Present-day organizations look forward to utilizing every opportunity to interact with their target customers and learn more about their experiences. They spend millions of dollars in setting up email campaigns, review sites, and website analytics just to know what their customers think of the products/services they offer. The best part is – all of this is done for a good reason.
As per a survey conducted by the Harvard Business Review, customers who are asked for feedback were more than three times as likely to have opened new accounts for purchase than the ones who weren’t surveyed. But asking for feedback comes with its share of challenges.
Firstly, not every user will tell you the truth but would explain what they think is important, hence adding up to the inaccuracy of the overall feedback loop. This is where the right technology can help you (as a business owner) know what really excites your buyer and what makes them despise what you sell.
Before we dive into the technological aspect, let’s understand the basics of customer feedback and what makes it so crucial for every business.
What is Customer Feedback and Why Should you Gather it?
As per its definition, customer feedback refers to the information about the benefits, issues, and experiences shared by target customers while dealing with your products or services. It can be collected via different methods, such as polls, surveys, and interviews.
The ‘WHY’ behind collecting customer feedback is quite clear – you cannot succeed in business without listening to your customers. By considering customer feedback carefully, the product, sales, and support can better understand the likes and dislikes of your customers and identify the room for improvement. It will act as a guiding force for the growth of your company, helping you find gems that can make it easier to adapt the product/service quality or customer experience over time
In other words, asking for feedback is one way to keep your customers at the center of everything you do.
You can select any of the following methods to collect customer feedback:
- Feedback surveys
- Sharing of feedback forms via email
- Personalized interaction with potential and loyal customers
- Customer interviews
- Short in-app surveys
- Website feedback widgets
- Social media channels
- Feedback forms or polls on your business website
What More can you do After Collecting Customer Feedback?
Collection of customer feedback via different means or methods is just half the battle won. But it is also important to be aware of the next big things you need to do to take full advantage of your learnings about customer reviews.
You can use customer feedback to:
1. Analyze User Behavior
By asking for customer feedback explicitly, you can get to know what appealed to them the most before they chose to buy from you. You can also monitor how customers from different cohorts behave on your website, which areas are most clickable, where they drop off, and similar others.
2. Identify Potential Churners and Loyal Customers
Loyal customers to your brand are the ones that spend a lot of time with your offering and prefer to buy again. Their feedback helps attract others in the same or parallel niche. Besides this, you can utilize feedback and related data to find customer segments who leave without buying or raising a concern. Based on the results, you can make a list of actions that confirms the lack of interest and make improvements in product, branding, or marketing strategy
3. Find which Customer Segment Needs more Attention
New visitors, trial conversions, active trial users, or repeat customers are a few typical segments for most businesses. Over time, you would also want to know which segments are growing or shrinking, which can be best done by collecting customer feedback. This will help you understand what works for each of these segments and how to grow them accordingly.
4. Find Product Improvement Areas
In every industry, some of your customers will always have some exciting ideas about improving the product/service that never came to your mind. By considering such advice from loyal customers, you can set your brand apart as the one that genuinely cares for its customers.
Read More: Conversational AI: Transforming EX & CX with Automation
5. Include Feedback into your Product Roadmap
One way to come close to the ideal market fit is to incorporate customer feedback into the product roadmap. Based on the suitability of the customers’ ideas about your business, you can analyze the corresponding need and make way for the new features. The biggest challenge here is to get the customers to suggest product improvements that matter to them.
6. Optimize the Conversion Path
In some cases, customer feedback helps in identifying high-friction elements on your site that tend to increase the bounce rate and reduce conversions. Similarly, you can prevent leakages as potential customers move from one stage to another in their buyer’s journey.
7. Nurture Potential Advocates of your Business
Gathering feedback will also help in finding the happiest of users who can be nurtured into advocates to promote your brand in their community and recommend it to others. You can either motivate them to do this with monetary rewards or send ‘thank you’ notes to appreciate their contribution.
8. Improve your Marketing and Sales Efforts
With regular customer feedback collection, you will be in a better position to pick product features for your marketing campaigns. For example, you can plan for special discounts for a specific user segment around a feature that they like the most. Similarly, the findings can be used to lead one-to-one sales conversations to success.
By now, you might have got a good idea of the importance of customer feedback and what you can do with it. Let’s move to how you can do that and the technology you need for it.
Moving Towards Customer Feedback Management with Conversational AI
Collecting feedback from your customers is of no use until you have planned a way to manage the same for the betterment of your business. Without appropriately addressing the large volume of feedback most businesses receive, persistent issues with the product or service are often left unaddressed over time.
For both individuals and companies, feedback is often misconstrued, particularly when it is not constructive. The truth is – customers feel glad to share their feedback about a brand – whether positive or negative. As per the Microsoft report, 77% of customers have a favorable view of a brand that asks for and accepts feedback. Whether you get a complaint or a suggestion as feedback, it is crucial to manage the experience your business offers to the consumers.
This is where customer feedback management comes to the rescue. It involves both a set of technologies and practice to improve the interactions customers have with your brand. It requires advanced technology to automate the customer support processes properly, organize data, and address issues that arise.
Read More: Conversational AI Platforms: Determining the Right Solution for Your Business
Role of Conversational AI in Customer Feedback Management
Conversational AI refers to the technology with which users can converse or talk, hence the name. It utilizes large volumes of data, NLP, and machine learning to imitate human interactions, recognizes speech and text inputs, and translates their meanings.
This type of artificial intelligence can offer brands a personalized and automated solution to interact with their customers. It not only helps overcome the challenge of managing customer feedback but also offers customers an experience where they feel their feedback will be heard. Knowing that they can communicate directly with your brand and get reliable responses, they will most likely build better relationships and ROI.
You should also know that:
- You can implement conversational AI in a way that your customers get quick responses and answers when they need them. This way, the technology serves as a gateway for more feedback to come in and make your business thrive.
- The feedback loop need not be limited to AI but also involve human touch in delicate situations. For example, you can incorporate a human handoff feature with conversational AI to enable users to request a live customer support service.
- Conversational AI can help you deal with negative feedback or bad customer experiences so that your team can instantly redress their issues and get the necessary feedback.
What Makes Conversational AI the Customer Service of Both Present and Future?
Having agents available to provide customer support and collect feedback is still vital. However, the time it takes to get this done manually can be reduced significantly with deployment of AI-based chatbots and virtual assistants. In the current hyper-digital environment, conversational AI helps unlock the concealed potential of organizations at a big scale.
The growth of conversational AI market is an indicator of its rising demand because of the benefits like:
1. Real-time Customer Assistance
This technology offers self-service to consumers on both mobile and web along with omnichannel support. It works 24×7 and reduces manual intervention for general customer queries. For complex tasks, it transfers the tickets to the service desk agents for further resolution.
2. Personalized Resolution of Customer Queries
Conversation AI bots are designed to understand the natural nuance of a language using NLP and carry the context across different conversations to offer relevant resolutions to customers. Whether it is about handling IT tasks or managing finances, AI chatbots or voice bots can be used to reduce customer churn.
3. Support Agent Assistance
A conversational AI solution can help service desk agents in getting easy access to the CRM, back-end system, customer information, and their past queries. This helps them become more efficient and productive when at work.
Final Thoughts
In the post-pandemic world we all have started to step into, meeting customer expectations through business offerings is even more important. With the help of conversational AI, you can deliver a hyper-personalized experience to resolve customer queries or while collecting their feedback. Since AI bots are not scripted or rule-based, they can facilitate actual conversations with your customers to enhance their experience.
Join Hands with Ameyo to Get Started with Conversational AI
Once you have determined where conversational AI can be helpful for your business, it’s time to join hands with Ameyo – a leading brand offering CX-rich solutions that are scalable, agent-friendly, and easy to use. Our conversational AI solutions – voicebot and chatbot, are designed to help your organization manage customer interactions.
