billion social media users worldwide, it’s high time businesses follow suit.
- Analytics
Curious to know how your customers behave? Analytics can give you tons of information without asking a single question.
In recent years, applications like Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics have allowed businesses to track and study customer behavior on their websites. Using analytics software, you can track everything including the traffic your website receives, the bounce rate of your content pages, the effectiveness of your advertisements, and much more. This is a great way to see which of your strategies are effective and how you can improve.
Looking for a way to make your site more user-friendly? Use a google mobile optimizer to maximize your site’s performance across different platforms.
- Usability Tests
Every product needs to be tested before it is launched. Usability tests give you a glimpse on how people use your website (e.g. which sections are easy to understand or difficult to use, which components are effective or ineffective, etc.).
Back in the day, you needed to hire a research firm to get this kind of data. It was expensive and usually quite slow. With today’s technology, you can use software and automation tools to do the studies for your. Not only is this much cheaper, it’s much quicker as well.
Gathering customer feedback is one of the most important things for your business moving forward. Using these tools, you can deliver better service and build loyalty among your customers. Remember: keep your customers happy and they’ll keep you happy as well!