5 Ways to Guarantee Customer Insights

“Companies that listen to customers grow faster.”

If you are running a business, you know how important it is to check the quality of your service or products. Unfortunately, without proper feedback, you’ll never know how well or bad you’re doing! This is why so many successful brands make it a point to collect customer insights.

Customer insight is data collected by businesses to understand how their customers feel and think. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you run. Collecting feedback is always necessary for assessment and business strategy.

While it’s so easy to think of what questions to ask, getting your customers to give you feedback can be an entirely different challenge. Today, if you’re looking at service or product improvement, it’s no longer a question of whether you need customer insights or not, but how you can get your customers on board when you ask for insights.

People can be very busy or distracted nowadays. If they don’t see themselves benefiting from something, it’s easy for them to ignore or refuse it.

How do you get customers to give you feedback?

Keep it short

An average’s person’s attention span (8 seconds from 12 seconds in 2020) has never been this low! Nobody wants to do something that takes too much of their time.

If you want to grab your customer’s attention and convince them to give you feedback, keep your message simple and short. The longer and more complex your message, survey, or questionnaire looks, the more intimidating and time-consuming it appears to your customers.

Be personal

Sometimes we ignore a message because it’s that familiar robotic spiel we read and hear all the time. So instead of randomly giving out the same formal questions to your customers, start making your approach more personal as if you were speaking to them in person.

Address your customers by their name and mirror the way actual human conversations go. Your customers can definitely tell if they’re speaking with a robot or an actual human. If they feel that they’re talking to a person, they will feel heard and understood.

Don’t forget to let them know why you need their feedback. Most people would give a response only when they understand why they have to do it. You can add a short message telling them you want to hear their thoughts about their recent purchase so you can give them an even better experience next time.

Don’t ask too much personal information

With so many cases of fraud circulating in the internet, you can’t blame your people if they choose not to give out too much information about themselves. In fact, according to a 2018 survey, 35.9% of people who go online distrusts a brand that asks too many questions from them.

Keep the transaction simple and less demanding.

Give back value

Let your customers know what they can get in return for their feedback. This could be a freebie, a small discount on the next purchase, an extension of their subscription, or simply a promise of better services in the future.

The ‘reward’ you offer will encourage more of your customers to leave their honest feedback after every purchase or transaction.

Find the perfect timing

Timing is everything.

Know when to ask for insights. If you wait too long or request for feedback too soon, you may risk not getting any response at all. The best time window to ask your customers for insights varies. Depending on what you offer, give your customers enough time to experience the actual product or service before you ask for insights.

Right after transaction

Strike while the iron is hot. People are more willing to share their thoughts when the experience is still fresh. In cases of dissatisfaction, reaching out immediately creates less room for customer churn.

When you communicate with your dissatisfied customer right away, you deal with the issue immediately, creating better experiences for them.

When you see an abandoned cart

About 75% of shoppers online abandon their cart. There are so many reasons why someone abandons their cart. It could be due to the lengthy checkout process, or the high shipping fee.

To increase checkout rate, ask your customers right away what’s keeping them from checking out.

You don’t have to ask for a long explanation. A simple pop-up, multiple-choice question could do the trick, so all your customer has to do is click!

After customer tries the product or service

If you need feedback for a product or service, reach out to your customer only after they get to use or experience it.

For tech products, for example, you may start reaching out after 48 hours. For eCommerce products that take a longer time to try out, a week should be fine.

Whether you’re trying to improve your online platform, your customer service, or your product, seeking customer insights helps you grow your business by letting you know what your customers want. Customer insights tell you what is working well and what needs more work.

If you want to get people on board when seeking customer insights, the trick here is to make every encounter with your customers engaging.

You want your customers to speak to you and not your boring script or your emotionless spiels. When they understand that you care about them and their experiences, it will be easier for them to open up and share a little bit of their time with you.