Customer Feedback - How Is It Effectively Obtained?

By Author: Chris Surridge
Total Articles: 26
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Old Days

The reputation of a company back in the old days would usually rely on the word-of-mouth recommendation from one party to another, where word-of-mouth literally meant face to face speaking communication. A company could succeed or flounder based on people's experiences and more importantly how they portrayed that company when speaking to the next person. In all instances, the company could usually do nothing but stand idly by, unaware of whatever comments may be passed regardless if they were positive or negative.

Progression

Then the business industry evolved and with it came customer feedback forms, surveys, and telecalls involving the sentence this will just take 2 minutes of your time. How many of us have seen a feedback form at a restaurant or hotel? How many have been stopped by a market surveyor with a clipboard in the street? How many of us have experienced cold calls asking for a survey? The information boom and need for customer feedback had started!

Regression

But that boom may well have turned to a bust as a result of their own undoing, with consumers now ...
... flooded with requests for their feedback, some more invasive than others. The customer was fed up with being pressured for opinions, and the sometimes aggressive approach to questioning could result in an unjust negative feedback, purely out of annoyance. They had had enough, so another approach was adopted - incentives!

Incentives

Who here has NOT seen an incentivized feedback form? And by that I mean an opinion card which when filled out could win you a prize in a draw. I would bet only a few. Customer activity information is a valuable commodity for companies. It will help them target their audiences more directly, quickly and cost-effectively. The savings generated and the increase in potential bottom line figures as a result of using such information, heavily outweighs the minor costs of incentives or competition prizes.

Social Media

Today, the revolution has come full circle. Whereas before customers were hesitant to waste a minute of their time offering feedback to street surveyors, now many consumers will actively spend hours in front of their computer, posting remarks, reviews, blogs and comments about company products and services. As technology advances by the day, customers have immediate access to social media sites on their mobile phones, and the frequency of those comments are on the rise. A customer can walk out of a shop, and within minutes their feedback of their latest shopping experience can be posted online for millions to see.

What can the company do?

But is begs the question what can the company do to gather that new online information? Are they in the same situation as in the beginning, with one party talking to another, without the aware of the company in question? Absolutely not! Unlike before, the platform now used to review a company, can also be used as an effective tool.

Social Media Monitoring - how it will help your business
With millions of social sites, a manual search for a particular customer review is near impossible. However there are websites and services which collect social media information (such as tweets, forum posts, facebook updates and comments etc) for the specific purpose of analyzing a company's public opinion and social profile. Each note collected will either weigh positively or negatively depending on the associated text in the comment.

For example. A company's key search word is likely to be their brandname. A social media analysis will generate a report based on how many postings described that brandname in a negative light, and how many in a positive. The software can even filter down to the exact location of the comment on the relevant websites.

Technology may have advanced, but the underlying need for the information has not changed. A company can use that information to see if they are held overall in high regard, or whether there is need for improvement, and in which areas. Also, companies can use this tool to prevent further negative reports spreading, effectively nipping it in the bud, by replying to bad reviews or complaints within minutes of the initial remark being posted - just as a PR company might put out an official statement to contain bad publicity.

Today as social media becomes a part of everyday life, the average consumer has a soap-box to shout their views and put the world to rights. But with the correct software and knowledge, businesses can assess this information in a more productive fashion, use it positively, and communicate to defend their position and reputation.

The Future

Who knows what the next technological wave will bring in the ways of customer feedback and interaction? But as technology changes, so will the methods of acquiring that all important customer feedback.

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