How to Get Customer Feedback Without Asking the Customer

Customer feedback surveys are everywhere. They’re at the bottom of cash register receipts. They fill up your inbox. They’re how customer service calls end.

According to Pew Research Center, as many as 82 percent of Americans make purchasing decisions based on customer feedback. While it’s important to gather feedback, the more you seek it, the more overburdened your customers may feel.

As a result, your customers may suffer from survey fatigue, which is when customers become apathetic, bored, or tired of taking surveys. The dilemma many brands are faced with, then, is how to get customer feedback without asking the customer.

Creative Ways to Get Customer Feedback

Savvy brands understand that you don’t necessarily need to ask customers for feedback. In many cases, you can collect information on your customer experience seamlessly, without being bothersome. Here are five ways to gather customer feedback.

Analyze Website Activity

For e-commerce brands, website analytics like bounce rates, average time spent on page, and conversion rate can say a lot about your online customer experience. For example, let’s say you have a high bounce rate, low conversion rate, and an average of just 5 seconds being spent on your average product page. This suggests that your page is misleading, lacking information, or doesn’t communicate your products well.

You can also analyze your online customer journey to identify the moment your customers decided against making a purchase. How many different pages did they visit? How many customers viewed pricing? How many abandoned their cart after the cost of shipping and handling was added? Understanding this type of data can help you better meet the needs and expectations of your customers.

Review Live Chat Transcripts

Brands are increasingly implementing live chat tools on their websites for customer service and support. However, asking customers to rate the interaction or fill out a survey based on the conversation is just one more thing your customers are tired of doing.

Review transcripts from your live chat customer interactions to identify any inefficiencies on your website, as well as any opportunities for improving your online customer experience. You can also use these transcripts to evaluate your associates and create recognition programs for exceptional service. Leveraging sentiment analysis through the use of natural language processing can help automate this process and provide a more digestible overview of your brand perception (e.g., negative, neutral, positive).

Listen to Recorded Calls

When speaking with customers over the phone, many brands record the conversations their associates hold. Similar to reviewing live chat transcripts, it’s important to also listen to sales and customer service calls to improve customer experience and evaluate associates.

Sales calls, specifically, can help you gain a better picture of your brand’s first impression and understand why customers either choose or don’t choose your products and services. Furthermore, customer service calls can be used to evaluate your post-purchase experience, such as the delivery, performance, and any questions or issues experienced with your product or services.

Monitor Social Media

While it may be challenging to convince your customers to fill out a survey, many brands find that customers are more than willing to talk on social media. According to Sprout Social, consumers frequently reach out to brands on social media when they have a question, issue, or comment. This makes Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn great sources of customer feedback.

Leveraging social listening tools and sentiment analysis can help you monitor posts and comments for conversations where your brand is mentioned. This feedback can not only be used to understand how your customers subjectively think and feel about your brand, but also to improve experiences in real time by responding to customer complaints and issues.

Ask Mystery Shoppers

Mystery shopping is one of the best ways to understand what really happens when your customers call, click, or visit your business. Mystery shoppers think, act, and shop just like your actual customers, only you don’t have to beg them to evaluate your customer experience and provide honest feedback.

With mystery shopping surveys, you’ll be able to better focus on specific aspects of your customer experience and ask questions you might not otherwise be able to ask real customers. The surveys can then be designed to challenge organizational assumptions, clarify corporate expectations, improve operational processes, recognize exceptional performance, and boost customer satisfaction.

Define the Next Steps

Simply gathering customer feedback isn’t enough. While acquiring feedback typically isn’t an issue for well-known brands, it’s often challenging to understand what to do with the feedback you’re given.

IntelliShop can provide the solutions to not only gather accurate customer feedback, but also to define the next steps to improve your customer experience. When you partner with us, we’ll take the time to understand your core values, needs, and goals to design feedback and actionable improvement solutions accordingly.

Contact IntelliShop today to request a consultation.