An introduction to customer feedback tools for small businesses

Customer feedback and small businesses

Small businesses have an advantage when it comes to cultivating close customer relationships. But how well do you really understand your customers’ needs? Could you plan your next product line expansion based on what you know right now? Are you discovering issues that frustrate customers quickly, or does it take a drop in customer retention to bring problems to light?

If you do have an accurate idea of what your customers want from you, it’s probably because you ask them regularly. Customer insights are far more valuable than your best assumptions about your company’s performance. Customer feedback tools can help you routinely capture rich, actionable data from customers and use it to grow your business.

Why customer feedback is important

Small businesses thrive when customer loyalty is high. Loyal customers provide steady revenue and serve as your unofficial brand ambassadors when they recommend your products or services to others. When you are competing in a landscape in which change is the only constant, implementing customer feedback can be one of your best strategies for remaining agile. It’s the closest you will ever get to a playbook for growth.

Collecting and managing customer feedback gives your business the data it needs to stay profitable. It’s also a proactive way to let customers know that you want to stay in step with their evolving needs. Feedback apps can help you quickly uncover:

What you are doing right

What frustrates customers

What product changes your customers would like to see

How customers perceive your brand

How to make the customer’s journey easier

This information is difficult to get if you aren’t seeking it deliberately. Asking for customer feedback directly allows you to leapfrog any assumptions you may have about what factors are driving customer satisfaction in your business. It pinpoints how to improve your offerings. Providing that you act on insights quickly, it also communicates to customers that you are listening to them, giving them one more reason to keep buying from you.

What are customer feedback tools

Customer feedback tools are software tools that assist businesses in gathering, analyzing, monitoring, and managing customer feedback. Effective customer feedback software can help businesses connect with customers and extract data from those interactions to track customer satisfaction and quickly address critical issues. Most customer feedback tools integrate with your small business software, e-commerce website, and social media channels for ease of use.

Using customer feedback tools can improve every aspect of small business operations. Higher sales, an improved marketing approach, better customer experiences, and timely product improvements are all likely outcomes when you implement a system for collecting, organizing, and sharing customer feedback regularly.

8 ways to use customer feedback tools

Customer feedback tools can greatly simplify how you capture insights, make sense of them, and act upon them. Customer feedback software can also add a degree of automation so you can collect, analyze, and implement feedback consistently over time.

Here are eight ways to use customer feedback tools and apply your learnings to your advantage:

1. Send out surveys

Creating a survey is one of the simplest and most versatile ways to collect customer feedback. Use surveys to gather quantitative metrics, such as customer satisfaction ratings, or more qualitative information, such as how customers feel about the latest changes you’ve made.

It’s up to you to set the goals for each fact-finding mission. Once you’ve put your finger on what you’d like to learn, feedback apps can help you to build surveys quickly using template libraries and form creation wizards.

One performance measure that many small businesses use surveys for is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS is essentially a one-question survey designed as a basic measure of customer loyalty. It goes straight to the bottom line: How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?

On the 0–10 NPS scale, customers who rate themselves as a six or below are considered “detractors.” Sevens and eights are “passives”; nines and tens are “promoters.” Your net promoter score is equal to your promoters minus your detractors, disregarding the passives:

NPS = %Promoters – %Detractors

Use the NPS scores you glean from surveys to track customer loyalty gains over time.

Another quantitative measure small businesses can collect through surveys is a customer effort score (CES). CES allows customers to provide feedback on how easy your products or services are to use.

You are likely to get better response rates to surveys that don’t take long for customers to complete. One minute of customer effort or less is best. However, customer feedback tools can help you create easy-to-complete surveys that answer a broader range of questions if you need more detailed data.

2. Optimize emails

Use customer emails for more than just transactions. Those touchpoints create opportunities to garner useful insights as well. Many customer feedback tools can even help you automate emails that seek feedback in certain scenarios. For example, as soon as customers receive a product, have the feedback app send an email requesting a review. Or have customer support calls trigger a follow-up email asking how the service was.

A personalized email with an attention-grabbing subject line can encourage customers to be more candid in their responses. Make the most of the opportunity by asking customers to type their impressions in an optional comment box. You will likely receive back a wealth of qualitative data.

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3. Ask questions on social media

Let social media be your small business’ sounding board. Customers interacting with your brand on social media will often give you their unfiltered thoughts. Ask for customer feedback through posts that pose carefully targeted questions, and you may pick up a few key phrases to use in your next marketing campaign. Or if you need instant data points, consider a simple poll. Polls only take a second of your customers’ time.

4. Gather sales feedback

Knowing how customers feel throughout the sales process is critical for your small business. Use automated post-sale surveys by phone or email to find out what is motivating your customers to buy and how your sales approach affects their decisions. Also, reach out to potential customers who didn’t close a sale and use those insights to adapt your strategy.

5. Learn from customer service interactions

Customer service agents have a direct view of how people feel about your products or services. Don’t lose the opportunity to capture the precious information that comes from their conversations.

Many feedback apps have features that can help support teams track customers’ most commonly asked questions, their biggest complaints, usability issues, and other data points you need to improve how you serve customers’ needs.

6. Use sentiment analysis

Customer feedback tools can extract keywords and analyze language from support calls, sales conversations, surveys, online chats, or social media interactions to gauge how positive or negative they are. Sentiment analysis captures nuances in a customer’s voice and expressions using a type of AI called natural language processing (NLP). NLP interprets customer reactions to a particular topic in a specific scenario and assigns an emotion or sentiment to it. If, for example, your data suggests there is a lot of negativity surrounding color selections in your product line, you’ll know it’s time to expand your palette.

7. Track website behaviors

Customer feedback tools can track data on how your customers experience your website. Find out which product pages or self-serve topics attract the most traffic and learn what customers search for but fail to find. Demographics from your website also provide useful information that can help you get a more complete view of your customers and what they are looking for.

8. Make in-app connections

Many customer feedback tools make it easier to measure customers’ satisfaction as they use your app. A pop-up request to leave a review or comment on their experience—even if it’s just a quick thumbs up or down—can be a useful performance metric. Connecting with customers in-app can also let you know what improvements in the user experience are most likely to delight them.

What is the customer feedback loop?

The customer feedback loop illustrates that the work of learning from your customers is never done. The three fundamental steps in the loop are:

Ask for feedback
Analyze the feedback
Act on your new insights

Use the three steps in a continuous cycle to stay laser-focused on your customers’ needs while fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Customer feedback software can help you bring a regular cadence to gathering, analyzing, and acting on insights so you don’t miss out on opportunities to earn more loyal customers.

Following the customer feedback loop

Ask

Ask for feedback

You now know several ways to use customer feedback tools. But before you use them, it’s important to consider the quality of the questions you will be asking. Each time you ask a customer for feedback, you should have a specific goal in mind. Are you:

Checking up on your customer satisfaction scores?

Interested in finding out if customers are enjoying a new product feature?

Wondering if delivery times meet your customers’ expectations?

Taking time to target your questions carefully will make your feedback easier to act upon when you receive it.

Analyze

Analyze the feedback

Organize your feedback into three categories:

Customer service feedback
Marketing and sales feedback
Product design and usability

The nature of the data you receive for each category can dictate how you can best share it. Don’t waste valuable time organizing the data in spreadsheets. Feedback apps have data visualization tools that can make better sense of your data, such as easy-to-read word clouds, charts, and graphs.

Act

Act on your feedback

Now it’s time to use your customer feedback to your advantage. Hold regular meetings to go over the data so everyone in your small business—from the front line to product design—can make positive changes directly based on what you heard from customers. Sharing feedback regularly with your team will help you prioritize what changes to make and when.

Many customer feedback tools can issue alerts for critical customer satisfaction issues that require more immediate triage.

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Business Insights and Ideas does not constitute professional tax or financial advice. You should contact your own tax or financial professional to discuss your situation.