How to Get Quality Customer Feedback

by Simon Hopes Author

Anyone who runs an e-commerce site, be it large or small, knows the importance of customer feedback. Equally well-known is the difficulty involved in generating quality customer feedback.

As the saying goes, “For every customer who bothers to complain, 20 other customers remain silent.” Unless the experience is awful, customers usually don’t care to share feedback about an experience that didn’t meet their anticipation. Instead, they make up their mind never to do business with the service provider any longer. That is a high price to pay for lost feedback.

The lost customer is not the only victim. Studies have shown that each disappointed customer typically shares the unsatisfactory experience with 8 to 10 (perhaps even 20) others. With the growing use of the social platform, it’s not uncommon for negative feedback to go viral and dent the credibility of a brand.

• Provide Proactive Live Chat help

44 percent of online shoppers feel the best feature an e-commerce website can have is a live chat according to a survey.

Live chat can address many problems. For instance, it can help customers who are unable to get the items they seek or answer questions about availability, payment, shipping, etc.

Chat support can assist a company gets closer to its customers by better understanding their desires and challenges. It also helps identify patterns if there are any recurring problems and helps find a long-term way out for those issues.

Online services such as Zopim let you introduce live chats on your site. About the type of feedback, the quality of your response plays a significant role in achieving excellent results. You should do your best to make sure all customer questions are addressed promptly and with helpful information for your customer.

You can increase the efficiency of your online chat by making it proactive: set the live chat window to appear whenever a customer has been reading a page for a long time, for example, 20 seconds. According to statistics, proactively illustrating the chat window can increase the number of chats by up to 300%.

• Get Feedback on Live Chat Session

Just like e-mail surveys, surveys which are sent after you close a ticket in a customer support portal; you can seek customer feedback after a live chat session has closed. This feedback can include fundamental questions about whether the chat experience was helpful. This helps you rate the efficiency of your chat-support group.

• Provide Dedicated Customer Feedback Forms on Your website

Give at least a dedicated feedback email—for instance, feedback@xyz.com. If there are any criticisms, customers can communicate their grievances through this email. This remains one of the most effective methods of generating feedback. According to findings, 54% of online shoppers fancied this method of associating with customer service.

You can give a step further by providing a dedicated feedback form, placed prominently on your website. As a best practice, the types should include all relevant questions related to feedback, but should not be too long. Whenever possible, provide customers with multiple options. For more significant impact, the email address for feedback or the feedback form should be highly visible on the website.

• Measure Your Customer Service Performance

Send out an email survey when a criticism ticket is closed. This survey aims to determine whether the resolution as per the customer’s expectations.

Such reviews work well when there are only a few questions. A simple option is to provide your customers the opportunity to rate their experience on a scale of 1 to 5. Over time, these ratings can reveal valuable trends.

• Call Your Customers Always

Calling customers is an extremely personalized way to seek customer feedback. This method is proactive and generates the best responses.

The interest of this approach is that you get firsthand feedback, even from the customer. Moreover, hearing your customer’s voice and tone provides an occasion to sense their pleasure. The solution here is that the person making the call should come across as genuinely wanting to help or benefit the customer, and not as someone conducting a mere formality or a sales call.