You've probably heard how valuable customer feedback is for your retail store, but where do you begin to receive helpful feedback to implement positive changes in your store? When you ask customers for feedback, they’ll not only feel more valued, but it will even increase their loyalty to your store and brand.
Customer feedback is a critical part of your business performance, supporting the overall growth of your retail store. Feedback from potential customers can shine a light on what you're doing right in your store for customer experiences, as well as reveal areas for improvement based on feedback from unhappy customers.
As retailers actively analyze customer behavior and their actionable insights, they have greater power to refine their products and services to elevate the shopping experience, resulting in more loyal customers.
The key to getting to this point is asking the right questions for a higher number of good, quality feedback. We'll dive into what kinds of questions you should be asking in this article, as well as ways to turn incoming feedback into a valuable source of information for your store.
Why listening to your customers is a game-changer
Before we dive into the kinds of questions you should be asking your shoppers, let’s go over why customer feedback management is important for retailers.
Happy customers are a result of businesses engaging in customer feedback surveys, product reviews, and even customer interviews with empathetic, caring, and satisfactory responses which can likely result in customer loyalty.
Not only do you want more customer feedback, but the secret to customer success is your quality of feedback from customers. There's a multitude of ways to receive qualitative feedback, and the difference in assuring its seamless integration will be how you ask and respond to the feedback.
By actively listening to and acting from different types of customer feedback, retailers can exceed their expectations.
While they’re never fun to see, negative customer feedback is just as important as positive feedback, and will likely teach you far more about how to improve your business than your customers’ happy comments.
Four types of questions to spark valuable customer conversations
Now you’re ready to spark better customer feedback by asking strategic, simple questions. These can come through an email campaign, customer surveys, or other advanced features such as a customer relationship management system.
Follow these common questions to leverage business growth and gain satisfied customers:
1. Ask about your products
- Product satisfaction: Why did your customer make the decision to buy your product? And what was their primary reason for the purchase? Did it meet their expectations?
- Product improvement: If your customer could change one thing about the purchased product, what would it be? This question allows you to put forth an opportunity for your customer to help you make future improvements, something called the customer feedback loop.
- Product usage: After a certain allotted time, ask your customer how often they use the product. And how do they use it? This will give you actionable insights into their needs and interest in your product and similar products you offer.
2. Ask about your customer service
- Service experience: Ask your customers to rate their customer experience. Ask something like: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your experience with our customer service, and why?"
- Associate interaction: How helpful and knowledgeable did you find our staff during your visit? This is a great question to receive a customer's opinion, even those who were just browsing or visiting. You'll also receive greater insight to your associates’ job performance and their effect on customer service.
- Feedback implementation: If the customer has given negative feedback in the past, make sure to, first, make those changes if they're relevant and helpful. Secondly, ask the following question for further feedback on your changes: "Have you noticed any changes in our customer service based on feedback you or others have provided?"
3. Ask about your website/online presence
- Website functionality: Your online presence is important, even as a physical retail store. Make sure to be on top of your website presence and ask for feedback. Maybe you could ask, "How easy was it to find what you were looking for on our website?" or "How often do you use our website?"
- Online support: How satisfied was your customer with your online support? Either through the chat and email resources you provided?
- Digital experience improvement: As a part of the customer feedback loop, always ask improvement questions. What's one feature they’d like to see added for the digital user experience? This is the time to ask customers about your social media channels and presence. Do they follow you on social media and how do they interact with content?
4. Ask about the in-store experience
- Store atmosphere: How would your customers describe the atmosphere and visual merchandising of your store? Give multiple choice answers here with an option for them to explain further if needed. Often customers need to be prompted with multiple choice answers in order to explain themselves, and some like to explain in a text box why they chose that particular answer.
- In-store navigation: Were your customers able to easily find what they were looking for in your store?
- Safety and cleanliness: How satisfied are your customers with the level of cleanliness and the safety measures in place at your store?
Turning feedback into your superpower for improvement
Now that you've asked your customers great questions, the key to successful change is taking advantage of actionable feedback to improve. You'll want to leverage the positive reviews and negative feedback you've received by looking for and identifying patterns, as well as understanding the underlying problems where you can solve customer issues.
First, take time to sift through the feedback. This may be a lot of work with the wide range of responses, and you'll definitely want some help from customer feedback tools and management systems. As your feedback is getting sorted, make sure it's falling under helpful categories for you to easily find such as: product quality, service, online presence, in-store experience, etc.
Even though organizing this feedback might take a lot of time, this in-depth analysis approach will reveal trends and feedback that deserve your attention. You'll definitely thank yourself later.
More importantly is acting on the feedback you've received and making positive changes towards customer satisfaction. This will demonstrate your care for your customers' valuable insights and needs. Make sure to acknowledge to them that you've made these changes based on their suggestions so you can help foster more meaningful relationships and a loyal community around your store.
How Clientbook makes feedback easy and effective
Now that we've talked about how vital it is to receive quality customer feedback, what questions to ask, and how to implement the feedback for further improvement, let's talk about how you're going to organize all that you've received. The answer lies in user-friendly software tools, like Clientbook .
Clientbook is a client management system with a seamless integration of high-technology that can revolutionize the way retailers collect, track, and analyze customer feedback with its streamlined, automated process. Immediately after a purchase, or timed a few weeks out, Clientbook can help you automatically send customized review requests to customers and incorporate feedback into your store's journey.
What’s more, through Clientbook's messaging platform, retail store owners can engage with customers and open a wealth of opportunities to gather customer insights, address concerns in real-time, and build strong relationships. Moreover, Clientbook offers advanced analytics to transform this feedback into data-driven decisions to directly impact your growth and customer satisfaction.
Organizing and collecting customer feedback is a lot of work, and you can't do this alone. Clientbook stands as a source of empowerment for retailers, creating a customer feedback strategy towards success. Make sure to book a demo today to get an idea of the asset Clientbook can be for your store's success.
Conclusion
In wrapping up about receiving better customer feedback, we've explored strategic steps to take to unlock meaningful and helpful customer feedback. We investigated response-stimulated questions to ask your customers that deepen relationships as well as how to use these questions to build better business practices.
By leveraging Clientbook's innovative tools, retail owners can elevate their feedback processes and align themselves with customers' needs and exceed expectations. Embrace Clientbook to receive better feedback to turn into your most valuable business asset.
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