Customer Experience
Article written by Mathew Maniyamkott
Regular contributor to various magazines. Passionate about entrepreneurship, startups, marketing, and productivity.
11 min read
31 May 2024
Ever wondered how companies used to struggle with creating custom features, like making customer feedback software from scratch? Imagine a time when in-house teams had to build everything themselves. But guess what? Things have changed! With the rise of SaaS-based software, that pressure has eased, giving rise to a new challenge. What’s that now? It’s about finding the perfect customer feedback software from a bunch of options, all designed for different types of businesses.
In this blog, we’re not just going to figure out what make great customer feedback tools, but we’re also going to explore the world of user feedback tools that are perfect for your unique business.
Let’s dive in.
Let’s take an example. For instance, every time you buy a product on Amazon, you get their emails from checking on buyer experience. Most of us ignore it, but it is an important metric for the said parties as it shows the kind of experience you had buying from them and your ratings are an indicator of repeat purchases and much more. It helps you to understand customer preferences, understand their expectations and you can personalize your offerings accordingly.
To understand the concept better, here are the advanatages of using customer feedback software.
There should be improvements in the products that you offer and the best people to give you that would be your customers who are using your product. Market research will only tell you if people are willing to buy your product but it doesn’t talk about how the product can be improved. A customer’s needs and expectations evolve over time and a customer who has used the product would be able to give valuable inputs.
Every time your customer interacts with you, you are giving them an experience, whether it is good or bad completely depends on how your products work and the accompanying customer service.
Customer feedback helps you interpret and analyze the metrics that customers have given by turning raw data into visual information in the form of graphs, pie charts, tables and so on. This makes it easy to identify patterns and understand the psyche of the customers.
Most of the feedback system comes along with the power of automation and it is extremely powerful and important as well because it allows you the time and flexibility to work on your core activities. Once you set up a system, it becomes easier to concentrate on your other core activities.
If you are looking for a customer feedback platform, here are 10 tell-tale signs of a bad one to watch out for:
This can be a huge drawback if the data that you have collected from the customer feedback software cannot be read by other systems because the software cannot accept it.
It is important that the system is designed in such a way that the feedback can be taken from any number of platforms and not just one. In fact, if you encounter a customer feedback software that works on just one platform, please avoid it with a ten-foot pole. The customer feedback system should be able to collect feedback using multiple platforms including email, social media, SMS, landing pages, chatbots, etc.
This is an absolute must-have feature that allows you to show a question based on the previous answers to the previous question. The best part about is that it enhances the experiences of the respondent by not showing them questions which are irrelevant to them.
If there is no skip logic feature in the user feedback tools, then a user needs to keep answering ‘no’ or ‘ignore’ (based on your inputs) because it is not relevant to them.
Monotonous surveys are boring. It is not only boring for the user to answer, but there is also not much that you can glean from such a survey. If your online customer feedback software only allows you to ask multiple choice questions, then run away from it.
Forget about using it even if there is a free trial period. It is not worth your time investing in a customer feedback software that does not give you the liberty of asking different sets of questions from your customers. Even the respondents like answering different types of questions. It is just plain human nature to want change.
See SurveySparrow for example. You get a wide array of question types and customization options.
Feedback apps should come with a reporting tool and feedback analysis in its dashboard. The dashboard should show how your feedback, it must be possible for you to compare and play around with the data to create different streams of information that can be used to improve the business.
Why? Because, the reporting tools help you gauge the impact of customer service efforts.
If there are a lot of people who will be handling different projects for various teams, then it is important for the feedback software should have project management capabilities. The lack of it means that you need to create new accounts every time you want someone to be added.
The other option is to share your login credentials which is definitely not advised. The customer feedback software should come with options to create any number of teams and it should be able to different tasks to people based on their job roles.
Allow the business to add a lot of customization options on the tools for customer feedback, from being able to add their logo, lots of colors, various text elements, and so on.
You might ask why providing free templates is important? Having a set of templates to look at for a particular business problem makes it easy to draft a survey questionnaire and also builds familiarity with the kind of questions that can be asked. On top of this, it saves a lot of time for the business that is going to conduct the survey.
There are a lot of minor processes such as feedback, collecting responses, having to follow-up with them, sending the data collected and so on. If one were to handle all of these processes manually, it would take a lot of time. The hours wasted in this futile process can easily be automated.
It also helps with sending recurring emails. Make sure that the customer feedback platform you choose has automation capabilities.
Not all customers are the same, and it is extremely important that you picture your clients that way. Only then will you be able to understand their specific needs and wants to offer something specific to them. This way you can target leads based on specific events, actions, sessions, and activities.
So, how do we choose the Right customer feedback software?
Choosing any kind of software is a big task because there are a lot of things to consider and there is information overload. The plethora of choices actually doesn’t help. Making a poor decision of choosing the right customer feedback software can result in a lot of wasted time and lead to a lot of cost overruns as well. You don’t want that, here are some tips on collecting customer feedback and how you should choose the right tool.
A customer feedback software can help you with insights on areas such as customer experience, loyalty, satisfaction and more. But you need to see the metrics that you want to concentrate on and choose accordingly. There might be a lot of features that are available, but you don’t need all of them. Only choose the ones that are extremely relevant to you.
Take a piece of paper and write down the features that are important to your business at this juncture with regards to your customer feedback software. Also, the kind of dashboard that you want as well. A dashboard is a powerful part of a customer feedback software since it is the one that spits out data into usable information. Think about the exact steps that you will use when you work with feedback software. Visualizing this will make it clearer for you.
Some software requires a lot of hand-holding before you can ensure someone is there at the workspace to do it, while some don’t require any kind of technical assistance. But if you don’t have the right technical capacity, then you need to select a vendor whose product comes along with support services.
While you might think that it is perfectly all right to export the data from the feedback on to an Excel sheet and analyze the data, unfortunately, that is not the smartest way to do this work unless your feedback volumes are extremely low. Rich capabilities in your dashboard have become almost a norm these days as marketers need to compare different types of data for deep insights.
Follow-up is an important concept in sales and more so when collecting feedback from your customers. It requires you to identify and manage customer touchpoints, listen to the customer and follow up on the feedback received. Keep a bunch of people who will take care of the follow-ups and close the thread.
That said, the final step is to test out the software for yourself. Some of this software have free trials or at least a freemium version using which you can find if you are comfortable working with the software and if it aligns with your business goals.
Finding an online form that has all the features that you want might not be something that is available at all, this is why you need to pick and choose. Different tools for customer feedback have their own set of advantages and disadvantages to navigate. Before you decide on a customer feedback software, you need to be aware of what exactly are the objectives towards using such a software. The easiest method to arrive at the customer feedback software to use would be the above methods.
A conversational interface is the backbone of any customer feedback software and SurveySparrow has all the features that we have mentioned. With its neat interface and feature-rich dashboard, it makes it easy for you to get the most from a customer feedback session. If you are looking for a customer feedback software that can take care of all your survey needs, look no further than Survey Sparrow.
Thousands of brands trust SurveySparrow to turn feedback into growth. Try it free today!
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