Businesses that want to thrive simply can’t get around customer preferences. From that perspective, "How can customer feedback improve customer service?" is an important query. That’s because focusing on service quality has the potential to propel your business to new heights.
We’ll discuss why customer feedback is important, how to gather it, and how to leverage it to improve customer service. Sound good? Let’s begin!
Why is customer feedback important?
Customer feedback provides direct insight into what your customers need, want, and expect. This information can help you tailor your customer services to meet their needs better. When you do so, you have opportunities to enhance customer satisfaction, craft a personalized experience, and maintain customer loyalty.
Feedback can be looked at as an ongoing dialogue between customers and a business to build a stronger relationship and foster trust.
How to ask for customer feedback
Asking for customer feedback doesn't have to be complicated since most customers are already familiar with feedback forms. Picking an online survey platform to pose your questions is a good first step.
Google Forms is an easy-to-use, effective survey platform that accommodates surveys of any type well. It’s also completely free, and Google Form’s capabilities can also be easily enhanced with add-ons, expanding to accommodate your needs.
Present the survey to your customers, ideally right after a meaningful interaction or transaction. It’s important to use clear, concise language in feedback forms and ensure the process is as effortless as possible. We’ll talk more about how to enhance your feedback surveys below.
6 ways to improve customer service with feedback forms
Make sure you’re asking the right questions
Feedback forms will only be effective when you ask the right questions. Focus on crafting questions that elicit detailed, actionable insights. Any way you can narrow down the information you receive will make it more useful for iteration later.
Here are some things to keep in mind while structuring your questions:
- Avoid vague or leading questions
- Vary your question formats
- Open-ended questions capture customer sentiments
- Closed-ended questions gather measurable data
- Ask questions that are relevant to customer experience
- Take time to explore the best customer satisfaction survey questions
Precise questions pinpoint your exact strengths and weaknesses, which can then be used to make targeted improvements in your customer service.
Explore customer feedback with your team
Involving your team in customer feedback evaluation ensures a unified approach to enhancing services. Regularly schedule sessions to review feedback collectively and encourage team members to discuss what you all find. Different viewpoints can uncover hidden patterns and solutions.
To do this, you need a survey platform that allows for easy storage and distribution of customer feedback. While Google Forms allows you to share your responses easily, an add-on like Form Publisher can take this simple function to the next level. With Form Publisher, you can convert each response to a customized document and automatically send it to multiple email addresses.
Highlight positive feedback for customer service successes
Highlighting positive feedback is a powerful way to reinforce excellent customer service within your organization. Here are a few different ways in which you can use positive feedback to improve customer service:
- Use feedback forms to gather success stories
- Share positive customer feedback in team meetings
- Recognize the service achievements of individuals or the whole team
- Establish clear quality benchmarks that your business can follow
- Utilize positive feedback as a training tool for new employees
See how negative feedback can inspire change
Negative feedback can be disheartening; however, if you view critiques as constructive insights, they can be a goldmine for driving change. They pinpoint precisely where your service may be faltering and provide a clear direction for necessary adjustments.
Here are a few ways to use negative feedback:
- Identify negative patterns or recurring issues
- Analyze the root causes of customer dissatisfaction
- Create training scenarios based on negative feedback received
- Reassess processes to be more customer-centric
- Establish a feedback loop to address concerns
By addressing negative feedback, you can turn dissatisfied customers into loyal advocates and significantly improve the quality of your customer service.
Implement changes based on trends you’re seeing
One of the biggest reasons you’re collecting feedback is identifying trends. Trends may be negative, like frequent service hiccups or customer pain points, but they can also be positive. Whatever the case, prioritize these trends and brainstorm targeted solutions with your team.
Following up on trends means making a habit of checking in on improvement. If you’re using a survey platform with workflow features, you can establish a process for iterating on feedback to tackle patterns you see. Putting in place systems for action is ultimately what makes feedback effective.
Save feedback in a central location
Centralize your customer response storage for holistic and long-term customer service improvement. This way, all team members will have access to the responses and be on the same page regarding customer sentiments.
This centralization also simplifies tracking changes over time, identifying long-term trends, and measuring the impact of new initiatives. Having all the feedback together can also help you respond faster to what your customers are saying and make intelligent changes.
You need survey tools to improve customer service
A simple add-on for Google Forms like Form Publisher can help you organize your feedback in a way that makes sense. Form Publisher converts each response to an individual response document. You can customize and personalize this document and save it anywhere on your Google Drive with a filing convention that suits your team processes.
Centralize responses, send them automatically to team members, create a workflow, and much more with Form Publisher. If you’re serious about improving customer service with customer feedback, explore Form Publisher today!