Let’s say you have delivered a superlative experience to your customers, the best that you could provide them from your end. That’s great. Now, what about gaining feedback from them as well? Customer feedback plays a powerful role in updating you with crucial insights about your customers’ needs and preferences plus every department of your organization. It helps you impactfully market your products and services and grow your business 10x faster.
Customer feedback serves as guiding insights, updates, and input shared by your client community about their experiences with your company, product, or services. For training providers, it is necessary to understand what your learners/ clients need from your course or content. It helps you improve your customer experience strategies and encourage positive changes for faster growth.
This article is all about the effective tools which can assist you to manage and collate to gain more positive feedback from your customers.
As I discussed earlier, surveys play a crucial component in your business growth. They give you an opportunity to collect quantitative and qualitative feedback on the real experiences with your organization from your customer’s end. It is important for you to apply and utilize the captured information in the best way possible. These are some of the surveying methods for gaining customer feedback.
You can send out your survey questionnaires to your clients at key action points or milestones in the entire customer journey to gain an in-depth understanding of your user experience. These surveys can be time-based (for example, 30 or 60 days after the course start date to understand the learner’s experience engagement level) or experience-based (after onboarding or completing a part of the course).
NPS or Net Promoter Score measures customer experience and predicts business growth. It is a proven metric that asks your customers how likely they are to recommend your courses or services to their friends and colleagues on a scale of 0-10. This particular survey method even helps you categorize your results. For example, you can compare your promoters (people who rate you from 9-10) to your detractors (who rate you between 0-6). The more promoters you have, the more you can infer your customers are satisfied with you.
You can use slight variations of the NPS question to gather more specific feedback about the quality of your course content, the structure of the course, trainers, venues, etc.
There is a range of industry benchmarks available for NPS, so it can be a great way to see how you’re tracking compared to your competitors.
Customer Effort Score or CES is a crucial metric that determines the amount of effort that your customers have put into interacting with your business. It measures how your customer success team specifically handles customer-related incidents, e.g. support queries. For example, let’s say you have a customer who has raised a support ticket for refund assistance. So the ease of experience is an ample indicator of customer loyalty. Therefore, this metric measures how happy your customers are while interacting with your support teams.
Instead of asking how satisfied they are, you can simply gain your feedback with the CES metric to gauge their ease of overall experience.
It’s obvious that you will attempt to highlight the key benefits of your courses and how different learners can benefit from them. However, when your target audience scrolls through the website, they would want to hear from someone relatable – your existing customers. Testimonials are a proven method that helps increase your business revenue. According to a research study conducted by BrightLocal nearly 90% of buyers read online reviews and over 85% of consumers trust online reviews before purchasing a product. You can share your positive reviews on social media, and email newsletters to further promote your courses to your audiences.
On the contrary, a Clutch report says that 94% of customers get convinced to avoid doing business when they see negative reviews. Therefore, capturing and publishing feedback is important, it is equally crucial to track and address negative reviews and resolve the issues. So you must ensure that you track external reviews on Google and social media or other community forums.
By harnessing customer feedback as a powerful tool for your business, you can gain valuable insights into your customer’s needs and preferences. Use that feedback to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
As I discussed earlier in this blog, the success and longevity of most businesses hinge on customer satisfaction. And when implemented appropriately, these can be used for marketing and customer engagement. The only way to systemize customer inputs and insights is by using survey tools.
Google offers one of the most widely-used free business tools – Google Forms. They help you create quick and smart surveys to gain responses on Google Sheets. You can view, and apply filters to sort your data. You can create customized, hassle-free experiences for your customers by guiding them through your questionnaires in a structural way.
Think of going the extra mile for your customers. Community forums are virtual forums that you can create to interact with and collect customer feedback. It provides the perfect opportunity for users to voice their concerns, suggestions, problems, and praises.
Customers might provide their valuable insights on your social media channels or email newsletters. However, as all these insights remain scattered and as a result, you fail to collect actionable insights. On the one hand, forums help you collate with your learners and extend the value of the course, facilitate introductions, and share knowledge. On another, forums can also be used to capture feedback.
Collecting feedback from multiple sources will give you a more comprehensive understanding of your customer’s needs and preferences. Including sources where you haven’t requested the feedback directly and/or it’s anonymous adds extra value. Google reviews, Facebook reviews, and even industry review sites are also great ways to discover and act on independent feedback from your customers.
Last but not least and definitely the best tool for creating surveys is Zoho Survey. This is a contextual application that comes with 25+ question types, and features skip logic and piping. These questionnaires are customizable to suit your brand theme and style. You can share your surveys instantly with everyone on your list, using social media and email campaigns. This tool comes harnessed with SSL protection will ensure that your surveys remain safe and private.
You can visualize response trends and make informed decisions with customizable reports and analyze the data with Google Sheets for an even deeper understanding. You can invite and collaborate with your teammates to edit your questions. The best part is that these surveys adjust according to the device interface. These are automatically optimized for mobile devices.
Talking about systemizing customer feedback flow for better business growth, how can we not include Training Provider CRM? A software solution that is built on the award-winning Zoho platform, this application helps you centralize all your data under one roof. Therefore, when you implement Zoho Survey along with this CRM, you can document all the information in one place, track the engagement history and resolve the issue in no time. This industry-tailored software becomes the storehouse of your customer data and helps you build strong relationships with them for future business.
Customers make your business and their feedback insights improve your growth. Pay heed to their insights and realize the most pressing goals in the organization, one at a time. Customer support is the ideal channel, to begin with. For more information, click on this link!