6 Ways to Collect Customer Feedback—and use it!
By Samantha Hager
Have you ever seen a new restaurant open up in your town and then immediately went online to see the reviews? If so, you’re one of the millions of consumers that sees the value in reviews and uses them as a metric for informed purchases.
However, in the world of carpet cleaning and restoration, customer feedback isn’t just based on the subjective taste and price of a menu item. Instead, a thorough review can showcase everything from your team’s work ethic and performance all the way to the UX quality of your site and whether or not your prices make sense.
Having said this, let’s take a closer look at the significance of customer feedback as well as a few ways to collect this highly valuable consumer data without breaking the bank. After all, as David J. Greer once said, “A customer talking about their experience with you is worth ten times that which you write or say about yourself.”
How customer feedback impacts your success and image
How can you truly measure the value and impact of something as influential and subjective as customer feedback? The truth is that it all comes down to the statistics associated with the customer experience and how it deeply affects the success of businesses and their teams:
- Companies with a customer experience mindset drive revenue 4-8% higher than the rest of their industries.
- Companies that lead in customer experience outperform others by nearly 80%.
- 84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue.
- 96% of customers say customer service is important in their choice of loyalty to a brand.
- Brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience.
- 73% of consumers say a good experience is key in influencing their brand loyalties.
- 77% of consumers say inefficient customer experiences detract from their quality of life.
- Loyal customers are five times more likely to purchase again and four times more likely to refer a friend to the company.
- American consumers will pay 17% more to purchase from a company with a reputation for great service.
- Companies with initiatives to improve their customer experience see employee engagement increase by 20% on average.
- 77% of consumers view brands more favorably if they seek out and apply customer feedback.
The key takeaways from these statistics are truly that customers want to feel respected and, in return, they will spend more. Similarly, customers are more loyal to the brands that listen to their feedback and implement it than those that solely focus on their own initiatives and opinions.
Whether big or small, companies of every size should be tracking customer feedback from review sites as well as using some of the various strategies below to truly tap into the opinions of their customers. A good customer experience is quite literally the key to increased profits, customer satisfaction, employee acquisition and retention, and a never-ending stream of referrals and repeat customers in your local area.
Collecting customer feedback with ease
There are many ways to collect customer feedback that go far beyond simply waiting for reviews on Google, Yelp, and Facebook. For this list, we’ve chosen to stick with unique strategies that cleaning and restoration companies likely haven’t thought about using to acquire this valuable data.
1. Incentivized surveys
While some brands may already use this method, it’s highly common to send surveys without any incentive to complete them for the customer. This is not a very successful strategy as there is no reward for the time and effort that you expect them to put into their review.
However, by adding a discount or something nice like a gift basket to the equation, you can encourage them to participate and get even more thorough feedback and boost your image further in their eyes along the way.
2. Post-job interviews
If you’re not doing this right now, it’s about time you implement this incredibly clever and easy strategy for customer feedback on your next job site. The minute you finish your next carpet cleaning or restoration project, give your client an interview sheet asking them about their experience with your team, their satisfaction level on various aspects of your business, and whether or not they’d use your team again or recommend you to a friend.
Then, leave. That’s the biggest key to this method is not being in the room when they complete the paper. This also gives them time to think over the whole experience and gives you one final chance to interact with them when you come to collect the review sheet in a day or two.
3. Local focus groups
Another strategy you can implement not just for customers but your entire community as a whole to gauge your brand recognition and sentiment is paying for focus groups to come together and review your site, logo, pricing, and tone.
To do this, try putting out an ad in your community looking to have people stop by during lunch for free food in exchange for a few reviews. Then, ensure they are unaware that this is exclusively for your brand by adding in your competitors’ logos, sites, pricing, and tones as well. You can also meet with them at a lunch place if your office space is too connected to your brand.
This form of feedback can help you to learn how to acquire new customers, what your competitors are doing right or wrong, and how to improve on your operations in the following years.
4. Site analytics
Site analytics, while not direct customer feedback, sometimes says even more about your customers’ opinions than their own handwritten reviews. Good site analyses help to showcase their patterns and their interest in various elements of your site. For instance, the bounce rate on your different site pages can help you determine which pages to improve and how quickly they lose interest.
Meanwhile, interaction with your links and your contact page shows how many people are truly interested in calling you or reaching out. However, if you have a high bounce rate on your pricing page, this could mean that your prices or packages are not enticing your target audience.
5. Automatic satisfaction rating texts
When acquiring new customers, try to sign them up for automated texts. Ith automated text message campaigns, you can alert them of deals you’re currently offering, business news, and also ask them for their feedback on your services as well.
This guide on the best SMS apps for businesses can help you determine which automated text platform to use and which campaigns to develop once you have it all set up.
6. Free-text feedback
Finally, free-text feedback is a great way to discover problems with your site and services straight from the customer themselves. Free-text forms on your site and social accounts offer a way for customers to send in concerns or issues without simply answering generic questions. It gives them the freedom to submit whatever they want which means more thorough reviews and outlined concerns more often than not.
We Love Surveys has a wonderful guide on analyzing free-text feedback data and leveraging it as a business. Using their methods, you can take these concerns and transform them into goals for your company to accomplish throughout the year for customer satisfaction and retention.
Now that you have a complete list of customer feedback collection methods, all it takes is putting them in place and remembering that no feedback is truly bad feedback. In fact, as Bill Gates once said, “It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”