Empowering Customers: Their Feedback Matters
Any business that strives for success must be willing to listen to its customers. Asking customers for their feedback – and by providing an easy way for them to respond – empowers them and can improve your customer relationship.
Conversely, making it difficult for customers to contact you will have quite the opposite effect. There are plenty of great ways to make collecting their feedback easier. Are you using all of these?
Social Media
Messages: Ensure that people can contact your page privately. Enabling this feature displays a Message button on your Facebook page.
Post Ability and Post Visibility allows anyone to post comments and photos on your page, which appears on the right-side of your Facebook page. These options can all be modified via your Facebook Settings.
Direct Messages: If a customer follows your Twitter account you gain the ability to send them a Direct Message. These are private exchanges between your brand’s Twitter account and the customer’s (most Twitter messages are public).
Hashtags: You can also get creative with a callout for ideas and comments with hashtags. E.g. #BrandXFeedback, #BrandXStories. For some great ideas, check out Mashable’s 6 Successful Twitter Hashtag Campaigns.
Point-Of-Sale
Comment Cards
Bricks-and-mortar stores aren’t going away anytime soon. Unless you’re solely an online business, your store is the frontline of customer service and engagement. The advantages of comment cards are twofold: For customers, they provide a direct, in-the-moment opportunity to share their experience. For businesses, comment cards are a means of collecting and controlling private feedback without sharing it publicly, as you would on social media.
Receipts
Some retailers print unique survey ID codes on customer receipts. The customer then visits a webpage where they can take part in an online survey that asks them about their in-store experience and suggestions for improvement.
Are you empowering your customers? More importantly, are you listening and responding in a timely manner to the good and bad comments?
