We all remember this widely known song from the early 90’s by famous R&B group Jodeci “Come and talk to me”. (Don’t be afraid to admit it, it’s fine.) If this song works magic to woo your soul mate though, it’s also the exact mindset you should have with your customers.
Why’s that? Because you need your customers to talk to you. It’s essential for your product, for your business, for your teams…
According to a study from 1st Financial Training Services though, 96 percent of unhappy customers will never complain. That means that only 4 percent of your customers will come and talk to you when something goes wrong. And since people usually talk more when things are bad, the rate of people communicating with you when things are good is probably even lower. Scary, isn’t it?
Here are 7 ways to change that and make it really easy for people to get in touch with you.
How to get customers to give you feedback
1. Display a contact form and/or an easy-to-find email address on your website
Your website is where it all starts: it’s the first place people will look when they have questions. So your job is to make customers feel like they can easily contact you and more importantly, like they will receive a swift reply! Get organized on your side to make sure that you stay on top of all the requests.
Two reasons why you should display a contact form and/or email address on your website:
People will always look at your website when they have questions and you definitely don’t want them to spend hours looking for your contact info, especially if it doesn’t exist.
Email is still the most common way of communicating today on the Internet: it will be intuitive and simple for people to reach out to you.
2. Engage in live chats
It’s great that your customers are able to send an email to your company in one swift click but it’s even greater when they can actually chat with you in real time. We’ve been trying out live chats at Front for a couple of months now and we are getting feedback that we wouldn’t have got any other way.
What we love most is the fact that you can actually set rules to target the people you chat with. For example, we set a rule for the chat box to pop up open after three seconds spent on any page of the website. Before we set this rule, the chat box would be collapsed unless someone clicked on it. Since we’ve implemented targeted rules, we’re getting 4 times more chats than before!
Two reasons why you should engage in live chats:
People will instantly get the feeling that there are actual people behind the website, and that’s always good.
You can manage to keep people on your website that would have left otherwise if they couldn’t understand something.
3. Create surveys for your customers
Surveys are a great way of getting feedback from your customers on specific subjects. You can try out long-form surveys with tools like SurveyMonkey or shorter surveys directly on your website with tools like Qualaroo. The later options makes it really easy to collect immediate responses to short questions from people that are active on your website.
Usually, it is recommended that you do a large survey campaign at least twice a week, especially when it comes to calculating your net promoter score.
Two reasons why you should engage in live chats:
If they are well-crafted, you can get quick data, given the fact that you know how to analyze the responses.
Slide-ins are easy to install and allow you to ask specific questions, especially to have more insights on why people are on your page or what they are looking for.
4. Collect live feedback on your app
You can ask people to actually give you live feedback as they are using your app. What we like to do at Front is to have our customers use the app in front of us (when we can!) and let them think out loud. It’s really helpful to see where customers struggle or on the other hand what feels intuitive to them.
If this sounds too complicated to do, Usertesting.com is a great tool to do just that. You can ask people to perform specific tasks on your app and they will film themselves doing it, while speaking their thoughts. When we used this tool, we found out that things that seemed obvious for us actually took several minutes for some people to figure out!
2 reasons to collect live feedback:
You know your app inside and out so you shouldn’t be trusted anymore to give objective feedback on it. Having other people try it out in front of you will definitely open your eyes on a lot of things.
Usertesting.com actually records people when they try out your app. That means that you can easily share this with your team. Super helpful
5. Be proactive
Thing is, if you don’t reach out to your customers, chances are they won’t reach out to you. So you shouldn’t be afraid to ask them questions as they use your app. Just be simple and non-intrusive.
Since we’ve started following his advice at Front, we’ve doubled our response rate of our welcome email, just by asking one simple question instead of talking about us!
You can also focus on marketing automation and send out messages to your customers as they complete certain actions with your product. Intercom or Autosend.io for example will let you do just that.
2 reasons to do pro-active support:
You’ll be amazed by the number of people who actually reply to you with great insights.
If you do it in a personal way, people will notice and appreciate. It will drive your retention rates up!
6. Make it easy for customers to find you in your app
Just like you want to be reachable on your website (through contact forms and live chats), you want to be easy-to-reach in your app so that people feel like they can contact you if they have an issue. Again, this only works if you have killer customer support behind it to follow up with every question.
Intercom.io does this very well by having a question at the bottom of every page that instantly opens up a chat window. At Front, we’ve opted for a “talk to us” button that also opens up an email composer.
2 reasons to have in-app customer feedback button:
You definitely don’t want people to get stuck on something and not let you know. In-app help lets you make sure people don’t give up on you too early on.
When backed with quick and good customer support, it can also do a lot of good to your retention rates.
7. Have a comment box on your website or in your app
Having a comment box let’s people give you a quick advice on things that they would love to see improved in your app. It’s quick for them (no need to write a lot since the box is tiny) and on your side, you get quick feedback!
Great examples of that of companies using that are Kissmetrics and PersistIQ.
2 reasons to have in-app customer feedback button:
Most customers won’t expect you to reply to these kind of comments so it’s a nice way to collect feedback without having to stress to much about it. Make sure you still check it though!
It doesn’t ask too much from your customers and it adds a fun aspect to your webpage.
Last but not least...put your customer feedback to use
Once you receive all this feedback, the next step is to figure out how to organize it and apply it to your product. What’s the point of getting feedback if you’re not acting on it? We’ll share tips on that next.
Written by Mathilde Collin
Originally Published: 17 April 2020