Gathering opinions of your customers can be a valuable source of marketing intelligence that can help determine whether customers are satisfied and how your offering might be improved to increase value. The following article from The Marketing Spark provides four excellent tools to gather this information.
Have you ever sat down at a restaurant and were asked to rate your experience afterward? If the waiter was rude, the meal was cold, and the waiting time was lousy, you’d be eager to fill out a customer feedback card to let the management know your exact thoughts. On the flipside, if everything was perfect you’d probably also be quick to offer praise.
On the web, customer feedback is equally important and needs to be treated as such. Unlike a restaurant though, it’s not possible to look your customer in the eye, shake their hand, and ask them what they think of your product or service. The only possible way to gather customer opinions is either when the customer or the company takes the initiative to reach out and start a dialogue. Fortunately there are a handful of tools that make gathering opinions through a website easier now than it’s ever been before. Here are four that are worth looking into.
The Get Satisfaction team has worked very hard to become one of the leaders in the customer conversation space. Their “Feedback” tab (usually shown on the left side of a page) is a regular fixture on many different types of websites. Get Satisfaction is a non-intrusive, yet prominent site add on that allows visitors to ask questions, offer praise, or point out a problem.
KISSinsights is a product from KISSmetrics that comes in the form of a small pop up window that appears on the lower right hand corner of the screen. When first visiting a site KISSinsights will ask the visitor a question of your choice. It can be a simple yes or no question or a multiple choice question with an option for adding in your own thoughts. KISSinsights is simple, affordable, and looks great.
Zopim is one of the best customer feedback tools I’ve come across. It’s an application that allows users to chat directly with an employee of the company if they so choose to and both the site visitor and the employee have the option of starting the conversation. If no one is logged on to monitor the chat, Zopim will take the feedback and present it during your next session.
UserVoice is a favorite in the customer feedback arena and after using it it’s easy to see that all the credit they’ve received is well deserved. Their approach is to offer site visitors access to hosted feedback forums that are meant to welcome honest opinions and conversations. Startups and companies that launch new products on a regular basis love UserVoice because it’s a useful tool for collecting user insights and quickly identifying problems.