Getting authentic feedback may sound easy in today’s day and age where opinions and thoughts are dispensed at greater frequency and amount through social networking platforms and other digital mediums. That said, businesses still have difficulty collecting authentic feedback that they can use to guide their day-to-day operations and long-term decisions. Here are five tips on how to get authentic feedback from customers without putting a huge dent in your business’ budget.
Run Surveys on Social Media
Being able to express your opinions on social media while staying anonymous is why platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit are great places to get unfiltered customer feedback. Put up a survey link in your Facebook feed, as a Tweet, or as an IG post. Leverage every method of sharing and every digital platform you can share it on to increase the survey’s visibility and participation rate. Keep in mind, however, that you may run into what’s known as Response Bias, wherein people who choose to complete the survey will either outright support your brand or dislike it. With responses being complete opposites, you may end up with a dataset that’s skewed and inaccurate.
Host Social Media Contests
Customer engagement often leads to greater customer feedback. One way to spark a high level of customer engagement is through contests. Nothing gets more attention on social media than the chance to get free stuff. Contests attract more eyeballs on your social media pages and channels and can also reinvigorate public interest in your brand if it’s recently become stale. Once you have their attention, you can require participants to fill out a survey form as a way to enter the contest. You can have them include basic information and customer features that you’d like to know, such as where they heard about your brand or product, what income bracket they belong to, etcetera.
Leverage Instagram Stories
Instagram’s Stories feature was only recently launched, but it’s a particularly nifty feature for businesses who want to do more than just share their content through photos. The Stories feature allows you to post content both in a photo and video format and attach prompts to it, such as questions or polls. Viewers of the stories you publish on your Instagram page can also react or respond directly in confidence, so they are more likely to come back with an authentic response to whatever you post.
Form an Online Community
A forum or community on your website or social media is a low-effort and low-cost way of strengthening your brand and generating feedback. Free-flowing conversations tend to bear more accurate and authentic information from consumers who have used your product or service or have come into contact with someone who has. To execute effectively, you’ll want to hire a moderator to respond to comments quickly, initiate informative and engaging conversations, and update members concerning changes in your brand’s policies and projects. A vibrant and active online community can be a good place to collect actionable insights and ideas for your brand.
Employ Feedback Monitoring Sites
Feedback monitoring sites are third-party services that monitor what consumers are posting about a specific brand or product/service. A popular example of this is Google Alerts, which notifies a business whenever someone has left you a review on a website or social networking platform. This helps you collect feedback from sites or apps that you weren’t even aware existed. Simply setting a feedback monitoring service for your business also minimizes your employee costs, including hiring and training fees and employee benefits. And with new digital communities popping up every couple of months, having a bigger radar to detect hearsay about your brand is important.
As a final piece of advice, consider hiring a virtual receptionist in Washington. This is a great way to show your clients that you value their business and be able to collect authentic feedback round the clock. A virtual receptionist offers 24/7 phone answering services without having to build the infrastructure from the ground up.
Feedback is what transforms your business over time. Without high-quality feedback, your business won’t be able to align its actions with its target audience or anticipate future market trends. Use the five tips aforementioned to collect authentic feedback with minimal effort and money spent.
