One thing every business owner understands is the need for feedback from customers. Feedback helps to improve services and products and the overall sales pipeline to make your business run more efficiently and most importantly profitably. You may or may not be collecting feedback right now and if you are then these tips will help you improve your feedback collection from customers and if you aren’t currently collecting feedback then you definitely should start.
When it comes to collecting feedback from customers it is important to offer a few ways to do so in order to maximize your submissions. When we talk about feedback we don’t mean just reviews and testimonials as that is a different type of feedback. In this case we mean a survey-style feedback system asking very specific questions that are for internal use and processes of improvement. It is a good idea to create an online survey method for customers to provide feedback as well as an offline method such as custom printed postcards or notepad forms that they can fill out on the spot and provide back to you. Regardless of the method of collection, these helpful tips will allow you to create the perfect survey and questions to make your feedback collection easy and also genuine. That last part is crucial as you don’t want false answers that will be misleading and will not help improve things but rather just keep them the same or worse.
Ok, now that we’re all up to speed on what it is we’re talking about here are the tips:
Keep It Short & Clear
One of the most important elements to keep in mind when creating your survey is the overall size. Keep it short and simple. You don’t want to discourage customers from filling out your survey by giving them a lengthy form that will take them a long time to complete. Customers are much more likely to give you feedback and give genuine honest answers to all questions if the feedback form is short.
Another important note is to make sure that the form is easy to understand and the questions are clear. You may be thinking like a scientist when creating the survey to craft the perfectly worded set of queries that will generate certain responses. It is best to just keep it casual and ask questions that are simple, clear and void of challenging words. If your customers have a hard time understanding the question then they may skip it or just answer it briefly to “move past it”.
Avoid Leading Questions
You will want to collect honest and genuine feedback. To do so avoid adding leading questions into your survey that will tilt the customer’s answer one way or the other. For example, asking “Why is product A worse than product B?” leads the customer to think that you feel product A is worse than B so they will answer accordingly to please the researcher. This is not going to be valuable information in the end because you have sort of answered it for them. They may have found product A superior and you wouldn’t know because they answered based on what they thought you were expecting.
Pay Attention to the Order of Your Questions
The order of your questions matters also. If you change the order of questions you can get completely different results. Imagine this scenario where customers are asked if they are in a relationship and then right after asked if they are happy. They will likely answer the second question about their happiness in relation to the first question about if they are in a relationship. While you may be looking to see if they are just happy in general, the customer has associated the happiness question with whether or not they are happy in their relationship or with their relationship status.
Leave the Answer Boxes Open
While there are many instances where checkboxes or radio buttons make sense, it can be very beneficial to collect open responses with text boxes. If customers are asked a question and provided with a box then they will provide more detailed and specific information that can help unlock some important secrets that will help you improve your business. Compared to a bunch of checkboxes that only tell you whatever predetermined options you have made available. Keep in mind that this does make analysis longer and everything has its place. Be mindful of the structure of the response options and you will be able to tailor your survey form to perfection.
Follow these tips and you will be well on your way to implementing a feedback collection and ultimately business improvement process into your business that will give you a leg up in the business world and allow you to customize your business with the customer in mind.