Collecting customer feedback online: before, during and after purchase

Any online customer journey starts long before the actual purchase. Where should you collect feedback to help you create a better customer experience?

Visitors search for products and services online, they might visit your website, read your blog or consume other content, and compare your brand or product with others. The actual online purchase experience is also subject to many interactions where things can go smoothly, or not so smoothly, for the user.

How does the product search work? Can customers easily find alternative or complementing products? How is the check-out process? Are you offering the payment options your customers look for? How easy-to-read is the order confirmation?

The online customer journey also continues long after the actual purchase. Customers might have chosen home deliveries, or to pick up the goods themselves at the store. They read manuals and instructions. They might need support or want to return the goods for some reason.

So, how do you collect customer feedback throughout the online customer journey, before, during, and after purchase?

Ways to collect feedback before the actual purchase

The most obvious channel for pre-purchase feedback is naturally your website. So why not add a simple survey on the main page, asking them why they are on your site or what they think of your page? You could also add it on the search page to find out if they found what they were looking for.

Your blog and other content hubs are another obvious place for gathering feedback and might even reach prospects at an earlier stage than your website. So, ask them if they find the topics interesting and relevant. Or what they thought about a particular item or topic you are talking about.

When dealing with loyal customers you already know, you might use your loyalty app to ask for feedback about special offers or other benefits that your customers might wish for, or ones you have introduced.

Feedback during the purchase process

So, you got your visitors to convert to your ecommerce site. But what if they never finished the transaction? You will certainly want to know the reason, so you can set up an immediate survey to ask visitors why.

On the other hand, if a visitor converted to a customer who finished the purchase, you can ask about the shopping experience and how to improve it further at the check-out.

The same applies to your loyalty, shopping, or payment apps – you can ask for feedback about the payment process, the shopping experience, the app functionality, or your product selection, for example.

The vital customer experience after purchase

The speed and quality of deliveries is just as vital for the overall shopping experience as the actual purchasing process. Whether you handle your own deliveries, have customers pick up the goods themselves, or use a 3-party delivery agent, you might wish to ask how the delivery was and potentially be able to make improvements to the process based on the feedback.

Support and complaint handling are just as important. You can easily collect feedback for your support portal or chat for example. Or you could ask about the manuals and support materials and how helpful and easy-to-understand they are.

Smiley Digital to the rescue

Smiley Digital is up to the task for all of the use cases above, and many more. It complements the other HappyOrNot Smileys solutions, providing the same functionality for online feedback as Smiley Touch or Smiley Terminal provide at the brick-and-mortar stores.

Smiley Digital helps you improve your digital customer experience and align service across digital and physical touch points with the same measures and KPIs.

Want to learn more and add digital surveys to your customer feedback portfolio? Check out what Smiley Digital has to offer for our customers. Talk to our experts!