Customer feedback is arguably the most important piece of data for any business. It reveals what customers feel, think, and say about your brand and the experiences provided.

Businesses might try to get by without it, and that’s often because they can’t figure out how to actually collect customer feedback. And for the businesses that do collect customer feedback in some capacity, the volume and quality of responses may be poor.

Yet there’s a simple method to effectively tackle the collection of customer feedback once and for all: with text messaging.

Why Your Business Needs Customer Feedback

Not collecting customer feedback and acting on it already? You’re doing both the business and its customers a disservice. It’s one of the most successful ways to build a customer-first strategy, elevate customer satisfaction (CSAT), and increase revenue all at the same time.

Customer feedback enables you to improve everything from internal processes to customer service to the actual products or services your business sells. In every area of the business, customer feedback can be leveraged.

Both the good and the bad of customer feedback help. Keep the good going, and make adjustments to your operations to get rid of the bad. Customers will notice, and happier customers mean repeat customers. But you’ll only be able to do this when you earn high-quality customer feedback on a regular basis.

5 Reasons Why Customers Avoid Giving Feedback

Consumers today simply lack the time and patience to give detailed, holistic feedback whenever they’re contacted. Another potential hurdle to collecting feedback: your surveys aren’t fine-tuned in terms of structure and distribution.

Here are the top reasons why customers avoid giving feedback:

• Intruding on current task: Customers are clicking or tapping around your website, and suddenly they’re stopped in their tracks by a survey pop-up asking them to answer some questions. It’s annoying and indicates to customers that your business doesn’t care what they’re doing.
• The survey is too long: Long-form, open-ended questions in a survey aren’t always preferred and could stop a customer from completing it. Hardly anyone has time these days and, even if they did, they’re not going to write a full-length essay unless there’s an incentive to do so.
• Right place, wrong time: Customers certainly don’t want to receive a survey to complete weeks or months after a purchase or service interaction. Instead, they want to provide feedback in a survey as close as possible to the time of an interaction with a brand.
• Wrong place, right time: In every industry, customers crave convenience. If a questionnaire is delivered via email or phone call, it may get ignored whether intentionally or not. Customers are busier than ever in their personal and professional lives, after all.
• Too much friction to deal with: Friction is a significant barrier in the world of customer feedback as it leads to incomplete or inadequate survey responses. Customers just won’t give any meaningful feedback if too much effort is required this could be because a survey is too long or the questions are unclear.

Between all of this, it shouldn’t surprise if your business fails to collect customer feedback that’s useful. There’s still plenty of hope to turn that around, though.

Use Text Messaging to Collect Customer Feedback

Looking for a highly effective way to deliver surveys and earn responses? Business texting is fast, convenient, and even adds a personal touch to surveys. As a result, customers feel motivated to complete a survey that funnels feedback directly into the business for analysis.

48% of consumers want to interact with a brand via text messaging — it’s the most preferred method, in fact. SMS Comparison, which shared that statistic in its annual report, also found that 98% of text messages are opened and responded to within just three minutes of being delivered.

Not only will your surveys have a better chance at being opened than they do compared to email, but customers are more likely to respond to them if they’re delivered via text message.

3 Ways to Collect Customer Feedback Effectively with Business Texting Software

Just a text message is all it takes to earn customer feedback. Whereas other communication channels are oversaturated with far too much noise, text messaging cuts through with simple, easy-to-access surveys that also open the door to conversations that build brand loyalty.

Here’s what your business will accomplish by collecting customer feedback with text messaging:

• Get customer feedback in the right place and at the right time: As mentioned earlier, consumers overwhelmingly prefer text messaging over other communication channels. But don’t get bogged by sending out surveys manually. It’s not easy, and it prevents your staff from working on more important tasks. Business texting software automates this, using artificial intelligence (AI) to send a survey after an event like a purchase from a retailer, a check-in at a hotel, or a touchpoint with customer service while the experience is still fresh in the customer’s mind.
• Take out all the friction: Surveys delivered via text message are only a tap away for customers, reducing the level of effort required to give feedback in any form such as a star rating, one-word reply, or text box answer. Since text messaging is convenient, customers will take a few seconds or minutes to fill out the survey and get a fast response to you that speaks accurately to their sentiment.
• Respond to customer feedback in the moment: Real-time feedback deserves a real-time response, and text messaging is a non-intrusive, two-way communication channel. When a customers give a bad rating, business texting software allows you to act right away and address outstanding issues that customers may have had with their experiences. Maybe it doesn’t sound critical, but this personal touch lets customers know you acknowledged what went wrong and want to make it wrong in a timely manner.

Overall, the use of texting messaging to collect customer feedback creates a seamless process for your business and its customers. The distribution of surveys is automated, and customers aren’t forced to jump through hoops to provide their feedback. CSAT rises, and with it follows revenue.

Choose the Best Business Texting Software to Earn Customer Feedback

To create happier customers, you need to know what makes them happy and do less of what doesn’t. Not all customers will give you feedback, but you can increase your chances by eliminating as many obstacles as possible.

Surveys don’t matter if your customers never respond to them, or if customers struggle to understand what they’re asking. Expand your reach and earn customer feedback to drive decision-making with Medallia Concierge intelligent messaging platform. More than 2,000 clients trust us to design and execute a brand-differentiated experience that keeps customers returning.

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