Gathering Priceless Customer Feedback: 8 Tips & Tricks

We bring you our second edition of weekly posts from our friends at Retail Online Integration. This time we discuss customer feedback – an invaluable asset as it often tells you something that can help improve your customers’ experience. Leave your feedback below! – Kelly, Editor, the eTail Blog

By Ariel Finkelstein

Two things can happen when e-commerce sites offer visitors the opportunity to provide feedback. First of all, retailers get valuable insight into their visitors’ experiences. Secondly, visitors voluntarily identify themselves as people who feel a connection to a website/brand. This valuable knowledge provides enables online retailers to generate new leads and retain current customers.

Look at it this way: If 65 percent of the visitors who left feedback also left their contact information, providing you additional paths for conversion, the two-way conversation would potentially boost your traffic and average order per visitor. But even better, it boosts your brand’s image. So here’s the attributes feedback systems should include to best support lead generation and conversion:

1. Make feedback categorization clear and easy. Give visitors a quick-pick menu and submenus for the feedback topic they wish to comment on.
2. Offer feedback options alongside every important process on your site including shopping cart, landing pages, search and registration processes. This will help you capture user feedback where it matters.
3. Let visitors steer the conversation. Avoid survey-style questions with that give mechanical sounding multiple choice answers or too-technical voting mechanisms.
4. Give visitors easy-to-use ratings systems. Use a simple rating scale and give an option for written feedback.
5. Keep your internal departments informed of feedback by integrating it into current workflows. Forward feedback on low-end products to telesales, for example, and give feedback on high-end products to enterprise-level sales teams.
6. When customers leave feedback, also offer them a newsletter opt-in.
7. Be sure to integrate seamlessly with existing CRM systems. Use individual feedback to open new leads or cases.
8. Integrate feedback with web analytics programs. Get the complete picture of your company’s initiatives to help it answer complex questions.

A Better Customer Experience Leads to Better Sales
The most crucial factor in whether website investments result in new leads, conversions and customer retention has to do with responsiveness, not technology. With an effective feedback tool, organizations are able to listen to consumers and demonstrate an eagerness to respond. Such two-way communication will result in better customer service online and better bottom-line results.

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