How to Gather Client Feedback
The best way to know if you’re meeting your customers’ needs — with your marketing efforts or otherwise — is to ask them. That’s why gathering client feedback is essential to improving and growing your business. This post explains how to gather client feedback and use it to better your brand.
Why Ask Clients for Feeback?
The most obvious reason to gather client feedback is that you want your business to serve them as well as possible. After all, happy clients are critical to business success. But there’s more.
Gather client feedback to:
- Focus on Customers. Client feedback helps you keep your customers at the heart of your decision-making. Putting your customers first ensures you focus your business decisions where they should be — on them.
- Improve Offerings. Your business won’t prosper if your offerings remain stagnant. Client feedback helps you know where you’re succeeding and what products or services you need to improve. It can also give you insight into what improvements to make.
- Keep Current Customers. It’s easier (and cheaper) to keep the clients you already have than replace them. Gathering and implementing client feedback helps them feel heard and valued.
- Solicit Reviews. Reviews are essential for attracting new customers and growing your business. You can solicit reviews while you’re asking for client feedback.
- Enhance Messaging. Your content marketing efforts revolve around serving people’s information needs and helping them understand how your products or services alleviate their concerns. Current clients are wonderful resources to determine how well you’re doing this and how your content strategy could improve. Feedback will help you make your content marketing more useful.
Positive and negative client feedback is essential for your business’s growth. Positive feedback helps you know when you’re on the right track and what you should do more. Negative or constructive feedback tells you where you can improve and identifies places for growth.
How to Gather Client Feedback
You can gather client feedback in multiple ways and at various times in your customer relationship. Here are some of the methods to consider. Your feedback strategy likely will be a combination of various approaches.
The most common method for gathering feedback is sending a customer survey right after they make a purchase or use your service. It’s an excellent time to ask for feedback because the experience with your business is still at the top of their mind.
You can automate these email feedback campaigns, eliminating the need to send messages individually. The only issue with email surveys is that they have a low response rate, but any response makes it worth your time to set up.
Of course, you can do email surveys anytime, not just after a sale. You may consider doing survey feedback campaigns a couple of times a year. If you use the same survey, you can track trends over time, which is a really helpful way to see if the changes you made are working.
Interviews
Doing short interviews with all or some of your clients once or twice a year will yield rich feedback for your brand. You’ll need to decide which clients to interview and when. Then create a set list of questions to ask each of them, being willing to veer from the list during each discussion.
Scheduling and conducting interviews is more time-consuming than other methods of gathering feedback for you and the client. Still, the value of the information you’ll receive with strong questions, an effective interviewer, and good note-taking is unparalleled.
SMS Surveys
Almost everyone opens a text message within three minutes of receiving it. So, a text message survey is sure to be seen.
Like email surveys, you can automate these campaigns, so you don’t have to worry about sending them. You just need customers’ cell phone numbers.
Response rates on SMS surveys also are relatively low, but you know customers will at least see and consider your survey.
Written Feedback
Some business owners still like to gather feedback the old-fashioned way through pen and paper.
Written feedback surveys work best for small businesses, restaurants, etc., where team members can distribute them as part of the checkout process (aka: attached to or provided with the receipt).
The shorter and easier the survey is, the more likely people are to complete it. Also, providing an incentive, like a free product during the customer’s next visit, makes them more likely to respond.
Using incentives like free products, discounts, or even drawings for prizes related to your business will always increase the response rate on any feedback tool. Consider this approach with any of these methods.
Online Surveys
You can use an online survey tool like SurveyMonkey or a pop-up builder like OptinMonster to create pop-up surveys on your website.
You can set these surveys to trigger when people do various things on your site, like checking out, exiting your site, or completing a contact form.
These surveys work well because they reach people while they’re having an experience with your brand.
Informal Channels
It’s worth noting that not all feedback you receive from clients will be through formal channels. Pay attention to what customers and potential customers say about your brand online, including on social media.
Set up a Google Alert for your brand’s name and monitor when people mention your brand online.
Pay attention to forums or discussion groups where people may discuss your brand.
And, of course, review questions people post on the chatbot on your website. Their queries could give you insight into how to serve them better.
Don’t have a chat option on your site? You’re missing an opportunity to better serve your customers with easy-to-access, fast information. Also, you’re losing the chance to learn from their questions and concerns. We recommend Podium for its ease of use and customer focus.
Gathering Client Feedback
You can gather client feedback in multiple ways. The best strategy likely is a combination of the methods described above so that you can gather views from various clients at different points in their buyer’s journey. Just remember that it’s vital to use the information you collect. Don’t survey customers for the sake of doing it.
Need help distributing client feedback surveys via email or SMS? Want to establish an email campaign to gather information a couple of times a year? Looking to improve your content marketing efforts as a result of feedback you’ve already received? Content Journey can help you with those efforts and more. Book a call, and let’s discuss how to gather client feedback and use it to grow your business.
