Four Tips for Ecommerce Companies Wanting to Capture Digital Feedback
Online customer feedback can be a real competitive advantage for companies in the ecommerce industry. However, collecting the right customer feedback takes careful planning and a firm understanding of the journey your customers take when buying a product on your website or app.
1. Online feedback is more than a feedback button
There’s more to online feedback than just having a feedback button on your website or mobile app. Feedback is a strategic choice to include the voice of the customer in optimising your online services and funnels. And for the ecommerce industry, the voice of the customer is critical in keeping up with the competition.
When it comes to measuring feedback from your website and converting interest into sales it can appear to be a very complicated process. However, the basic principles of introducing the right solution to increase online sales with customer feedback are remarkably simple and straightforward.
For starters, it’s good to consider the purpose for which you want to collect feedback. In other words, you need to think about what you want to know from your customers and which kinds of questions you want to ask them. For example, do you want to use metrics (e.g. Net Promoter Score or Customer Effort Score)? Which funnels are most important for your business? And once you have the feedback, how are you going to respond or take action?
Online feedback collection tools make it much easier to not only collect feedback but also keep it relevant and timely in the real world. This feedback is relevant in the sense that it is triggered based upon visitor behaviour as well as by asking short and simple questions about why the customer is not proceeding within the funnel. For example, you’ll want to tune your feedback questions around what you can achieve on these pages. So keep in mind – being hassled with questions that are irrelevant won’t endear your business to your customers!
3. Choose your feedback tool wisely
There are loads of feedback collection tools out there with DIY form and survey-builder capabilities that make it relatively easy to start gathering online feedback. While this is more than enough for some smaller players in the ecommerce industry, for an enterprise with multiple online processes this isn’t necessarily the challenge. The challenge is how to turn this feedback into useful insights and make it actionable. This is an important distinction, because data collection tools only collect feedback, but they do not analyse it.
Bottom line: make sure you are choosing a tool that best fits your goals in terms of analysis.
4. Think big but start small
Now comes the tricky part. You know why and how you want to collect online feedback for your website, but now it’s time to choose a process that has volume (number of visitors) and can directly establish an ROI. For online retailers, an ordering process lends itself ideally for a first feedback encounter. Why? There are plenty of visitors and the problem is clear: Why are visitors dropping off in the ordering process?
This ‘why factor’ is something that cannot be derived from web statistic tools such Google Analytics. The moment someone reports (by providing feedback) that something goes wrong, you not only have insight into what went wrong but you can immediately follow up and request their contact information. These are, in fact, leads that would normally be lost but now provide immediate revenue.
So by starting small, you can gain knowledge based on these insights and relatively quickly. Make small improvements and monitor the impact on the customer metrics you have chosen. And don’t forget to be proactive in sharing those insights!
Customer feedback can play a massive and long-lasting role in boosting online sales and optimising conversions: a win-win for customers and companies alike.