It’s Time to Speak to your Digital Agency About Online Customer Feedback
Picture this. You are the marketing executive of a company that is currently undergoing massive growth. Your responsibility involves overseeing all digital marketing initiatives within your company which range anywhere from driving online traffic and improving usability to SEO and social channels.
Although you are a very skilled and digital savvy marketer, you are not an expert in every digital tool you are considering to employ. And not only that, but being swamped with the work that goes along with each and every digital campaign might not leave you much extra time to go through the process of truly understanding how each of these digital tools operates, much less implement them.
Sound familiar? If so, then I’m guessing you’ve already approached a digital agency or are looking to do so in the near future. In both cases, perhaps it’s helpful to consider a few of the benefits of doing this first.
The value of digital agencies:
1. You have a limited amount of time and budget with your internal digital marketing team. An agency has the bandwidth and resources to deal with projects that you cannot give 100% to.
2. It’s always good to have advice from the outside looking in.
3. It’s hard to keep up with the pace of the rapidly changing digital marketing space. A study conducted by Ambos shows that over half of UK marketers surveyed by adobe felt unable to cope with the pace at which digital marketing has accelerated over the last few years.
4. It’s beneficial for digital marketers to allocate projects to their agencies because they are specialised and have the bandwidth. This means they can often jump start the programs for you.
Missing the key ingredient
It is specifically points 3 and 4 that I would like to focus on in this blog. While your agency is most likely assisting you with the likes of SEO, web analytics, A/B testing etc., online qualitative feedback from customers tends to be out of the spotlight.
If you do not collect feedback from the customer or visitor you could be missing vital revenue opportunities and suffer from mediocre conversion rates. Sometimes just the most simple piece of customer feedback that informs you of a bug on the checkout page can be valuable in terms of potential revenue and conversion.
The Importance of Qualitative Data
Most of the tools at your disposal today focus on the quantitative data such as heat maps, clicks and page viewing time. While these are important and provide useful insights into understanding the customer journey, they do not provide the full picture. Where’s the “why”? Sure you may be able to see if a visitor has abandoned their shopping cart and left your site but do you know why?
Let’s use an analogy. If you worked in a supermarket and spotted a customer suddenly putting their basket down and walking out of the shop the first thing that would spring to mind is why are they leaving. From observing their movement and mannerisms you may be able to theorise why they are leaving but wouldn’t you be better off flat out asking them why as they move towards the exit? “I forgot my wallet/a member of your staff was rude to me/my wife just texted me to say she already has the groceries from another supermarket etc.”
My point here is that qualitative feedback is vital to understand the full picture of customer experience. What is the story behind all these clicks and mouse movements? That is what a real-time feedback collection tool can help you with. If you can trigger a feedback form to appear the moment a web visitor moves the mouse away from the checkout page, you can get the qualitative insights that take out the guess work.
Managing and Interpreting your Insights
It should however be noted that feedback collection is only half the story. What you do with all this qualitative information, how you visualise and action it efficiently, is also critical. You need dashboards and charts to digest the feedback in a way that suits your organisation. It is one thing collecting the data but you need to be able to understand the story behind all of the feedback so that you can take action quickly and in the right areas. You should be able to view and compare data by week or month and also cross compare different areas of your website.
Ask your digital agency about customer feedback
So next time you speak to your digital agency be sure to ask about online customer feedback tools. They can scope out the different tools and jumpstart your digital feedback program for you, saving you valuable time and effort.
