KISS with your customers

In our last blog, we spoke about the importance of giving your customers a voice. Essentially, we believe the customer needs a channel that they can use to be heard. In this blog, we discover what makes the channel popular with your customers — in industry terms, what increases your response rate.
The first thing that you need to do is KISS

Keep It Short & Simple. So before you work on anything else to get customer feedback, ask yourself is it Short & Simple?
To be able to KISS with your customer you can think of these pointers
Does the customer need to invest more than 30 seconds in giving me feedback?Is there a clear call to action that the customer can see even before he starts the feedback process
If the answer to any of these 2 questions is in the negative, then you are effectively narrowing the funnel of the feedback data entering your operations.

So once you have found a Short & Simple method to gather feedback, we move our attention towards the context of the customer journey. Let’s think of a supermarket. A customer makes a list of items they want to buy, they go around aisles looking for the same, they fill their cart with what they need and the supermarket along this journey influences them on what they might want and increase the size of the basket.
Along this journey, the typical metrics of a good experience would revolve around

• Locating the products quickly
• Finding a large selection in every category
• Having a short queuing time

The incentive for the customer to comment, share or give insights about their experience vs the desired experience is highest when they are in the act. So getting the feedback through the KISS system is important but the context, in this case, has to be “ON THE GROUND”. Asking for their feedback once the customer gets home, has lost the contextual element. Customers have more things to do — grocery shopping has already taken away a large chunk of their day and now there is no room to give you feedback. So being contextual again increases the size of the funnel and allows more data to flow into your operation analysis.
Another element that improves your response rate, incentives. The reason we have picked this last is that it directly depends on the success of the two other factors we discussed above.

A complex mechanism to gather feedback that is presented in a non-contextual manner means larger investment in incentives. Its very clear for the customer, the time you ask them for feedback they think “What’s in it for me?”

• I get Freebies if i share my opinion
• I’m valuable hence they want my opinion
• I’m a customer and they care about all customers

Ideally, the emotion to be provoked in the customer is #3. A sense of care and connection between the brand/business and its customer is a key to driving up response rates and more importantly generating genuine feedback.
So remember to KISS and Keep it Contextual, do leave your comments below or write to me on [email protected]