For any type company the dialogue with their customers plays a key role in growing a successful business. Many companies are aware of this and make it a priority to constantly engage with their customers to receive feedback in order to improve the quality of their service and/or products. However, most of them face the challenge to maintain this dialogue while within their time and budget and to properly translate these findings into a clear action plan for improvements.
The most common way of collecting customer feedback is by simply talking to your customers. This traditional way of engagement has a benefit that it addresses the human aspect of the customer relationship, so if done correctly it can attend to the customers’ emotional needs as well. One of the downsides of this way is the limited reach and scope it provides. It is difficult to truly engage with the majority of your customers, while receiving valuable feedback. In return the received customer feedback can be scattered and is mostly unstructured due to the collection method. This can lead to misinterpretations of the feedback and difficulties in translating the feedback into customer service improvements. Moreover, this can be time consuming and expensive without delivering results.
By leveraging the power of technology along with the human aspect of customer engagement, companies can maintain a strong dialogue with their customers, while collecting and receiving actionable insights for future improvements. The availability of digital customer feedback systems has lowered the barrier for companies to integrate technology into their current ways of having a dialogue with their customers.
More specifically, the return on investment of the upfront costs for the set-up of a digital feedback system can be noticed within a few months. As for the monthly recurring fee for the software and service, these costs are like any other SaaS products nowadays; minimal and agile to the course of the company.
The use of these systems supersedes the aforementioned traditional way by providing the following key points:
1) Consistency in maintaining customer engagement/relationship;
Due to the time constraints followed from personal customer engagement, it is not always possible to collect feedback from your customers through the traditional way. By using a digital feedback, along with personal customer engagement, can provide you consistency in engaging with your customers by offering them the chance to provide feedback 24/7.
2) Precise feedback on specific areas;
Digital feedback systems allow you to target key areas of interest, and provides you with the flexibility to modify this as you progress. These systems can be used to either provide information to customers or gain insights from them. Providing information on specific topics, such as extended opening hours, new flavors and promotions, can make your business grow. Receiving information from customers, such as willingness to refer to a friend and satisfaction level of the service, can help the business improve.
3) Structure in the overall feedback process.
A big plus for digitally storing the precise information mentioned above is how the ease of access. By storing all this information and categorizing all the collected feedback it provides structure in the feedback and improvement process.
The combination, of being consistent with the customer feedback process and targeting specific areas of interest in a structured manner, provides results that can be translated into tangible actions.
These three benefits can have a big impact on how companies maintain and strengthen the dialogue with their customers as customer feedback will always remain the most important aspect in establishing a sustainable business. Luckily due to modern technology it has become easier to do so.
