Gain and evaluate customer feedback quickly and easily for company success with CX software from QuestionPro

Improve customer experiences through customer feedback at the touchpoints along the customer journey: paths, options, methods, evaluation, software. 

Gain customer feedback along the customer journey

Customer journey and customer experiences

Customer feedback, often also called consumer feedback, generally refers to feedback from customers about a company's products or brands or about the company itself.

Feedback requires experience, and customers have a variety of experiences before and after purchasing products and brands or the company offering them, for example with sales, customer service or support. This collection of individual experiences is called the → Customer Journey, which translates to “the customer’s journey”, which begins, for example, where someone enters a search term into a search engine and from there reaches your website. These individual experiences along the customer journey are called “touchpoints”. And customers gain experience with your products and your company at many touchpoints.

Simple example of a customer journey

Coming from a search engine, your potential customer gains their first experience with your company or the product they were previously looking for on your website. If your website visitor has their first positive experience on your website because it is particularly cleverly designed and appears trustworthy, offers easy navigation and the content is meaningful, then there is a high probability that your visitor will take a closer look at the desired product also busy with your company. In addition, your potential customer is looking for customer feedback on social media and on various review portals about the product you offer and your company itself.

In the live chat that you offer on your website, details about the delivery are discussed; the chat employee is friendly, helpful and competent. If the price is correct, the product is added to the shopping cart. The ordering process itself is quick and easy because your potential customer can place their order as a guest and does not have to register first. This is where your website visitor has a negative experience, namely that their preferred payment option is not offered and then cancels the purchase, leaves your website and may not come back. And if in doubt, you don't know why this happened because you don't ask for customer feedback at this point.

Customer feedback and customer journey

In the example described above, your potential customer had several positive experiences along the customer journey and only one negative one, and yet the purchase process was abandoned because it was the most important experience for the website visitor. Since the competition is tight and there are similar, similar products, your potential customer avoided the effort of contacting you and simply purchased the product from the competitor. You could also have asked your potential customer, i.e. asked for customer feedback, why they canceled the ordering process and you would have gained valuable information. Innovative survey technologies offer solutions for this that would have provided you with the appropriate customer feedback. Obtaining customer feedback along the customer journey is extremely important because if you know which touchpoints along the customer journey cause negative customer experiences, you can make these touchpoints positive based on the information gained from customer feedback.

That's why customer feedback is extremely important for every company

Don't wait for customer feedback, stimulate it!

If you want to know where your company stands in the favor of consumers and what customer experiences are had along the customer journey, then you can derive this from the sales figures and leave it at that. Quite a few companies still do this until sales suddenly fall and those responsible cannot find any lever to end the free fall. On the other hand, you can also ask for customer feedback at every single touchpoint and thus gain far more valuable and in-depth information. Dealing with customer feedback as a source of business decisions is now a matter of course for long-term successful companies.

Companies that know and appreciate the value of customer feedback do not just wait for customers to give their feedback somewhere and somehow, for example in rating portals, social networks or forums, but rather these companies create channels for gaining customer feedback and stimulate it even, for example by being active customer survey or Touchpoint analyses carry out regularly, along the entire customer journey.

Gain customer feedback using touchpoint analysis

Actively questioning customer experiences through customer feedback at the individual points of contact between customers, products and companies is called touchpoint analysis. Customer-centric companies try to measure customer experiences at as many points of contact and interaction as possible using a wide variety of survey methods and evaluate them accordingly. Below we will explain these methods for obtaining customer feedback in more detail.

Ways and opportunity to obtain customer feedback

Thanks to modern and innovative survey technologies, companies today have many opportunities to gain customer feedback along the customer journey. In particular, Customer Experience Management platforms (CX software), such as those from QuestionPro, offer holistic approaches to gaining customer feedback across all media and channels, online and offline. And CX software also offers the appropriate analysis methods that convert customer feedback into really useful insights. We would like to introduce you to some of these options below.

Online intercept surveys / onsite surveys

Onsite surveys in the form of online intercept surveys help you collect customer feedback on your website, for example on usability (web experience), information content or ease of navigation. Your customers can leave customer feedback using the feedback tab, or a pop-up or layer with relevant questions appears while surfing. Such pop-ups or layers can also be actively controlled so that they can be displayed, for example, when a visitor enters your website or wants to leave it, i.e. when the mouse leaves the browser.

But it can also be done in an even more granular way. For example, you can display a pop-up or layer survey whenever website visitors come from a specific device, operating system or from a specific region. This means you can collect very targeted customer feedback. It is also possible to control the pop-up or layer using the search term through which website visitors came to your website. Online Intercept surveys are a powerful customer feedback tool!
→ Online intercept surveys.

Classic customer surveys using questionnaires

Customer surveys have always been a very popular tool for obtaining customer feedback. Customer feedback is obtained via a questionnaire, which is now mainly accessed online via a link. A customer survey in the classic sense is often very extensive, contains many questions and is usually carried out once or twice a year. In contrast to touchpoint analysis, which focuses on individual interactions and experiences on the part of customers and is also carried out directly in the context of these interactions, the classic customer survey is rather broader and also includes aspects such as customer expectations, price-performance ratio, and processes between customers and company, corporate image, competitive aspects, quality management and much more. To obtain customer feedback from customer surveys, QuestionPro's CX software offers a very easy-to-use questionnaire editor, which also includes special predefined question types about customer loyalty and customer satisfaction.
→  Here you can find an example of a customer survey.

Customer feedback via email

Correspondence with customers today predominantly takes place via email. Your customers send you inquiries about prices and products, write complaints or give valuable suggestions. These emails are usually archived in CRM systems. Many companies neglect evaluating qualitative feedback because they lack the tools. The content of emails can be easily and automatically evaluated using semantic text analysis. So don’t ignore customer feedback from emails. If you have any questions about this, please feel free to contact us!

Feedback terminal

Feedback terminals are a very valuable tool for gaining customer feedback in stores, supermarkets, shopping centers, hotels or waiting areas, such as at airports. Customers can give their feedback on a touch display with a fingertip as they pass by. Smartly positioned, feedback terminals offer a very high return of customer feedback. The big advantage of feedback terminals is that customer feedback is obtained as soon as they see what is happening, for example when leaving a store.

Generate customer feedback via QR code

If you travel with Deutsche Bahn, you have probably noticed the QR code on the seats, which you can photograph with a QR code reader and which will lead you directly to a survey. This can of course be applied to all industries and areas. The CX software QuestionPro generates such QR codes fully automatically when creating a questionnaire. This QR code can then be printed on flyers, posters, business cards, menus, outer packaging, etc., for example. This means that customer feedback can be stimulated virtually anywhere in the world.

Customer community

Many companies today rely on customer communities to gain valuable quantitative and qualitative customer feedback. Innovative customer communities offer a variety of options for gaining customer feedback, for example in the form of forums, idea boards or online focus groups. With the help of customer communities, it is very easy to set up customer panels, i.e. a group of customers who regularly take part in online surveys. This makes obtaining customer feedback much easier. Today it is no longer a big effort for companies to create and administer their own customer community, as there are special frameworks for this. QuestionPro also offers the option of creating and managing a customer community.

Customer feedback via telephone

Today, customer surveys rarely take place via telephone. Using touchpoint analyses and online customer surveys, customer feedback is much more cost-effective to obtain and far less unobtrusive. In addition, companies that offer products in the B2C sector in particular face major legal challenges with regard to the new GDPR standards. However, telephone customer surveys still take place predominantly in the B2B sector. Customer feedback can be easily entered into a data entry form during the conversation. Collecting customer feedback via telephone does not have to be an explicitly conducted customer survey. You can also ask about customer sensitivities during a sales or service call. QuestionPro's CX software is CATI and CAPI-capable, so that any input masks, for example during support conversations, can be called up automatically, so that support employees do not have to search for a contact record during the conversation.
→  Information about telephone surveys.

Collect customer feedback with Interactive Voice Response technology

The IVR technology integrated into the CX software makes it possible to gain customer feedback via Interactive Voice Response. Using IVR integration, you can conduct voice surveys in the form of automated phone calls and collect customer feedback without any intervention. In practice, IVR is rarely used, especially in Germany, as the legal framework here also poses a greater challenge. But customer acceptance is also rather low here. Anyone who has ever had an encounter with an artificial voice calling you can certainly confirm this. In the USA, for example, this procedure is used more often to obtain customer feedback.

Rating portals, forums and social networks

Review portals are very popular with consumers because they ensure transparency and are a valuable decision-making aid when it comes to choosing a product or service. Customer feedback from rating portals and social networks are a valuable source of information for companies, because customer feedback is often brutally honest and unfiltered, especially when reviews can be submitted anonymously or using a pseudonym. There are now countless review portals, such as Google My Business, TripAdvisor or Yelp, and customer feedback is increasing more and more. So dedicate yourself to the many reviews and ratings and try to get as many positive reviews as possible.
→  Get more positive customer feedback.

The personal interview

You can also ask for customer feedback in a personal conversation. This is not uncommon in supermarkets or in front of shopping centers. Interviewers usually record customer feedback using a tablet PC. The CX software QuestionPro offers you the option of saving customer feedback from personal interviews recorded on a tablet PC offline, so that an internet connection is not necessary during the conversation. The data can be synchronized with the server following the survey project. The data is recorded in a structured and intuitive manner using an intelligent data entry mask that works like a conversation guide. This makes it possible for even inexperienced interviewers to quickly and easily collect customer feedback in a personal conversation.

Customer feedback app

Innovative companies provide selected customers with a feedback app through which smaller customer surveys can be launched on a regular basis. When a new survey is launched, customers receive a notification via the smartphone notification bar and can then answer the questions. You can incentivize customers' willingness to participate in such a feedback program, i.e. reward them, for example by companies awarding gift vouchers or other gimmicks for each participation in a survey. One possible area of ​​application is that customers open the customer feedback app when they enter the app operator's store and then send feedback on the customer experience in real time. There are many other applications for obtaining customer feedback via feedback apps. Contact us!

Use contact form

A contact form is probably the easiest way to gain customer feedback. But not all contact forms are the same. A distinction can be made here between the classic contact form, which can usually be accessed from the main menu to send general inquiries. Or, for example, there is the complaint form, which is specifically structured so that angry customers can express their complaints in a structured manner. Other companies, on the other hand, have content-specific forms on every page of their website so that they can request information quickly and easily. These contact forms can also be used wonderfully to obtain customer feedback, which provides information about how customers became aware of the website or what they are interested in. Or whether the content of the website and the navigation are satisfactory.

In addition to the actual message that your website visitors send you via the contact form, you can also use a few additional fields to gain valuable customer feedback on the usability and content quality of the website. The CX software QuestionPro also offers a form editor that can do exactly that! And in addition, the recipients of the data from the contact forms can also be controlled, so that data from the complaint form ends up in complaint management, the data from a product inquiry to the relevant sales employees and the additional information gained goes to a central database in which customer feedback is analysed.

Analysis of customer feedback

Key performance indicators for customer satisfaction

Of course, customer feedback has no real meaning without appropriate analysis of the data. The evaluation of customer feedback should therefore also be carried out using the latest methods and findings. It is therefore important to make sure to ask the right questions when collecting customer feedback. Customer feedback brings you data on important and valuable key performance indicators for your company, four of which we outline below.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The Customer Satisfaction Score measures the overall satisfaction of your customers with just a single question: “Considering all the experiences you have had with our company, products, services: How satisfied are you?” Customer feedback is given on a 4-, 5- or even 10-point scale from very dissatisfied to very satisfied.
→ Information about the Customer Satisfaction Score

Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Effort Score measures the level of effort that customers have to put in to find information on your website, speak to a customer service representative or place an order. The more inconvenient this is for your customers, the more dissatisfied your customers will be. Therefore, the Customer Effort Score is also a valuable indicator of customer satisfaction.
→ Information about the Customer Effort Score.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

One of the most commonly used metrics for customer satisfaction and customer loyalty is the Net Promoter Score. The Net Promoter Score measures your customers' willingness to recommend on a scale of 1-10, from which the level of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty can be derived. Customer feedback on the Net Promoter Score can be recorded very easily in various ways and the significance of this key figure is undisputed among experts in the field of Customer Experience Management.
→ Information about the Net Promoter Score.

Secure Customer Index (SCI)

The Secure Customer Index is not as widespread and well-known as the Net Promoter Score or the Customer Satisfaction Score. The Secure Customer Index measures the degree of customer loyalty and is made up of the degree of customer satisfaction as well as a customer's willingness to interact and repurchase.
→ Information about the Secure Customer Index

Evaluate and analyse customer feedback using a real-time experience dashboard

If you use QuestionPro's Customer Experience Management platform, you have the option of recording customer feedback decentrally but analyzing it centrally via an experience dashboard. QuestionPro's experience dashboard for evaluating customer feedback is freely configurable and shows you all key performance indicators at a glance in real time.
→ Information about the Customer Experience Dashboard.

Analyze qualitative customer feedback using AI-based semantic text analysis

Companies are gaining more and more qualitative customer feedback, for example from rating portals or social networks. This customer feedback can be evaluated and classified using semantic text analysis, so that valuable conclusions can be drawn from qualitative customer feedback without having to read the multitude of forum posts, reviews or mentions in social networks.
→  Information on the topic of semantic text analysis.

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KEYWORDS OF THIS BLOG POST

customer Feedback | Customer Journey | Touch Points | Customer satisfaction