Providing high quality service is one thing, but giving the customer a fair amount of care is a whole other thing. You need to go through the whole process of dealing with a customer with your team and make sure that every step leads to greater customer satisfaction. A satisfied customer is very likely to either come back, or spread the word about your product or service — and those are both goals that a good salesman aims to achieve.
There are many ways to get feedback from your customers that helps you tweak the sales process so that the ultimate result will be you growing revenue and happy customers. It’s a long, but necessary process that helps your sales team and consequentially the whole company to grow in the right direction. Here are a few techniques you can use to collect valuable feedback data.
Surveys
Polls, forms and questionnaires of different length and depth are the most common way of collecting customer feedback. There are three basic kinds:
- In-App
- After service
In-App surveys are integrated directly in your website (or mobile app) and collect immediate feedback from the customer while they’re in direct interaction with your company. It’s fast, easy, and quite successful if kept short.
After service is a kind of survey delivered immediately upon receiving a product or a service, so that the feedback is still fresh and objective. The most common way to do this is via e-mail.
E-mail – it can be used for short, after-service surveys, but also for a more in-depth investigation of the customer’s experience, typically directing people to a 3rt-party survey site, like SurveyMonkey. People tend to get discouraged by longer forms, so the response rate for in-depth e-mail survey is much lower, but it has the advantage of providing your salespeople with valuable and detailed information.
CSAT, or the Customer Satisfaction Score
One of the most common ways to collect information about your customers’ satisfaction level is to ask them for a rating. It’s the usual way to ask for feedback, but it’s not universal. If your company is doing business in different countries, it is good to first research the ways people are used to give a rating. It may be based on a school rating system in the specific country, or it can be a complete opposite to it. Some nationalities will be more likely to rate your services as “Amazing” or “Terrible” rather than “Satisfactory” or “Unsatisfactory”. The number-based ratings may also differ — it’s not just a question of whether it’s based on stars, points or smileys, and whether the range is 1 – 3, 1 – 5 or 1 – 10. There’s been a whole study based on the way people tend to respond to feedback polls based on their cultural background, so it’s advantageous to become familiar with that first before asking for stars.
Social Media Monitoring
The way people see your social media is often the way they see your company. It has become the perfect tool for direct engagement with customers, as well as a devastating weapon in case of poor customer experience. Literally anyone can see the customer opinions and interactions taking place on your company’s social media profiles, so it is extremely important to pay attention to the way it’s done.
Thanks to the openness and directness of social media communication, it is the perfect place for you to collect honest and immediate feedback from everyone. And not only on your profile page — there are tools that will help you track the tags and mentions of your company or even your competitors, so that you can see the big picture, if you know where and how to look. Many of the social-media companies (e.g., Facebook) also offer dedicated rating systems that can be implemented on your business’ page.
Indirect Feedback Assessment
Surveys and CSAT are direct ways of collecting customer feedback, whereas social media is halfway between direct and indirect, due to the nature of communication that takes place there. But there are also ways to collect feedback indirectly — it takes more time and the work is kind of painstaking, but it is still worth the effort, just like any of the other ways.
One of the biggest indirect measures of customer satisfaction is customer loyalty. Tracking the returning customers, follow-ups and regular communication are all indicators of loyal and satisfied customers. The bigger the percentage of people who come back regularly, the higher the amount of customer satisfaction.
