Customer Feedback Made Simple

It is no surprise, that sites such as Amazon include all customer feedback, both positive and negative. Of course in Amazon’s case, the feedback is about a product they are selling rather than about their own site, but nevertheless, it is generally accepted best practice to make all your customer feedback available to users of the site.

Customer feedback, often called reviews or testimonials, are a powerful influencer on modern websites.

Here are 6 top tips for making best use of customer feedback:

1. Transparency – there are plenty of sites on the internet that quite obviously only publish their best reviews. Such an approach could actually have a negative impact. Website users aren’t stupid. They know that not every review is going to be glowing and just displaying the best ones shows a patent lack of transparency. Don’t be worried about revealing all. Your users will rate you more highly if they see you are being transparent and honest and your site will gain credibility.
2. Use an online survey tool or a dedicated customer feedback service. Examples of the latter include Feefo.com which is a transparent and easy to use system. On our site Companiesmadesimple.com, we use Survey Monkey.
3. Turn negatives positive. It’s a useful tip to create a system that enables you to respond to negative comments. As good practice, all negative comments should be followed up. We make it a practice to ensure that every comment, be it criticism or just constructive suggestions, are responded to. Turning negatives positive in this way creates a powerful impression.
4. Create a ranking system. Our surveys have been completed by over 1000 users and this now leads to a dynamic ranking system that provide impressive results. It also creates a target that can be used as a tool to improve what we do.
5. Update regularly. We publish our results every week and amend our statistics at the same time. There is nothing worse than seeing a review or testimonial from a year ago. To be truly effective, customer feedback has to be up to date.
6. Publish your statistics. Whether they are good or bad, there really is no point collecting data if you are not going to use it in some way. Publish your data and be proud of it.