Customer feedback simply describes the feedback your customers give regarding the product/service they have just received. In some other cases, it is called a customer review. It is an evaluation of your product/service by a customer who had previously purchased it.

Why is Customer Feedback Important?

Receiving feedback from your customers helps you to know how badly or greatly your business is performing in terms of providing a good customer experience and quality customer service. With this information, you can make the right changes to your business to ensure the best quality service to customers.

How do I Get Feedback from the Customers?

You can get feedback from your customers by simply asking them orally to describe their experience with your product, right from when they purchased it to when it was used.

Although you might get adequate responses from them this way, it is better and more helpful to structure your questions into a customer feedback survey. This is simply a survey (list of questions) that will help you get feedback from them conveniently.

In running a customer feedback survey:

1. Use yes/no questions:

Studies have shown that yes/no questions are good starter questions because they are fairly easy for the customers to evaluate and provide answers to. For example, you could ask a question like ‘was our product helpful to you?’. A customer will immediately have an answer to give; either a yes or a no.

2. Follow up with open-ended questions:

After asking the yes/no questions, the next question should be a follow-up question on the question you have just asked to get more information and explanations from the customer. For example, after asking ‘was our product helpful to you?’ you can follow up with, ‘how was our product helpful/not helpful to you?’.

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3. Avoid assumptions:

Don’t make the mistake of assuming your customer is knowledgeable about something (maybe a product or a service). Avoid these assumptions by using questions to clear your doubts. For example, instead of assuming your customer has heard of your latest products, you can ask ‘have you heard of our latest products?’. Doing this will help you to keep the customers' attention on the survey.

4. Use rating scales where possible:

This is where you offer a scale for your customers to rate their responses. For example, you would have come across a survey where you are asked to answer based on a scale of 1-5, where 1 = ‘Strongly Disagree’ and 5 = ‘Strongly Agree’. This is a good scenario for using rating scales. They help your customers to offer more definite feedback than just a mere yes or no.

5. Make your surveys short and brief:

Your customers will tend to get tired and bored when they have to answer a long stretch of survey questions. Always keep your surveys brief and don’t burden your customers. If truly you need to ask many questions and get more feedback in one survey, you can break down the survey into smaller surveys and send them at intervals to your customers.

6. Add bonuses/rewards for surveys:

Customers will generally shy away from providing any feedback to you, especially if it comes in form of surveys. One thing you can do to encourage them to participate in the survey is to attach some bonuses or rewards for completing the surveys. For example, you can give your customers a 10% discount on their next purchase for completing the survey.

7. Launch with a survey platform:

Finally, after you have structured how you want your survey to look, you can launch it with a survey platform. Survey platforms like SurveyMonkey can help you to launch the survey, and can also provide templates for your survey if you are having trouble building your survey.

Additionally, you can get your customers to participate in the surveys by sending the survey links to them through text messages. Broadcast your surveys through SMS! Get started now.

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Conclusion

In running a customer feedback survey, you will need to apply extra care and caution to it, this is so that it doesn’t fail and customers end up not providing any feedback; yielding results that are below your expectations.

You can broadcast information about your surveys to your customers through Bulk SMS and also include the links to these surveys in the texts. This can help to boost the surveys and elicit more responses from customers. Use our Bulk SMS services to grow your survey audience.