Are you aware of the opinion of the most recent customer who purchased an item from your online store regarding the product they received?
What about your last ten customers? Someone who purchased a few items three months ago?
Receiving feedback from customers allows you to gauge the opinion of your e-commerce customers regarding your brand and items.
Currently, 43% of customers residing in the U.S. have admitted to investing more resources in brands they are devoted to, signifying that if businesses focus on client feedback, it could result in an influx of considerable revenue.
We should contemplate the significance of consumer remarks and how you can exploit it to develop your online business.
Why Is Customer Feedback Important?
Currently, individuals are more privileged than ever to find data and critiques of merchandise and services before they buy them. The following facts demonstrate the absolute necessity of customer feedback, primarily those in the form of online reviews, for e-commerce companies.
- According to Podium, 93% of people say reviews impact what they choose to buy.
- Google and Facebook are top spots for customer reviews, according to ReviewTrackers.
- KPMG found that 30% of customers have shared product feedback online.
- In a Cone Study, 80% of consumers reported that they decided not to buy something after reading a negative review.
- The Spiegel Research Center found that a product with five reviews is 270% more likely to be purchased than a product with no reviews. In addition, they found that displaying reviews for more expensive products increased conversion rates by 380%.
- About 70% of consumers have changed their perception of a brand based on if and how the company replied to an online review, according to Bazaarvoice.
- In this Zendesk study, 97% of respondents say a bad customer service experience can change buying behavior.
- Vonage found that U.S. businesses lose an estimated $62 billion each year due to bad customer service.
- And Womply found that businesses that reply to at least 25% of reviews see an average revenue increase of 35%.
How Collecting Customer Feedback Can Help Your Ecommerce Business
There are numerous advantages to considering what your clients have to say; from lessening the cost of gaining new customers to raising the rate of customers who complete a purchase when using your website, as well as gaining more dependable customers.
Improve the customer experience.
It is estimated that for every person who speaks up about their dissatisfaction with a product or service, there are another 26 people who experience similar feelings but remain silent. They go away and never come back to shop in your store. By assessing measurement rates over the entire customer experience, you can acquire an understanding of what customers contemplate regarding your enterprise and items – from when they originally visit your webpage, up to when they put in an order and receive their acquisition. By studying the results over time, you can discover what motivates someone to enthusiastically promote your brand to their friends on Instagram. This information can be utilized to raise the overall quality of customer service, resulting in more delighted customers.
Create more superfans.
Superfans can be seen as loyal customers who have a vested interest in your products, and are willing to spread the word about your company without being asked. They will happily tell their family, friends, and colleagues all about your brand. If you incorporate an NPS survey or a related form into your e-commerce business, the ‘superfans’ are those who give a rating of ‘9’ or ’10.’ (To learn more on NPS surveys, see later in this article).
Superfan endorsements through personal recommendations can be the ideal situation for e-commerce marketers. When people discuss your brand on social media platforms, it increases your brand’s recognition and, typically, increases the sales your business brings in.
Improve product development.
Requesting remarks on how both new and old products/services can be enhanced is very helpful; however, this can easily be overlooked. It is very difficult to evaluate your products with clarity when you are completely immersed in your daily tasks. Unless you directly request them to do so, your patrons often will not tell you what they think.
For illustration, if you’re selling luxury ice cream sandwiches, you could view a number of five-star reviews and assume everything is in perfect order. What if 5% of ice cream sandwiches melted into a liquid form when they reached their destination?
Unless you make inquiries for feedback, you won’t know about this unless you notice an increase in customer grievances through service tickets.
Demonstrate that you care.
When you pay attention to and confirm what your customers say, it conveys that you find them important. This results in better experiences for customers, causing them to remain with the company for longer.
By treating your customers as individuals, you can gain more insight and be able to modify your offerings to best meet their needs.
Decrease customer acquisition costs.
When you truly comprehend which clientele best suits your organization and can provide an unrivaled experience, this will aid in reducing your acquisition expenses. You are giving your current customers a wonderful experience so they will keep returning to make purchases. They are inclined to compose product evaluations as well.
Since you are aware of who your desired clients are, you can revise the content on your website and advertising channels to better communicate with them.
The result — more customers at a lower cost.
Increase online conversions
Are you aware that the typical rate at which people turn into paying customers on e-commerce websites is between 3% and 4%?
By concentrating on improving your website according to how your customers respond and what they have to say, you can increase your conversion rate. If you raise your conversion rate to 5% from 4%, it could result in an ample extra sum in dollars from new clients in one month.
Provide a competitive advantage.
To put it plainly, companies that truly focus on their customers have a clear advantage over their rivals.
The result of these actions will be cheaper customer procurement costs, increased repeated purchases, improved customer loyalty, and probably more positive merchandise assessments. This creates a moat around your business. Everything originates from obtaining, paying attention to, and appreciating customer comments.
Provide benchmarks for your business.
You can’t manage or improve what you don’t measure. When setting goals for different teams and people in your firm that are connected to customer service or opinions, you are demonstrating that it is a top priority.
By keeping track of what you are doing in the same way, you will start to make progress and observe better outcomes.
How to gather quantitative feedback
Conduct customer satisfaction surveys
Measures such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) can provide insight into how satisfied and involved your customers are with your company.
The NPS score is a measure of customer loyalty. The people who have had negative experiences with your services (0-6) are definitely not pleased and are likely to switch to a different brand.
Gathering customer feedback through NPS gives insight into which clients should be focused on to enhance business results. Your aim should be to identify where improvements are needed and take suitable action to gain the confidence of your critics and neutrals.
The CES rating reflects how straightforward it is for customers to use your services or have their problems taken care of: “CES questionnaires inquire about the difficulty of interacting with [business name], asking respondents to rate it from ‘effortless’ and ‘low effort’ to ‘very difficult’ and ‘a lot of effort’.”
Send out email or social media surveys
You can also acquire customer opinions about your eCommerce business by conducting numerical questionnaires through platforms that customers use most often and show the most engagement. You can conduct a survey by asking certain questions or you can send out emails with queries to people who have used a certain product. Tailor your surveys to your desired marketing plan and outcome, and make sure that the quiz you create reflects the identity of your brand and maintains the same style as your previous posts.
Here are a few more tips to help you make customer surveys with a high response rate:
- Ensure to create engaging surveys with a simple structure and easy-to-fill out. Get free survey templates from platforms like JotForm.
- Always thank survey respondents for taking their time to fill out the survey. Offering discounts, freebies, coupons, and other incentives can help motivate customers to fill out the survey, but ensure to experiment before settling for a given incentive.
- Use both open- and closed-ended questions.
- Keep your survey short and precise to increase the likelihood of completion by the respondents.
Evaluate website user activity
Examine the behavior of customers when they use your website without having any direct contact with them. This can be accomplished by utilizing techniques such as A/B testing, heatmap creation, and click monitoring. A/B tests can provide insight into which landing pages get the most conversions, as well as which colors and locations of the call to action buttons work best. You can acquire up-to-the-minute information on how people make their way around your website. Tools such as heatmaps (click maps, scroll maps, move maps) offer an insight into the areas of the website that customers are most and least engaged with.
How to gather qualitative feedback
Qualitative feedback can be in verbal or written form. Gathering data concerning the encounters of patrons in their own utterances allows you to comprehend their sentiment.
Here are a few methods of gathering qualitative consumer input for eCommerce.
Engage customers directly
Drawbacks to conducting surveys exist because respondents could reply in a prejudiced way, particularly when rewards are included. To ensure a fair and reliable approach to gathering customer feedback, it’s best to reach out to them individually or by phone. Doing so will provide you with high quality, valuable insights from their tone of voice and physical cues.
This method will allow you to get genuine opinions to aid in enhancing your e-commerce business. You can find out why your website isn’t getting customers to make purchases, where your issues are arising, etc.
Gaining such understanding will allow you to make corrections to plug any gaps in your procedures.
Use suggestion boxes on websites
Suggestion boxes (or feedback boxes) give you the possibility to receive input from customers at multiple stages or webpages on your online store.
You can easily measure customers’ sentiments regarding your products, services, and website navigation by utilizing the feedback.
What should trigger the request for feedback?
- If a site visitor spends a lot of time on the site without taking a particular action.
- If the visitor spends a considerably high amount of time on the knowledge base or FAQ page.
- If a shopper recently abandoned their shopping cart.
- When a visitor is about to leave your site.
- On the thank-you page upon completion of a purchase.
Gather customer reviews and comments
A lot of customers are usually inclined to leave comments on the item pages, giving you a chance to comprehend what consumers think of your business.
The feedback from other people who follow you will help you understand what you have been doing in a positive way and where you can improve.
When customers voice their displeasure about your services, this type of response is beneficial for improving what you do and gaining their trust.
It is recommended that you reach out to discontented customers, determine when the problem that initiated the complaint can be fixed, and if possible, recompense them for the negative experience.
Testimonials can draw in new customers due to the fact that lots of internet shoppers look at them as if they were personal endorsements.
Track social media comments
Social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter offer the chance to glean feedback from numerous users of your products and services.
Review the following questions to monitor social media comments effectively:
- How many brand comments are there per period (daily, weekly, or monthly)?
- How many comments specifically mention your products and services?
- Is the trending activity increasing or decreasing?
- Which are your most active and least active social media channels?
- How does your social media sentiment compare to the competition?
This information will let you know what your brand’s position is in the industry and what customers think of your products and services.
Be sure to take into account the suggestions received and make changes accordingly in order to increase involvement.
Effective customer feedback collection practices
Once you have grasped the meaning of quantitative and qualitative customer feedback, the following tips can assist you with creating an efficient feedback collection approach.
- Ask both the good and the bad parts of the customer experience.
- Ask about what customers would like to see or experience from your brand. Use omnichannel contact center to reach a wider range of customers.
- Personalize your message to improve engagement and encourage honest feedback.
- Offer a reward, such as a gift, freebie, or discount.
- Thank customers for participating in the survey.
Conclusion
Gathering customer reviews for online shops provides a wonderful means to get an insight of how individuals view your business and goods. The feedback provides you with details of your strong points and areas that require more work.
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