You know the importance of gathering feedback but are concerned about annoying your customers. Fair point. Here are our 5 key tips for how to ask for feedback without being too forceful!

Feedback is an invaluable tool for helping your customers maximise their experience with you. However, if deploy your surveys and feedback tools in the wrong way, they can quickly become more of a nuisance than a help!

Let’s take a look at five tips to encourage feedback rather than push people away from it…

Tips to encourage customer feedback

Timing is key

You’ve heard it all before – ‘timing is everything’ – and it’s no less true in this case! Imagine walking through a shop door and immediately being met by a suited salesman urging you towards the latest arrivals. You’d undoubtedly want to turn around and leave…It has the same effect when a survey invitation appears on screen as soon as a customer enters our website; they’re more likely to ignore it so they can continue browsing.
Patience is a virtue, so wait until your customer has been engaging with your website for a certain amount of time before requesting feedback from them.
If you want feedback from customers that have already completed a purchase, the same rule applies. Allow them time to engage with their purchase and form an opinion on it first! This way you also get the added benefit of good quality feedback that truly represents how they feel about their purchase.

BEAR TRAP: Don’t leave this too long, else the feedback you receive will be out-dated! This is a sweet science. Test out your timings to find the optimum balance for your business.

Don’t Interfere

There’s no use choosing the optimum time to deliver your survey if you present it in an intrusive way. Never use pop-ups that take over the entire screen; you can invade someone’s personal space even online!
Of course, you do want your request to be noticeable… but not at the expense of your client’s experience with your business – got it?!

Suggestion: choose some eye-catching colour schemes or animations in line with your branding and small pop-ups that appear in the corner of a screen that don’t cover up any important content. This way your clients can continue doing what they were planning on doing before your survey request appeared!

Return the Favour

Customers will be more inclined to give feedback if they are being offered a reward or incentive for doing so. This is where you can get creative and think of something that is exciting yet cost-effective.
Perhaps offering free shipping on their next purchase or a free consultation on how to use a new piece of software. This will not only encourage the positive feedback you’re looking for but also customer loyalty and referrals!

BEAR TRAP: Careful again here! Offering ‘too much’ of an incentive here can backfire as you ended up soliciting responses for the sake of it! Quantity is key here.

Rephrase It

A lot of standard survey questions can come across accusatory and critical, for example “There are still items in your shopping bag. Why didn’t you complete your purchase on this occasion?”. Phrases like these will make your customer feel pressured and run the risk of them abandoning the survey or, even worse, leaving negative feedback that they otherwise may not have left.
A better example would be “What could we do differently next time to help you with your purchase?” as it invites the customer to share their opinion with you in a non-critical way. Feedback collection is a tool to help us improve and grow, not to attack our customer!

Go Live

Live feedback is a great way to assist your customers in real-time but again needs to be timed and presented in a way that isn’t invasive. Follow the same principles that we’ve already laid out for you but this time ask if they need the help before springing into a full-blown conversation.

By using these five ideas you can prove to your customers that you care about their feedback and in turn encourage more engagement that will help your business’ growth in the future.

Need help platforming the perfect surveys to encourage feedback? Sign up to our FREE feedback tool today.