Without customer feedback, you’re basically operating in the dark.

As I have already mentioned numerous times, there’s no real conversion optimization without research. Heck, I even have a whole category called “Research” on the site!

Customer feedback is an integral and crucial part of the research process.

Research can be quantitative or qualitative. Customer feedback is all qualitative. So it’s half of one of the critical processes within your business.

If you don’t know what you’re doing right, you can’t do more of it. If you don’t know what you’re doing wrong, you can’t do less of it.

The article outlines the importance of feedback concerning multiple teams, and then covers some ideas for using feedback to improve the customer experience. And to bring more revenue.

Three Ways to Use Feedback to Create a Better Customer Experience

The following three ideas will give you a valuable place to begin collecting and using feedback.

1. Customer Service Touch Points

Live chat or support tickets, or it could mean self-service support using a knowledge base.

I find it also invaluable to go through live customer service calls, listening to a proven, exceptional customer service representative. You do it to be able to see the problems first-hand, to listen to conversations live, to understand the mood the customers are in when they call, to see what kind of words and phrases they use, how they describe the product and the problem. All pure gold.

The next best thing would be to go through call recordings if there are any. Again, only the calls with the best customer service people.

2. Product Suggestions and Improvements

You can usually get “product” feedback and suggestions if you ask. Just don’t be annoying and ask at the right time.

While it can be daunting to determine which question to ask in the product experience (you want to avoid disrupting the UX too much but also get valuable insights), there are a few popular questions to ask depending on your goals:

“What is {product feature} helping you accomplish?”

“What issues, if any, are you having with {product feature}?”

“What features do you think we’re missing today for {product feature}?”

3. A/B Test Ideation

On-site surveys can also be a crucial tool used in conversion research.

For instance, if I’ve found via analytics analysis that a certain page is converting poorly or has a much higher bounce rate than other similar pages, I may add a survey that asks one of the following questions:

“Were you able to find the information you were looking for?”

“Did this page meet your expectations?”

When I want to get broader Voice of Customer insights into why users prefer our brand and end up purchasing, what hesitations and doubts they may have had, or what their comparison shopping experience may have been like, I could ask one of the following:

“What persuaded you to purchase from us?”

“Is there anything holding you back from completing a purchase? Y/N” (and then ask for explanation)

“Which other options did you consider before choosing our product/service?”

In my experience, a better question to ask is “What nearly stopped you from buying?”

This way you can uncover more valuable information. You can uncover the big objections people might have. Something people are on the fence about. Something that almost prevented some to buy, and surely prevented many others from making that decision. It’s like a magic wand which shows you what specifically to fix to magically start making more money.

Start at least with the ways described above (more details in the article) and you’ll be surprised how much better you understand your customers. It completely changes the perspective.

I’ve seen business owners who were completely surprised by some of the finding and customers’ feelings when we were done with this part of research. Business owners who believed they knew everything about the customers because they were in the business forever and they have built the whole damn thing.

This process virtually never fails to bring extremely useful information. Try it. It’s like free gold just waiting for you to pick it up.

 

Using Feedback to Fuel a Better Customer Experience