How to Make it Easy for Customers to Share Feedback

By Ruchi Goel
3 MIN READ

Each one of us receives feedback requests daily. But how many of us share our genuine feedback, or even think about doing it. To be honest – we rarely do that. But Why?

Is it the lengthy feedback forms? Is it an email stuffed with gibberish? Or it is only the mindset. Let’s first dig into how clients generally think when it comes to sharing feedback. Such thoughts as “Why should I share feedback?”, “What would happen if I share feedback?”, “Would my feedback change anything?”,” Does anyone even care what I have written?”, “They are asking for too much – I don’t have this much extra time”, or, likely the most common “Others are giving feedback, so mine won’t make any difference.”

Therefore, the first thing you need to consider is:

Undoubtedly, customer feedback is necessary for any business model. But why would a customer care to share their feedback. They have multiple options in the market, and they could simply choose another service provider. Why should they offer their time to tell you where you lag? As a services company or individual, you need feedback from your customers to improve your services in order to build trust and brand value, but whether they decide to give it is their choice.

What’s important to focus on next is:

To get customers to share feedback, you need to make them feel important – that each feedback given is valuable, and you actually work on it to improve your services. You need to make sure that all of your customers feel like they are king. When they feel special and as if they can make an impact, they open up.

And last but not least, Think about how you can make it easy for your customers to share their feedback in a way that is quick and simple. Here’s some quick tips:

What to do

Before asking for feedback, you should define:

• Why are you asking for feedback?
• What are you expecting as feedback?
• What insights do you want to gain with the feedback?

Your business model, the type of customer base you have, and the growth analysis generally define the motive of asking for customer feedback, and so you should be interested in discovering

• Are your customers happy or unhappy?
• What makes your customers happy or unhappy?
• Why does it make your customers happy or unhappy?
• What your customers wish you could do better?

Once you are clear on why you are asking for feedback, the next step is to determine what, where, and when to ask for the feedback. Clearly define a set of questions that support strategic business development and improvement. Remember, to maximize the engagement, the survey and method should  be short and simple.

The following examples are some of the ways to make collecting feedback low commitment and easy:

Visual feedback from clients saves time

Image from zipboard blog

When customers can pinpoint their pains with annotation, what can be better than that. This saves time and efforts on both sides as no lengthy descriptions are required.

The use of emojis makes the feedback form appealing

Image from HappyOrNot website

People can quickly relate to emojis.This saves their time spent on reading and understanding the options, and makes the feedback intuitive.

Pop-ups make it easy to get real time feedback

Image pop-up from kissmetrics.com

When customers can share their feedback when they are actually experiencing the service, it is not only easy for them, but captures their true sentiment at that point of experience – meaning you get feedback that is fresh and honest.

What not to do

A basic motto of getting your customers to share feedback is to try and establish a bond with them where they can share anything, anytime. For this, resorting to ways like tempting customers to share feedback in lieu of some incentives, can hamper the quality of feedback that you receive. When it comes to feedback, both quality and quantity matter, and one cannot offset  the other. Rather, building trust among your customers so that they feel free to share their pain points will help you get to the root of the issues so that you can make improvements that work.

Endnote

“When customers share their story, they’re not just sharing pain points. They’re actually teaching you how to make your product, service, and business better.”   –Kristin Smaby

Customer feedback is critical, so, never miss an opportunity to get feedback from them – and remember, how you ask for it is what makes the difference.

Ruchi Goel is a digital marketer with an interest in user focused web development and design. To read more of her articles, find her on Medium.