Effective Strategies for Gathering Customer Feedback

Article Summary：To truly understand customer needs and maximize the benefits of VOC, businesses must implement comprehensive yet targeted strategies for collecting meaningful feedback.

To truly understand customer needs and maximize the benefits of VOC, businesses must implement comprehensive yet targeted strategies for collecting meaningful feedback. While surveys continue to be a staple method, combining both qualitative and quantitative approaches yields richer insights. Some effective strategies include:

• Customer interviews - Speaking directly to customers over the phone or in-person allows exploring their experiences, pain points and wishes in depth. It's best for gathering nuanced qualitative feedback.
• Focus groups - Moderated discussions with small groups of 6-10 customers facilitate brainstorming around new ideas and concepts. Participants influence each other to surface diverse perspectives.
• Online surveys - Quick polls distributed via email or on websites provide a convenient way to gather quantitative data at scale. Keep surveys short to boost response rates.
• Social listening - Monitor brand mentions and conversations across platforms like Facebook, Twitter and reviews to understand sentiment in real-time.
• Co-creation workshops - Invite key customers to collaborate directly on the development and testing of new solutions from ideation to prototypes.
• Customer advisory boards - Form ongoing panels of engaged customers who provide regular input and guidance over months/years on strategy and innovations.
• Testing feedback loops - Integrate feedback collection touchpoints at multiple stages of the customer journey like pre-sale, on-boarding and post-purchase support.

The key is employing a mix of synchronous and asynchronous methods, both passive and active approaches, to cast a wide net. Advanced analytics tools can then uncover patterns across mixed media qualitative and quantitative VOC datasets.

To streamline effective VOC, I recommend trying Udesk - an all-in-one customer service platform. Udesk facilitates collecting feedback from within conversations. It also provides powerful sentiment and topic analysis to surface actionable insights from mixed unstructured customer data. Managers can easily track progress on addressing issues and enhancing experiences based on VOC.

Take our VoC Tool for a spin—for free—to see how it can work for your business.

The article is original by Udesk, and when reprinted, the source must be indicated：https://www.udeskglobal.com/blog/effective-strategies-for-gathering-customer-feedback.html