10 Ways To Use Feedback To Improve The E-commerce Customer Experience
Online or physical – the world of business revolves around customers. The more happy customers you have, the better you would be able to boost sales and conversions. As an e-commerce store owner, you hire digital marketers and invest in social media marketing strategies to ensure you get high sales volumes for your online business. But what if your customers aren’t happy with your products and services? Above all, how do you know that your customers are expecting more than what you’re currently offering to them? That is where customer feedback comes to your rescue. What Is Customer Feedback?
Customer feedback is information provided to you by your target audience about their experiences with your brand, products, or services. This feedback is critical for the success of an online business as
it helps improve customer experience and also represents your brand’s professional image in front of the customers. Businesses that don’t pay heed to customer feedback can have issues with their reputation. Also, it is one of the biggest barriers to customer retention strategies. Imagine you sell footwear and fashion accessories online. Customers visit your website to buy highquality shoes and matching accessories. Luckily, you were a prudent entrepreneur when you started your online business. So, once a customer successfully makes a purchase, you send them a follow-up email to collect their feedback. You have invested your time and resources in creating a winning email survey that includes questions about:
How satisfied are your customers with your products and services? Was there anything your store could have done differently for a better e-commerce customer experience? What else your brand could do to better meet your customer’s expectations in the future? While all of these questions are relevant and dig down to the roots that encourage customer responses, the biggest point of concern is how far you can go to make your customer’s experience right. Why Customer Feedback Matters? Harvard Business Review conducted a survey a few years back in which they divided customers into two groups and decided to survey only one group, and ignore the other. Here’s what they observed exactly a year later of conducting that survey. “A year after the survey was conducted, the customers we surveyed were more than three times as likely to have opened new accounts, were less than half as likely to have defected, and were more profitable than the customers who hadn’t been surveyed.” According to them, the surveyed customers continued to register at a faster rate than those who haven’t been surveyed. Below are some of the benefits you can expect when you use feedback to improve the customer experience. Humanize Your business Image The majority of online businesses fail to humanize their business image. As a result, customers don’t respond to surveys and questionnaires believing that online businesses do not care about their feedback. Even if it’s a negative comment, losing it means a loss in learning how your business can better cater to customer’s needs. It Leads To Self-Improvement Customer feedback is a way for online businesses to know whether their customer service strategies can create seamless customer experiences.
Helps You Know Your Customers Customers have their needs, wants, and desires. It takes online businesses years to understand what their customer expectations are towards their business. Customer feedback not only allows business owners to know more about their business but it also helps them know who their customers are. It Points Out Areas That Needs Improvement Both positive, as well as negative feedback, helps businesses know which specific areas to focus on. Customer feedback enables you to identify your product’s strengths and weaknesses. Showing that you truly care about your customer’s feedback sells better than anything else. It Makes Your Customers Feel Involved Customer feedback helps online businesses show their customers that they’re important and their opinion matters. When you ask your buyers for an opinion, they feel part of the process and show more interest in your products and services. Especially, when the buyers feel that their opinions and complaints are listened to, they start trusting your brand and eventually turn into your loyal customers. Positive Feedback Generates Personal Recommendations Businesses, where inbound marketing is involved, can leverage word of mouth advertising to boost conversions and sales. According to research, personal recommendations are the biggest motivational factor for online buyers. Personal recommendation generally comes from friends and family. What positive feedback does is it helps businesses gain more customers through personal recommendations. It Persuades Your Customers To Come Back For More Customer feedback reflects on product and customer service areas that you didn’t take into account earlier. No matter how well-designed and inclusive your marketing and selling strategies are, there are certain things that only a buyer is going to highlight. Businesses that pay attention to customer feedback will better understand the customer’s pain points and offer a personalized customer experience. It Helps In Customer Acquisition Although personal recommendations can work wonders for your online business, you must not underestimate the power of online reviews. Data collected by Invesp reveals that more than 90% of customers read opinions before visiting a business website.
Helps Build Loyalty For Your Brand Asking for opinions from customers and responding to their questions and concerns establishes a long-lasting relationship that adds a personal touch to the entire buying process. Needless to say, building and maintaining relationships with customers pay off in one way or the other. How To Gather Customer Feedback For Your E-Commerce Business Now that you know about how important customer feedback is for your online business, it’s time to look at some of the ways you can collect customer experience data for your business. Surveys Customer feedback survey forms are one of the most common yet effective tools for collecting customer feedback. Sellers send this form once a buyer completes their transaction. While this approach doesn’t require any rocket science, there’s still a right and wrong way to go about using these forms. Make sure the questions you include in your form are targeted and help you meet your goals. There are different online tools available that you can use to gauge the responses of your customers. Emails/Contact Forms Since email is a standard support channel for many e-commerce brands, you can use it to gather candid customer feedback. Online Review Websites Online review websites act as a neutral territory that can be used by businesses to gather genuine customer feedback. Social Media Many online businesses also leverage social media to gather customer feedback. In addition to customer’s comments, you can also use built-in polling tools to know what their target audience thinks of their products and services. 10 Ways to Use Feedback to Improve the E-commerce Customer Experience 1. Use Customer Feedback To Create Better Products One of the studies conducted by Forrester reveals that up to 74% of customer experience professionals consider customer feedback as a key factor behind exclusive product ideas. Data that e-commerce businesses gather from their prospects can help you develop a product that buyers need. Here, it is essential to ask your customers the right questions For instance, brands can ask questions about new features and product improvements that could enhance the usability of their products. Also, you can ask for recommendations for correlative products, opening markets, etc.
2. Use Customer Feedback To Create Better Customer Experience The success of your online business depends on how well your company can deliver a seamless customer experience. When a business asks the customer for feedback, it portrays its professional image – an image of an entity that truly cares about its customer’s likes, dislikes, and buying preferences. Present-day customers are more informed than ever before. The positive buying experience and the value you provide to your customers can go a long way. 3. Use Customer Feedback To Improve Remarketing Strategies Remarketing is a foolproof way to target those customers who have already visited your website but didn’t complete the checkout process due to some unknown reason. Since those customers have already shown interest in your products previously, they’re more likely to purchase if you push them a little with your marketing strategies. Research suggests that visitors who have visited your website earlier are 4✕ more likely to purchase new customers. Did you know you can also use customer feedback to improve your Google Marketing strategies? What customer feedback does is it increases your likelihood to cross-sell and also helps confuse buyers make a quick buying decision. It also helps you adjust your offer according to the customer’s needs. 4. Use Customer Feedback To Achieve Marketing Goals Online businesses can also use customer feedback to achieve their marketing goals. Getting feedback from your customers means you get a chance to know your customers better. As a result, you can create targeted marketing campaigns to address your customer’s pain points. Make sure you use the information you collect from survey forms and emails to create precise buyer personas. All in all, the success of your marketing efforts be it content marketing, customer support, or user experience is directly or indirectly linked with the data you collect in the form of customer feedback. 5. Use Customer Feedback To Get Referrals Happy customers = more referrals = more happy customers Pretty simple, isn’t it? Happy customers are more likely to recommend your business to others. As a result, more people will visit your website and invest their hard-earned money into your products and services. However, if you don’t take customer feedback seriously, the negative feedback/customer experience will inhibit other buyers from visiting your website and trust your offers. Remember, you have to give your customers a reason to become your brand advocate. And this isn’t possible without impeccable customer support and timely response to their feedback. 6. Use Customer Feedback As Social Evidence
People tend to trust websites that include positive reviews and customer testimonials. Businesses that respect buyer’s opinions and reviews are on the right path to attract more customers and boost sales. When your website visitors see positive reviews on your website, they’ll feel confident about your services. 7. Use Customer Feedback To Inspire Your Team E-commerce businesses can also use customer feedback to motivate their team. In the case of positive feedback, the worker responsible for it will automatically feel encouraged. As a result, he will put in more effort to design more useful features in the future that customers will love. Similarly, negative feedback can inspire the worker to work hard to fulfill the customer’s needs. 8. Use Customer Feedback To Gauge Customer Satisfaction As mentioned above, happy customers are more likely to recommend your business to others. This is why many brands gauge customer feedback to improve their overall customer satisfaction ratio. NPS, also known as Net Promoter Score, is a foolproof method widely used by e-commerce brands to measure the willingness of their customers to recommend their brand to other people. The higher your NPS is, the profitable the business appears to be. 9. Use Customer Feedback To Retain Existing Customers
The feedback you collect from survey forms, emails, or reviews can help online businesses to quickly evaluate if buyers are happy with your products. That feedback is essential because it can help to address customers’ complaints. Also, it will significantly impact your future customer retention rate. 10. Use Customer Feedback To Acquire New Customers Customer feedback not only helps businesses improve their customer retention rate, but it also helps them to acquire new customers.
Whether it’s in the form of reviews or word of mouth marketing, when people get to see positive things about your brand, they’ll feel like visiting your store and making a purchase. Final Words Customer feedback acts as a useful source of information for brands who want to improve their customer experience strategies. To continue making buyers satisfied, businesses need to ask for their feedback. The most critical step is to acknowledge their concerns on time.