Best Solutions to Collect Customer Feedback Real-Time

Evaluation and analysis of raw data in a speedy and effective manner can help your business boom by industry standards. This raw data will cost you millions of dollars and several human hours to collect and analyze. Why not hear it from the horse’s mouth itself?

It becomes a lot more productive to collect customer feedback from those who are your end users and who spend the most time with your product! Customer feedback will help you make out why people are doing what they appear to be doing. Why do people get turned off every time they are asked to create an account? Why is it that they gravitate towards bulleted data on your webpage, rather than the beautiful graphs you have created for them?

When you set out to corroborate the data analysis that you carry out with the customer feedback that you collect, you will find yourself some clarity with regards to the fate of your product.

In order to define customer feedback itself, let's take a step back. Customer feedback is simply the information provided by customers about their experience with a product or service. Its main purpose is to explain their level of satisfaction. This will be able to help your product, customer success, and marketing teams understand where there is room for improvement. Companies can collect customer feedback proactively by polling and surveying customers, interviewing them, or by asking for reviews. Teams can also collect feedback by providing users a place in the product where they can share comments, complaints, or compliments.

The need for customer feedback is drawn from four main circumstances-

1. To get better – A product that is not dynamic can be brushed off as lifeless, hence, it almost becomes imperative for us to be ensuring that we make sure our customers know that we hear them and we understand their needs and will always endeavor to improve and incorporate changes into our product and services as per current needs.
2. To have reliable data sources – We know the truth better heard from the horse’s mouth itself, so why not ask our dear customers directly where and how they would like changes to be seen in the work that we provide for them. This would eliminate the need for any unnecessary assumptions and give you some solid “big data” to work with and focus on the way forward.
3. To ensure customer retention – Does it ever happen that when there is some sort of a big sad and you are feeling down and out, you watch rom-coms that give long monologues where someone says something along the lines of “I hope you are able to leave relationships where you are not equals.” and then you’re like, damn right sister! No? me neither. But this is some good food for thought where you make sure you are doing enough to make the customer feel valued. Asking their opinion through feedback is one of those ways, and then implementing or even evaluating their feedback (which they have written out for you by specifically taking out time and resources from their busy schedules) is even more treasured.
4. To stay ahead in the game – Let us be pragmatic here now, we agree that nobody in this world is invincible, surely? Utilizing our resources to understand your own products' strengths and weaknesses will be able to keep you afloat and beat competitors, securing your position in the market. There are various tools on social media, written reviews as well as the websites of competitors that will be able to give you an insight into what customers think of their brand.

Combined with these reasons, when you concentrate your efforts on collecting this feedback real-time, you will realize that a substantial amount of that information is incredibly efficient.

We believe in respecting our customers‘ and our own time. When you are collecting feedback in real-time, you are going to receive a much more thorough and impressive report from your customers about the quality of your product. The processes in which many companies manually collect feedback, through email, surveys or even phone calls are very time consuming. Surveys or interviews need to be created, customers need to be contacted and then the results of those surveys or interviews have to be read, organized and then routed to the right team. And these traditional methods aren’t just more time consuming for your team, they’re more invasive and time consuming for your customers as well!

We here at Hellonext want to bring you our hand-picked 5 ways in which you can endeavor to collect feedback from your customers instantaneously, to yield higher results for your brand:

Customer Feedback Surveys

A good old survey that you send out to your customers right after their purchase, hopefully while they are still in your business premises; will bring in some great feedback. You can target your customers product-wise as well as usage wise and create surveys that are product specific, customer experience specific or even brand specific. You can provide them with QR codes that they can scan on their way out of your store and give you their feedback just as they catch a bus going back to their homes!

A quick caveat, if you want your customers to fill out the entire survey form, it might be best to follow some best practices while creating your survey:

• Ask relevant questions
• Do not ask close-ended questions
• Provide rating scales
• Do not make use of loaded questions

Customer Contact Forms

After your customer has left the premises, or has set about to make an online purchase, you can send them an email if they have consented to be contacted in such ways. Emailing your customer is one of the most fool-proof and easiest ways to collect customer feedback. It is a set channel of communication between your company and your customers, as a result, with every interaction there is an amount of feedback that will be received from your customers.

The key here will remain to organize your feedback, so that you are able to look through your emails received and sort out the data that you will gather. Additionally, you are advised to set expectations for your customer, so that they are aware that you are taking this seriously as possible for your company.

Using our services at Hellonext, you will be able to use Boards that will be accessible to your entire team to organize your feedback. It’s a clear process ensuring that no helpful insights slip through the cracks.

Social Networking Sites

The reason you see so many companies hire young interns to run their social media accounts is because companies have found this goldmine of undiscovered treasure that is social media! The sheer amount of interaction that will occur for your company in real time is unimaginable. Drier than comments, mentions or instagram stories with question options - all of these will find your customer exactly where they are and allow you to make use of this reservoir of data on a periodic basis at a professional level!

Like we mentioned before, so many social media sites now have built in polls and Yes/No questions, it would become almost criminal to not make use of them in finding the pulse of your customer base instantaneously!

Website Analytics

Say you have recently launched a new website or a new product, what is the most conclusive way of checking out how your customers view it? By allowing on-site analytics. These analytics will be able to reveal what customers don’t know about how they use your product. This becomes even more true when you sell a digital product or service, you benefit from leveraging analytics to understand how users interact with your company.

If one of your articles has an average time clocked in at say 5 seconds - that would mean that your bounce rate is not impressive at this point. It will be able to show you that something isn’t sticking and help you get to the bottom of how to salvage your situation.

Making use of SaaS tools

SaaS tools, like Hellonext, will help you organize all the data you have collected so far and help you make useful conclusions with respect to the data you are working with. You can even embed our tool on your website and have your customers work through our feedback specifications directly. We also offer a free trial, so you do not have to commit to anything unless you are sure that this is what you want. By using Hellonext, you are able to make better sense of your customer feedback and provide actionable insights by aggregating everything into a single system of record. But that’s not all!

With the help of Hellonext, you can make use of extensive product and our services to provide a holistic experience to your company and your team developers. Head over to Hellonext and see for yourself!

Building a strong relationship with your customers is one of the best methods for increasing sales. You will build trust with each recurring customer, and they will spread the word about your business.

If you are looking to build a long lasting loyalty and get your support team in the spirit of helping build your user base, send us a ping here and we will be more than happy to help you out! 😊