There was a time when companies had to build every feature that they wanted, which includes building customer feedback software from scratch. With the proliferation of SaaS-based software, the pressure to build with an in-house team is long gone. Now, the challenge is in finding the right software as there are plenty of players who have come up with solutions catered to a varied segment of businesses.
When a company is planning to work with a software, they have their own set of criteria based upon their business expectations. The team needs to find out the most affordable software that has the right features that they are looking for and is smooth to use.
What is a Customer Feedback Software?
Every time you buy a product on Amazon, you get their emails and from the vendor asking if the buying experience and the product from each of them respectively were good. Most of us ignore it, but it is an important metric for the said parties as it shows the kind of experience you had buying from them and your ratings are an indicator of repeat purchases and much more. It helps you to understand customer preferences, understand their expectations and you can personalize your offerings accordingly. Moreover, these are some of the benefits of using customer feedback software.
It helps improve products and services: There should be improvements in the products that you offer and the best people to give you that would be your customers who are using your product. Market research will only tell you if people are willing to buy your product but it doesn’t talk about how the product can be improved. A customer’s needs and expectations evolve over time and a customer who has used the product would be able to give valuable inputs.
Helps you create a better customer experience: Every time your customer interacts with you, you are giving them an experience, whether it is good or bad completely depends on how your products work and the accompanying customer service.
It can be used to analyze information: Customer feedback helps you interpret and analyze the metrics that customers have given by turning raw data into visual information in the form of graphs, pie charts, tables and so on. This makes it easy to identify patterns and understand the psyche of the customers.
Automate to gather data fast: Most of the feedback system comes along with the power of automation and it is extremely powerful and important as well because it allows you the time and flexibility to work on your core activities. Once you set up a system, it becomes easier to concentrate on your other core activities.
If you are looking for a customer feedback software, here are 10 tell-tale signs of bad one to watch out for:
The article will talk about customer feedback software that you need to avoid along with accompanying reasoning for not using them. Choosing the wrong software might result in wasted time because of implementation and a lot of costs paid towards a mediocre software.
1. Not Compatible With Your Favorite Software
This can be a huge drawback if the data that you have collected from the customer feedback software cannot be read by other systems because the software cannot accept it.
2. Compatible Only On A Single Platform
It is important that the system is designed in such a way that the feedback can be taken from any number of platforms and not just one. In fact, if you encounter a customer feedback software that works on just one platform, please avoid it with a ten-foot pole. The customer feedback system should be able to collect feedback using multiple platforms including email, social media, SMS, landing pages, chatbots, etc.
3. Skip Logic? We’ll Skip That!
This is an absolute must-have feature that allows you to show a question based on the previous answers to the previous question. The best part about is that it enhances the experiences of the respondent by not showing them questions which are irrelevant to them. If there is no skip logic feature in the customer feedback software, then a user needs to keep answering ‘no’ or ‘ignore’ (based on your inputs) because it is not relevant to them.
4. Multiple Question Types? Dream On!
Not only is having a single type of question boring for the user to answer, but there is also not much that you can glean from such a survey. If your customer feedback software only allows you to ask multiple choice questions, then run away from it. Forget about using it even if there is a free trial period. It is not worth your time investing in a customer feedback software that does not give you the liberty of asking different sets of questions from your customers. Even the respondents like answering different types of questions. It is just plain human nature to want change.
5. Reporting Tools Are A Sham
Any customer feedback software should come with a reporting tool and feedback analysis in its dashboard. The dashboard should show how your feedback, it must be possible for you to compare and play around with the data to create different streams of information that can be used to improve the business. The reporting tools help you gauge the impact of customer service efforts.
6. Not Particularly Good At Project Management
If you are just a single person, then this should not bother you. But if there are a lot of people who will be handling different projects for various teams, then the customer feedback software should have project management capabilities for sure. The lack of it means that you need to create new accounts every time you want someone to be added. The other option is to share your login credentials which is definitely not adviced. The customer feedback software should come with options to create any number of teams and it should be able to different tasks to people based on their job roles.
7. Advanced Customization Is Just Not Possible
Allow the business to add a lot of customization options on the customer feedback software, from being able to add their logo, adding lots of colors, various text elements, and so on.
8. Free Templates? Ahem, Nope!
You might ask why is providing free templates important? Having a set of templates to look at for a particular business problem makes it easy to draft a survey questionnaire and also builds familiarity with the kind of questions that can be asked. On top of this, it saves a lot of time for the business that is going to conduct the survey.
9. It Sorely Lacks Automation Capabilities
There are a lot of minor processes that happens like asking for feedback, collecting responses, having to follow-up with them, sending the data collected and so on. If one were to handle all of these processes manually, it would take a lot of time and don’t forget about the number of man-hours wasted in this futile process that could easily be automated. Helps you save time when sending recurring emails as well when you automate as you don’t have to be up at the particular time you want to send the survey. Make sure that the customer feedback software you choose has automation capabilities.
10. Cannot Segment Audience
Not all customers are the same, and it is extremely important that you picture your clients that way. Only then will you be able to understand their specific needs and wants to offer something specific to them. This way you can target leads based on specific events, actions, sessions, and activities.
So, How To Choose The Right Customer Feedback Software?
Choosing the right customer feedback software, in fact, choosing any kind of software is a big task because there are a lot of things to consider and there is information overload. The plethora of choices actually doesn’t help. Making a poor decision of choosing the right customer feedback software can result in a lot of wasted time and lead to a lot of cost overruns as well. You don’t want that, here are some tips on collecting customer feedback and how you should choose the right feedback software.
What are your objectives?
A customer feedback software can help you with insights on areas such as customer experience, loyalty, satisfaction and more. But you need to see the metrics that you want to concentrate on and choose accordingly. There might be a lot of features that are available, but you don’t need all of them. Only choose the ones that are extremely relevant to you.
Must-have Features In Your Customer Feedback Software
Take a piece of paper and write down the features that are important to your business at this juncture with regards to your customer feedback software. Also, the kind of dashboard that you want as well. A dashboard is a powerful part of a customer feedback software since it is the one that spits out data into usable information. Think about the exact steps that you will use when you work with feedback software. Visualizing this will make it clearer for you.
Requirements and support
Some software requires a lot of hand-holding before you can ensure someone is there at the workspace to do it, while some don’t require any kind of technical assistance. But if you don’t have the right technical capacity, then you need to select a vendor whose product comes along with support services.
Dashboard capabilities
While you might think that it is perfectly all right to export the data from the feedback on to an Excel sheet and analyze the data, unfortunately, that is not the smartest way to do this work unless your feedback volumes are extremely low. Rich capabilities in your dashboard have become almost a norm these days as marketers need to compare different types of data for deep insights.
Closed loop feedback
Follow-up is an important concept in sales and more so when collecting feedback from your customers. It requires you to identify and manage customer touchpoints, listen to the customer and follow up on the feedback received. Keep a bunch of people who will take care of the follow-ups and close the thread.
That said, the final step is to test out the software for yourself. Some of this software have free trials or at least a freemium version using which you can find if you are comfortable working with the software and if it aligns with your business goals.
Conclusion
Finding an online form that has all the features that you want might not be something that is available at all, this is why you need to pick and choose. Different customer feedback software has their own set of advantages and disadvantages to navigate. Before you decide on a customer feedback software, you need to be aware of what exactly are the objectives towards using such a software. The easiest method to arrive at the customer feedback software to use would be the above method. Collecting feedback from your customer is not something fancy that only a few companies do, but it is prevalent everywhere as its importance has been realized by most businesses.
A conversational interface is the backbone of any customer feedback software and Survey Sparrow has all the features that we have mentioned. With its neat interface and feature-rich dashboard, it makes it easy for you to get the most from a customer feedback session. If you are looking for a customer feedback software that can take care of all your survey needs, look no further than Survey Sparrow.
