3 Ways to Collect Customer Feedback the Right Way!

What is the north star of providing excellent customer experiences and fostering a customer-centric culture?

Your customers.

How do you care for your customers?

It boils down to seeking customer feedback and acting on them.

3 Unique Ways to Collect Customer Feedback

There are multiple ways by which it can be done. Let us take a moment to define customer feedback before talking about how to collect them.

Customer feedback is the communication from your customers expressing how they feel about your brand, your products, and the services they received from your team.

It is very critical to seek feedback and make meaningful changes to improve customer experience (CX). This is harder than we think.

According to Adobe’s Digital Trends Report, only 1 in 5 companies that consider their CX to be mainstream responded that they have “significant insight” into their customers’ mindset or friction points in the customer journey.  

According to Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, 72% of business respondents agreed somewhat or strongly with the statement, “We understand what it feels like to be one of our customers.” Yet, only 35% of consumers surveyed agreed somewhat or strongly that companies understand them well.

According to Gartner, 90% of customer-facing employees say they understand the needs of customers, and only 38% of consumers agree.

This is what we call an empathy gap and a massive opportunity for businesses.

Seeking customer feedback can give you all the insights you need to up your CX play.

In this blog, we have covered three ways that you must use to seek customer feedback.

1. Customer Feedback through Emails and Phone Calls

The easiest way by which you can seek customer feedback is by sending a follow-up email right after you provide a service.

After a transaction or an interaction, email them, asking for qualitative and quantitative feedback on their experiences with your brand, product, and service. Keep this short and easy for your customers to provide inputs. 

It is very likely you don’t get a response to your email because it takes time commitment from them to send you an email.

Follow up the email with a personal phone call. Ideally, it should be the person interacting with the customer for the transaction.

2. Customer Feedback through Surveys

Customer surveys come in all shapes and sizes. A few famous metrics that are commonly used are:

CSAT Score

The customer satisfaction (CSAT) score asks one fundamental question, which is:

How satisfied are you with our product, customer service and customer support?

This is typically requested on a scale of 1 to 5 or      1 to 10.

This is a transactional metric used to evaluate a customer’s specific experience. You usually try to get customers to respond to this within 10 to 15 minutes of interacting with you.

Customer Effort Score

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric used to measure the effort required for customers to complete a task or resolve an issue.

CES surveys typically have one question, which is:

How easy was it for you to complete your task today, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being very easy and 5 being very difficult?

CES is a customer service metric that helps organizations understand and identify how easy or difficult it is for customers to interact with them.

A low CES score indicates that customers are satisfied with the effort required to interact with a company. In contrast, a high CES score suggests customers are dissatisfied with the required effort.

By regularly measuring CES, companies can track progress and identify areas where they are doing well and need improvement. This would allow them to make data-driven decisions on how to improve the customer experience.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS asks this question:

How likely is it that you would recommend this company or product to a friend or a colleague?

This is typically requested on a scale of 1 to 10.

Responses 9 and 10 are promoters, 7 and 8 are passives, and anything lower than that is detractors.

You calculate the NPS by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

NPS is used as an indicator of customer loyalty and brand devotion. Almost all teams within an organization consume NPS.

Customer Health Score (CHS)

The customer health score is a metric used to understand customers’ likelihood to grow, stay consistent, or Customer churn.

CHS is the single metric that would allow you to determine if your customers are staying or planning to leave, as it bridges the gap between customer success teams and customers.

This is not a one-question metric.

The customer success teams must structure the survey based on their objectives and define the scale. For each value in the scale, plan responses that the customer success would take to address those concerns.

Then this can be a compelling metric to measure. This can be done through surveys, customer interviews, or customer feedback to become very powerful.

Most SaaS companies use this metric religiously to reduce their customer churn.

3. Customer Feedback through Digital Channels

Often, customer feedback isn’t solicited on digital channels. Your customers choose to leave their reviews about your products and services.

You should mine the digital channels for customer reviews and feedback. As they are unsolicited, they can give you an unfiltered view of your customers’ thoughts.

Never miss responding to reviews on digital channels. Good or bad, they help your prospects to form an informed opinion about your product, service, or experience.

Here are a few thumb rules that you should consider:

• Shorter surveys tend to have better completion rates
• Ensure that you act on the feedback provided. Please respond to all those who provided feedback and what likely action you are looking at
• Offer incentives for providing you with the necessary feedback, as this can help your entire customer community
• Always have an open-ended question in every survey you conduct. Qualitative user feedback can give you tons of ideas to implement solutions.