You want your customers to be happy with your service, don’t you?
The problem is that only one out of 26 customers will tell you if they have complaints. While your analytics tools show numbers of what happens at your website, they leave with no information about why it happens.
It stands to reason you use instruments of gathering customer feedback to get the reasons behind the why’s: You add a feedback button on a website, ask customers to complete a survey, offer them a lead magnet in exchange for a review, etc.
But is there anything else you can do to motivate customers to provide feedback that would help you eliminate drawbacks for a better user experience and work on your brand development accordingly?
Below you’ll find five alternative ways to ask customers for feedback and encourage them to provide rather than ignore it.
1) Add an Element of Gamification to Your Surveys
Surveys are the most popular way to get customer feedback:
They are short and sweet, easy to create and customize, and they grab attention when designed and embedded right. Customers don’t mind answering surveys if they don’t take much time and don’t require long-written replies.
But you can take a step further and add an element of gamification to your surveys to make them even more attractive and user-friendly for customers to complete. Design your surveys as quizzes, tests, polls, or games!
Here go the top five survey questions types to consider for a higher response rate:
1) Multiple-choice questions. They are engaging because they appeal to the basic human instinct — social. It’s about accomplishments, creativity, personal value, and action. By asking a customer to choose one option, you inspire the latter.
To get even more out of multiple-search questions, use images rather than text for answers. First, most people are visual learners thinking by pictures, not words. And second, users are lazy to read lengthy answers, comparing and choosing the most appropriate one; visuals are faster for them to interpret.
2) Yes/No questions. They are easy and quick to answer, and they don’t take much effort from customers. You can represent a few yes/no questions as a test for users to complete and get a particular result once finished. Thus, you’ll evoke curiosity, motivating customers to go all the way.
3) Likert scale questions. They are perfect to understand a customer’s satisfaction with your service. Provide up to five points for users to scale and measure different factors related to your business.
Likert scale questions are easy to design into a quiz: be precise, use straightforward language, and customize it with a nice-looking design to engage customers.
4) Checkbox questions. They remind multiple-choice questions but allow users to choose a few options. Checkbox questions are perfect for segmenting the audience by interests, product choice, demographics, and other factors. To analyze the results of polls with such questions, you’ll need to use graphs, word clouds, or spreadsheets.
5) Matching questions. Here, users choose answers from given options to match two correct ones. Matching questions are interactive, responsive because of their involving nature, and often relate to the educational niche (exams, tests, synthesis essays, etc.). And yet, you can try creating a test with matching questions related to your products or niche.
Not only does it help customers learn more about your business, but it will also give you feedback on what they think about your product or service. Based on the results, you’ll understand what to do for business improvement and customer loyalty increase.
2) Use “Either-Or” Questions for Customer Segmentation
It’s not about surveys but your website design and content organization: Divide all the information by segments and allow customers to choose from those given on a website. In other words, provide them with an “either-or” choice.
Like Neil Patel did:
It’s an alternative way to get customer feedback without asking them any questions directly. You’ll get insights into what most of your website visitors like, create detailed buyer personas, and segment customers for better targeting and more purposeful marketing strategies.
More than that, such feedback works for better personalization in email marketing. Once you understand what this or that group of customers want, you’ll provide corresponding offers that meet their needs.
3) Hook Them Right Before They Leave
The instrument to help you here is an exit-intent popup with a text asking why a website visitor doesn’t want to proceed.
Exit-intent popups are more engaging and less frustrating to users because they appear once a person decides to close a page, therefore not interrupting a user experience. Such popups are perfect for list-building efforts, outperforming traditional popups by 5% and influencing a bounce rate.
In e-commerce, these popups work as a reminder for customers who want to leave a website with some products left in their shopping carts.
But you can go further and use exit-intent popups to ask visitors for feedback:
Design it so it would perform a multiple-choice question for users to share why they leave. You can also add an email or phone number for website visitors to contact your customer service team if they have any questions left. Use this instrument to invite customers back and ask what you can do to improve their experience with your platform.
4) Organize a Follow-Up Campaign With an Element of FOMO
Brands often send automated follow-up emails to customers, asking for feedback. This method is OK to use but it has two drawbacks:
- Most customers consider it time-consuming to write email feedback, therefore ignoring such requests.
- It’s also time- and energy-consuming for businesses to analyze the results: Even if you get dozens of emails from customers, it would take hours to read, sort out, and draw conclusions.
First, let’s solve the first problem:
To motivate customers to provide feedback via email, try addressing their FOMO (fear of missing out). Create urgency or promise them a gift for their feedback, for example:
Source: Author’s inbox
You can also try asking for feedback or including any other CTA in an email P.S.:
According to statistics, most people read a P.S. before the email itself, so it’s your extra chance to grab attention and encourage more customers to share feedback with you.
And now, to the second problem: How to organize the process of analyzing customer feedback in emails?
First, choose the right customer segment to email. Focus on a small group of your long-term customers instead of outreaching everyone on your mailing list. Loyal to your brand, long-term customers are more likely to share feedback and honestly point out your drawbacks.
Second, make a list of definite questions for customers to answer. Don’t simply ask anything like, “What do you think about our service?” You’ll get nothing but vague replies or long texts that are hard and time-consuming to analyze. Instead, focus on several aspects you want to learn:
- How did you find our website?
- Why have you chosen our website?
- What are the pros and cons of our product/service for you?
- What was your overall experience with our website: navigation, communication, suggestions for improvement?
Come up with a few related questions for different customer segments based on their experience with your website. The key is to follow up different segments with different questions and analyze replies by categories rather than all in all.
5) Reach Them via Interactivity on Social Media
Your business accounts and communities on social media are perfect for gathering customer feedback: Users are more loyal and open to the conversation there, and numerous tools for social listening will help you monitor mentions and collect reviews.
Interactivity instruments on Facebook or Instagram are your great helpers here:
Thus, you can engage customers and get fast feedback via Facebook reactions:
Or, you can organize Q&A sessions with your audience to understand what bothers them and what they’d like to improve about your product or service.
Remember about Instagram Stories: Use instruments like question stickers and invite customers to share their experience with your brand or thoughts on your new product, feature, logo change, etc.
Or, you can create a brand community on some forums or social media networks. It’s an opportunity to build relations with customers, increase engagement, get tons of user-generated content, and generate feedback from users first-hand. Sure thing, you’ll need a full-time moderator to communicate with the community and analyze their feedback.
Summary
While surveys remain the #1 instrument for gathering customer feedback, you can take a step further and try alternative methods:
- Make your surveys even more engaging with interactive elements and gamification
- Address your customers’ FOMO in follow-up emails
- Hook them back to your website with alternatively designed exit-intent popups
- Don’t ignore social media to gather feedback from your online community
Customer feedback is your sure-fire way to business development, brand loyalty, and skyrocket conversion. So, why not start gathering and analyzing it today?
