Running a customer feedback campaign can be a solid way of uncovering problems with your website, your service/products, even your entire business, but there’s literally no point if there’s no take away from the data you’ve collected.
Can customer feedback actually improve conversion rate?
Before you begin, you need to be sure a customer feedback campaign is going to work for your business. Clarify what you hope to achieve by collating feedback, and whether it is actually appropriate. Make sure:
- You’re not going to aggravate or distract visitors from their main goal
- The question(s) make sense without too much explanation
- You prioritise user experience and are in tune with users’ needs
Collecting the data is easy enough – it should be pretty simple to install a customer feedback widget on your site – but using that data can be more tricky. You need to be able to comfortably analyse findings from a large enough sample size to determine whether the feedback should be acted on.
Next, you should decide on location (which pages as well as where it will physically appear on screen) and then how to phrase questions to get truly usable data.
Questions for valuable customer feedback
This is a sort of qualitative versus quantitative debate. Broad, open questions allow for users to really share their thoughts and feelings with you, and can yield surprising results and valuable breakthroughs… but, few participants will offer well-written essays addressing each of your questions. Better to keep things targeted and specific.
- Keep questions relevant to specific pages – if you’re asking about service plans, have your widget on your service plan page.
- Consider yes/no questions or ones with multiple choice answers for statistical results
- Think about how responses could add further value – can you address concerns in an FAQ page, via a blog post or with an announcement on social media?
Test your questions
Trial your custom feedback campaigns with a small sample group. It’ll help reveal which variants in your questions’ phrasing work best, and which will provide the most valuable insight. When analysing your findings, you need statistically significant data in order to be sure any actions as a result of your customer feedback campaign are worthwhile.
Monitoring your customer feedback campaign
Why go through all that prep to just leave the campaign running and hope for the best? You need to check back in with your results regularly so you can check you’re receiving useful, measurable data. You’ll also be able to:
- Respond to problems in real-time and improve customer experience
- Determine if your sample size is big enough for statistical significance
- Improve your campaign if responses aren’t as you’d hoped
On that last point, if the feedback you’re receiving is of poor quality, or there simply isn’t enough of the good stuff, you can go back to your testing group to find out if you’ve made a mistake in your phrasing or location along the way. Make sure your questions are simple and clear, and that they’re easy to respond to (check for any technical hitches too). Don’t let your campaigns run on too long, or you risk your responses flatlining.
Reviewing results after the campaign has ended
If and when you decide to end a campaign, you’re unlikely to be shocked by the results if you’ve been checking in with them regularly. You need to evaluate the conclusions you’d likely already started to draw up, and make sure you’ve not missed anything in the meantime.
The next step will be to prioritise the conclusions and actions to improve conversion rate. Some will likely require more effort than others, and your best bet is to weigh these up in terms of effort/resource versus impact/result – low-hanging fruit and all that.
Customer feedback and conversion rate optimisation
If you take the time to plan and prepare, and regularly review your campaign, evaluating your customer feedback will be far easier. You’ll be working with meaningful responses, valuable data and actionable insights, which will actually help inform CRO tests, improve your site, your offering, and ultimately your business.
