What you’ll read: To drive real impact with your business, you need to understand what your customers want. In this article, we dive into the secrets to getting better feedback.
There’s no denying that collecting excellent customer feedback is essential when improving your brand experience.
If the customer feedback you collect isn’t accurate, clear, and comprehensive, it won’t be as valuable.
In some cases, it can even cause more problems than it solves.
That said, it’s crucial to know how to elicit excellent feedback from your customers whenever the opportunity arises.
Thankfully, cognitive psychologist LeeAnn Renninger’s recent TED Talk helps us understand the secret to giving great feedback — which, in turn, teaches us how to encourage honest customer responses .
Secret 1. Don’t React Too Quickly
In her talk, Renninger explains that feedback recipients often reply too quickly.
In many cases, we respond to less-than-stellar feedback by becoming defensive in some way — sometimes looking for a quick resolution, regardless of its effectiveness or overall impact on performance.
For our purposes, it’s important to take a step back before we tackle customer feedback.
Yes, you need to solve your customers’ issues quickly and effectively as they arise — but that’s not all you should do with the information you’ve been given.
With every piece of customer feedback you collect, you’ll know more about:
- What your customer needs and expects from your brand
- The problems your customers face, and how they talk about them
- How your customers prefer to engage with brands like yours
…and muchmore.
But you simply won’t uncover this information if you merely attend to the surface-level aspects of your customer feedback. Though you do need to react quickly to your audience’s concerns, it’s even more important to respond deeply to it, as well.
Be Ready to Receive Feedback (and Allow Your Customers Give It)
Renninger then explains that feedback tends to sink in better when the recipient is prepared for it.
In her talk, Reninnger puts the onus on managers to prepare their employees for feedback talks on performance and overall outlook. For our purposes, we’re going to flip the script and say that it’s our duty to always be ready to hear what our customers have to say.
Logistically speaking, your customers should be able to provide feedback whenever, wherever, and however they wish. An omnichannel approach to collecting customer feedback can help you uncover valuable insight — and allow you to build close-knit relationships with your individual customers.
It’s also important to have standardized workflows in place to analyze, assess, and act on the feedback you collect. In creating systematized processes, here, you’ll ensure your team squeezes every possible bit of info they can from every customer engagement they face.
As for your plan of attack, always be ready to take immediate action — and to make “big picture” improvements as necessary. The more clear it is to your customers that you actually take their suggestions seriously, the more likely they’ll make their voices heard.
(Pro tip: A a centralized Single Source of Truth can make is vital for the purpose of storing, collecting, and retrieving customer feedback a painless process.much easier, as well.)
Guide Your Customers to Give Great Feedback
Renninger believes those who give great feedback have a few things in common:
- They speak objectively
- They use evidence to back up their claims
- They avoid vague statements, and instead stay as specific and on-point as possible
You can’t exactly expect your customers to follow these guidelines on their own.
But you can guide them through the process of providing clear, comprehensive, and actionable feedback whenever they engage with your brand. It all comes down to staying curious, and being willing to dig deeper into your customers’ comments and questions.
A few examples of how this might play out:
- Providing space for further explanation within multiple-choice surveys.In any case, the goal is to elicit more — and more in-depth — information from your customers regarding their experiences with your brand. It’s up to you, though, to dig deeper in order to get a more complete view of the big picture.
Focus on the Impact
In her studies, Renninger has found that feedback is best-received when the provider focuses on impact and implications of said feedback.
Focusing on the manager-employee relationship, Renninger discusses the importance of adding “impact statements.” Basically, the idea is to provide clear rationale behind the feedback.
For our purposes, you want your customers to trace the feedback they’re currently providing to their overall experience with your brand.
You might ask them to discuss:
- What they are (or are not) able to do because of something you offer
- What they anticipate being able to do in the future because of where you’ve gotten them
- What they expect from you as they continue on in their journey toward success
Zooming out even further, you might also ask your customers to consider why, in their eyes, the feedback they’ve given is important to them. This, again, will allow them to think more contextually about their experiences with your brand — which in turn will lead to more insightful feedback for you to act on.
Keep the Door Open for Further Engagement
The last piece of advice Renninger has for her audience is to make feedback-related engagements a regular, routine occurrence.
Again, though: it’s on us to keep the conversation going with our customers.
Those who wait for their customers to come to them with insightful feedback and other important info will end up missing out on a ton of opportunities to improve in some way or another.
You always want to probe deeper into your customers’ comments and questions. Similarly, you need to ensure they know they’re always able to reach out to your team for any reason whatsoever.
Additionally, you want to use every feedback-related engagement to deliver even more value to your customers. Whether it’s a one-time promotional discount, an upsell or cross-sell opportunity, an offer for additional services — or something else completely — you always want your customers to leave with more value than they expected.
If you can make that happen, they’ll have every reason to keep offering insightful and useful feedback well into the future.