Managing Your Customer Experience: Key Methods for Collecting Customer Feedback

So you've set the goal to take your business's NPS up a few notches from its current level. You might even dream of a world-class Net Promoter Score in the mid-90s. Congratulations!

The path to improving your NPS will involve taking long, in-depth inventory of your current business patterns and performance. It's not always fun, especially when you're confronted with negative customer feedback data.

That customer feedback data – positive and negative alike – will help guide you to improved NPS and ultimately a more successful business. While gathering customer feedback is easier said than done, the use of a customer feedback system can aid in this process.

It's a big undertaking. But at the most basic level, it's not so different from other big challenges in life. My trials and tribulations with high school Chemistry class might shine some light on the subject...

Collecting Customer Feedback, Learning From New Perspective

I was a huge nerd. I wanted to be top of my class in high school — the first person to finish my math quiz, the top prize at the science fair, straight A’s my entire life, and then suddenly I was caught in the middle of a crisis: Advanced Chemistry.

(Like I said: big, big nerd.)

I floundered. I panicked.  For the first time in my (student) career, I didn’t know how to study or really where to start. But failure was not an option. My (student) career was on the line. My teacher was clearly disappointed, so I swallowed my pride and asked him what he thought I should do.

He recommended a tutor. Despite my shame spiral, I found a tutor.

Collecting feedback is essential (but the methods might feel awkward at first)

My sessions with the tutor were pretty uncomfortable. I had to entrust the fate of my Advanced Chemistry future to a stranger who promised to help me overcome some of my biggest challenges (sound familiar?). And although the tutor was kind and wanted me to succeed, his honest critiques made me cringe at first.

Customer feedback means confronting weak spots.

I had to come face to face with my weaknesses but I also had to trust my strengths so that I could get to where I wanted to be. I asked for this stranger's guidance in order to perform better overall – which meant taking a clear view of my strengths as much as failures.

The methods get easier over time.

Day by day, it got a little less awkward. The tough feedback was easier to take. It felt less like an attack on myself and more like a gift for improvement.

I kept that tutor all year, and you know what? Your girl crushed that Advanced Chemistry exam and became a tutor a few years later. Tutoring eventually led to teaching my own after-school class.The nerd train never stops! It took me all the way to AskNicely where I’m answering your most pressing NPS questions every day.

Collecting Customer Feedback To Conquer Your Goals

"What's a good Net Promoter Score anyway?" It’s a critical question for many of our customers, and it’s one that I get all the time.  The first thing I like to tell people is to figure out where you stand. In a previous blog post, I referred to this as establishing your baseline. In other words, do you know how happy your customers are right now? What does your baseline reveal about how happy your customers are? 

You Can Always Improve Methods For Collecting Customer Feedback

Could you up your survey frequency? Are there any barriers within your current organization that prevents you from putting a lot more energy into customer happiness? Remember, it’s all about baselines and setting real, actionable goals to achieve customer happiness that results in brand loyalty and advocacy.

Here’s a quick breakdown:

That overwhelming motivation to succeed will drive you to learn and grow your NPS. Sure, we want to be the best. Who doesn’t want a 70+ Net Promoter Score right out of the gate? But improvement means understanding our own baselines, and setting goals and blowing them out of the water.

Don’t have a Net Promoter Score of 50 yet? Use NPS to figure out what’s holding you back. This is where the rubber of your business meets the customer feedback road.

Bottomline: How Do You Actually Improve Your Customer Experience?

Where are your customers not happy? What do your promoters have in common? What’s a common theme with our detractors?

AskNicely helps you find the answers to these questions. It starts with methods of customer feedback collection that we've been optimizing and automating with clients for years.

The short version: collect data often, collect it at targeted points in the customer journey, and keep engaging your customers to get as much feedback from them as possible.

Once you've collected and analyzed data, there will be a host of tactics you can pursue to optimize methods and responses based on your baselines.

You might get more specific with your Detractor Tags, or customize your follow-up questions in a way that addresses scores specifically. Don’t be afraid to ask your promoters for third-party reviews. Encourage customers to like your social media pages after completing a survey.

Even as we run businesses, we're always learning. Customers are often the best teachers. So go out there, young scholar, and figure out what’s holding you back. Be the best you that you can possibly be! If you’re not sure how to go about it, we're always happy to walk you through it.