Elon Musk’s quote sums up every reason you should actively seek feedback as an ecommerce store. Without feedback there’s no way to tell whether you should keep doing the things you are doing or whether you should start doing things in different way.
Seeking feedback is tedious. But that’s not the only hard part. What if the feedback you receive is not the truth? Feedback influences business decisions so it’s dangerous not to have it honest. Let’s jump into how we can get this done.
There are two sides to this : Seeking feedback in a way to ensure that it is genuine and then looking at the channels we can use to actually get the feedback. Let’s start with the former.
What leads someone to give you an honest answer? Trust is the keyword here. Your customer would give you honest feedback only if they trust you and know you would value their opinion.
What should you be doing to ensure that your customers realize they are communicating with a human being whom they should trust?
1- Build relationships: Are your customers treated as persons or just another user with an email address. Your customers deserve a personal touch in your communication. Cut seeking honest feedback. Cut out the robotic tone and make it friendlier. Commend them for an achievement or award. Acknowledge a prior conversation if you have had any. These little actions contribute to creating a connection between you and your customers that would encourage honest feedback when you ask.
2- Give assurance of speed and stick to it: What do you think goes through your customers’ minds the first time they are reaching you? In the first place, they are not expecting a reply. Even if you do reply, they think it won’t be soon enough. These kind of thoughts won’t get them to leave their honest thoughts about your company or product. Assure your customers of your rapid response and stick to it. Get them to also believe that you would reply. Adding a phrase like “replying to this email would come straight to my inbox” is a simple way to get this started.
3- Ask relevant, smart and open-ended questions: When seeking honest feedback, asking a myriad of questions at once puts your customers off. As much as possible, you should seeking feedback for one or two critical issues at a go. If the feedback you are requesting won’t be valuable to you within the next month, you should not be asking about it now. Again, do not limit your customers to your own thoughts. Allow them to give you more of their opinion by asking open-ended questions.
Now that we know how we can get honest feedback, let’s look at how exactly we can go about seeking the feedback to start with.
1- Be your own customer: Before you start seeking feedback, first things first. Walk through the steps your customer would go through to buy an item from your store. If you get frustrated at any point, trust that your customer would as well. After getting this primary feedback, you are now ready to talk to your customers.
2- Send out surveys: This is a simple way to get beneficial information from your customers. Tools like Survey Monkey and Google Forms make creation and distribution of surveys a pieGoogle Formsce of cake.
survey monkey – Kudobuzz postFor your ecommerce store, sending after purchase mails to your customers is extremely rewarding. Kudobuzz sends after purchase mails to your customers x (This number is chosen by you) number of days after they make a purchase which has a simple form embedded in it that enables your customers to give feedback to you while their purchase is still fresh in hand.
3- Feedback boxes: Have you ever been in a situation where you think of how a webpage can be improved but forget about it just after leaving the page? Chances are that your customer has been through this while on your site as well. A useful way to gather these recommendations from your customer is to leave a feedback box on each page. Qualaroo is a handy tool to get this done. You can ask a question as simple as “What other information would you like on this page?”
4- Have strong social media presence: With 300 million, 304 million and 1.49 billion active users on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook respectively. As of January 2019, active monthly users of facebook was 2.27 billion; Instagram — 1 billion and Twitter — 321 million. Your online store has no other choice than to be active on these and other social media platforms. Being active is not just about posting updates regularly on these pages. What is even more important is engaging with your fans. Run contests, ask questions, commend a customer with the highest sales. Make sure, though, that all your efforts drive traffic back to your site in order to increase sales. When you connect these accounts to Kudobuzz, comments and reviews from your fans are pulled into your Kudobuzz dashboard, ready to be published in your Kudobuzz widget.
5- Reach out directly to customers: There is nothing more powerful than hearing and seeing the tone and expression that goes with someone’s feedback about your store. Pick up your database, locate your local customers and call them up for lunch or dinner. You could spend just a couple of hours with customers in this way but receive very deep valuable feedback.
6- Display customer reviews: Displaying reviews is a key tool for getting honest feedback. When your site visitors/customers see how the feedback of other customers is being used, it motivates them to leave their honest feedback as well. While using the Kudobuzz widget, your customers can click on a button or a link to leave their feedback, catching the customers just at the point when they are ready to leave a review.
Your ecommerce store cannot grow if you are not investing in collecting honest feedback from your customers. Commit yourself to this activity and try any of the steps above if you are not doing so yet.
Which ones are you looking forward to trying out? Let us know in the comments below.
Do you have any other steps that are working really well for you? Share them with us.
