Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. – Bill Gates

Customer feedback can be one of your greatest sources of learning as your customers are a wealth of information. Customer feedback guides your decision-making and your product.

It’s essential to know and understand how customers view your product, support, and company. You would want to know why are they using (or not using) your product or service and other consumer behaviours and patterns. Thus, their views can help you to develop a better product and provide a better service.

However, it’s well-known that getting quality customer feedback can be extremely difficult.

And it’s common where customers usually don’t bother to share feedback about an experience that didn’t meet their expectations and stop using your product or service. On the other hand, they share their poor experience with people around them and this leads to you losing more customers. Worse, with the increasing usage of social media, it’s common for negative feedback to go viral and hurt your brand.

On a positive note, we can also use social media and new technology to our benefits in getting customer’s feedback and understanding the trend. Let’s look at some effective ways of getting quality customer feedback and to engage with them as well.

 Monitor Social Media

Image: Getty Images

Social media is the medium to listen to your customers. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter can be valuable resources for customer feedback.

You can even make the process of feedback more interactive by responding instantly to the comments of your customers and asking their opinions on what should be added to your product or service to make it better.

For instance, on Twitter where fast-moving conversations occur, you can ask direct questions related to your products or services and get prompt answers. Direct questions such as “Which is more important to you? Free shipping or Quick shipping?” generate quick and straightforward responses.

Polls can also be an effective way of getting feedback and revealing current trends which can help you make business decisions. These days, you can easily conduct polling through social media websites due to their simplicity and user-friendliness.

Live Chat

Image: Free Icon PNG

Live Chat is great where it can help customers to solve issues at current time for instance, customers who are unable to locate the items they seek, or enquires about availability, payment, shipping and so on.

But Live Chat can also be a proactive tool for customer feedback. Live chat is the next best thing to talking with a customer in real time. It can be an engaging and effective way to get online customer feedback in real time.

Customer feedback is about being flexible and providing a medium that customers are comfortable using. Research and findings have shown that many customers consider Live Chat helpful and do make a good use of it.

Customer Incentives

Image: Sogo

If you want instant feedback, you can consider customers discounts or coupons because nothing motivates customers like an incentive.

But remember, provide a worthy incentive such as cash or a way to save money, as they have been proven to be more effective than a lottery or a change to win a big prize.

For example, you can offer instant gift redemption or printable vouchers and coupons on your social media platforms to attract your customers and followers in giving you feedback. You can see this tactic in many businesses such as Starbucks where they have given out a free drink once customers are done filling up their survey forms online.