How Customer Feedback Benefits Ecommerce Business

Today, creating a responsive e-commerce website with the latest products is not enough. It is equally important to learn about customer feedback for eCommerce business, as the success and growth of your business depend on your customers. According to a recent study conducted by the Spiegel Research Center,

• 95% of shoppers read customers’ feedback/comments before purchasing a product.
• A product with five opinions has 270% higher possibility of being sold than the products with no reviews.

Therefore, customers’ feedback is not just their opinion regarding a brand. The visitors to your e-commerce site need to know that your brand has the best intentions in mind for the target customers. They depend upon the feedback to make up their mind before converting into customers.

Unlike a brick-and-mortar store, e-commerce businesses have no opportunity to establish face-to-face communication with the customers in order to gather feedback. They have to ask the customers in order to find out what they think about a brand, its product/services and complaints. If you ignore customers’ feedback and continue with the business as usual, then it shows to your consumers that you do not care about their feelings. In this scenario, you will lose the target customers to your competitors. Hence, it is crucial for you to gather customer feedback if you want the e-commerce business to grow.

Why Seek Customer Feedback?

Nowadays, people can collect information and read reviews regarding various products or services before making an investment. Thus, it is important for any businessperson not to ignore the feedback of customers. The following statistics prove the importance of customers’ feedback.

• Podium – reviews impact the purchase decision of 93% of people.
• KPMG – 30% of customers have shared online feedback regarding products.
• Cone Study – negative reviews have prevented 80% of consumers from purchasing a product.
• Spiegel Research Center – displaying reviews for expensive products improved the conversion rates by 380%.
• Broadly – 84% of people have faith in online reviews.
• Bazaarvoice – 70% of the consumers have modified their perception regarding a brand depending upon how or if a business has replied to the online reviews.
• Zendesk research – poor customer service experience changed the purchase decision of 97% respondents.
• Vonage – Each year U.S. businesses lose around $62 billion due to poor customer service.
• Womply – businesses have noticed a 35% increase (average) in revenue after replying to at least 25% of the reviews.

How Customers’ Feedback Benefits Your Ecommerce Business

Whether it is decreasing the cost of customer acquisition or increasing the conversion rate, it is important to listen to your customers and the following points may help you understand the benefits.

Stimulates the Decision to Buy

Positive reviews from the customers on a particular product/service have been found to stimulate the purchase decision of the prospective buyers. You will also notice a decrease in ‘Shopping Cart’ abandonment due to this reason.

Increases the Confidence in New Customers

The positive reviews regarding a product on the e-commerce site have also been found to instil confidence into prospective buyers. The customers are likely to depend more on an e-commerce site which showcases products with positive reviews or where products can be reviewed.

Helps in the Product Development Process

If your customers do not share their feedback, then you cannot have an objective view regarding the quality of your products or services. You have to take into account the feedback of all customers.

For example,

There may be a couple of positive reviews against a particular product of your brand and you may believe that all your customers are satisfied. However, a few customers may be dissatisfied with the quality of this particular product/service. However, you remain unaware of this dissatisfaction until you ask for feedback of each customer and may lose them to your competitors.

Hence, it is essential to take initiative in order to collect the feedback of all customers. It enables you to learn about the quality of products/services, let you make the necessary adjustments and saves you losing customers.

Helps to Increase the Superfans

Your loyal customers who willingly recommend your brand to friends/relatives/family-members are known as Superfans. For example,

The NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures the loyalty of customers to a particular brand or company and Superfans are the customers who score 9 or 10 during this survey.

If the Superfans of your brand share positive feedback regarding a product/service on social media, then its effectiveness is similar to word-of-mouth marketing. They can create more awareness regarding your brand and can increase their reliability along with the sales.

Helps to Enhance the Customer Experience

If you receive a complaint from one customer regarding a product’s quality, then there may be 26 other customers (on an average) who felt the same way. However, you may not learn about their dissatisfaction if you do not ask for the feedback. These unsatisfied customers may stop purchasing from the store and move to your competitors without providing any feedback.

Therefore, it is important to measure the satisfaction rate of the visitors to your e-commerce store throughout their journey – from the time when they visited the e-commerce store to the time when they turned into customers by placing an order and making a purchase.

If you know what the visitors/customers think about your e-commerce store from their feedback, then you can provide satisfactory customer-experience and may improve the quality of experience.

Decrease Customer Acquisition Costs

Through customers’ feedback, you can understand who your target customers are. It will benefit you in the following manner.

• You can provide an excellent customer experience. Hence, the existing customers will continue to buy from you.
• Satisfied customers are likely to write positive reviews regarding your products.
• You can also update the website content and can select the marketing channels (to communicate with the target customers more effectively) depending upon the preference of your customers.

As a result, you are going to have more customers at a lower cost.

Increase Online Conversions

The average conversion rate is 3%-4% for any e-commerce platform. However, you can improve the conversion rate if you optimize the e-commerce site based upon customers’ behaviour and their feedback. Even a 1% increase in conversion rate may amount to thousands of dollars increase in sales from the new customers.

Make Your Customers FEEL Special

You can make your customers feel special if you listen to their demands and complaints and take necessary measures to improve their experience when navigating through your e-commerce store. It shows to your customers that you value them and improves the customer-retention rates.

On the other hand, you can customize the products on your e-commerce store based upon the target customers’ demands if you listen to them which in return will bring more loyal customers to your brand.

How to Collect Customer Feedback for Your E-commerce Store

You may use the following methods to collect customer feedback.

Customer Feedback Surveys

This is considered to be an effective method of gathering feedback from the potential and current customers. You may conduct the following surveys to cater to the needs of existing and potential customers.

Prospect Surveys

When you survey the behaviour or demands of potential customers, you can have a better understanding of the target audience. You may learn about their demographic details, desires, preferences, motivations or pain points. You may use the insights from this type of survey to create personalized content for your e-commerce store that resonates with the target audience.

Current Customer Surveys

You may run the following surveys to measure the satisfaction of existing customers.

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): It has been designed to rate the customers’ satisfaction with the products in your store, with the user onboarding process or with the performance of the support team.
  They are short surveys and usually include a linear scale. For example,

  Rate your experience on a scale of 1–5/10

  They are usually sent once a customer chats with a customer-care representative or sends an e-mail.

• Customer Effort Score (CES): This is another short survey. It measures the user-experience. You can learn about a customer’s experience (easy/satisfying/difficult) when visiting your e-commerce store or when interacting with the customer service representatives.
• Net Promoter Score: It measures customer loyalty. The customers are asked only one question during the survey – ‘How likely is a customer to recommend your company to a friend or colleague, on a rating scale of 1–10?’
  Based on the result of this survey, you may categorize the customers as –
  • Detractors (score 0-6): They are likely to write negative reviews regarding your products or move to your competitor.
  • Passives (score 7-8): They are satisfied with the products, however, are unlikely to recommend your products to others.
  • Promoters (score 9-10): They are your brand’s Superfans. They love your products and are likely to recommend your products to others.

  The following tips may help you achieve higher response rates irrespective of the type of the survey.

• Ensure that the survey process is engaging and the form can be easily filled out.
• Express gratitude to the participants and there are different ways of expressing the gratitude. You may offer a coupon/discount/freebie to those who completed the survey.
• Use a collection of open-ended and closed-ended questions during the survey.
• Keep the survey as concise as possible without missing the key points.

One-On-One Outreach Method

It enables you to reach out to each customer. This is an effective method of collecting customer feedback, as you can collect better insights in comparison to an online survey where some participants may provide an answer based upon what a surveyor may want to hear.

• During face-to-face surveys, you can read the body language of a participant.
• When surveying over the phone, you can understand the changes in a person’s voice and tone.
• You may even receive additional insights from the customers through follow-up questions.

You may use the Appointment Scheduling Software if you want to schedule numerous feedback calls. It enables the customers to directly schedule the calls on a surveyor’s calendar.

Feedback Boxes on Website

You may use Feedback boxes on your e-commerce website. It enables you to quickly gather the customers’/visitors’ feedback and let you measure their sentiment at different touch-points on your e-commerce store. You may use the ‘feedback boxes’ in the following scenarios or on the following pages.

• When someone spends a lot of time on the product page without taking another action.
• When visitors abandon the cart.
• When visitors are about to exit your website.
• When visitors are on the FAQ or knowledge-based page.
• On the ‘Thank-You’ page once someone has purchased a product.

You may ask for customers’ or visitors’ feedback using different methods, such as –

• Exit-intent pop-ups
• Slide-out forms
• Chatbots
• Live-chat

The selection of the feedback box depends upon the type of target customers or their location (a type of web-page) on a website along with their action. For example,

• A Chatbot or ‘live-chat’ option is suitable if someone spends a lot of time reading an article or on the product page.
• The ‘Exit-Intent popup’ is ideal if a visitor is about to exit a website.

Assess User Activity

There are some software programs that you may use in order to learn how the visitors to your website interact in real-time. You can observe what the visitors do on your website without having to collect their feedback through an online survey, one-to-one reach-out program or feedback form. For example,

• You can follow a visitor on your e-commerce store using some analytics (Hotjar or FullStory) and find out the following facts.
  • What they clicked on
  • How far they went on your website
  • Where they dropped off
  • Heat-maps
  • Click-maps

You may use the data collected through such analytics to optimize the e-commerce store for higher conversions. Utilizing a cloud browser web scraper can automate this process, providing valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, ultimately leading to a more efficient and profitable online business.

Keep an Eye on Social Media Comments

You may even monitor users’ comments regarding your brand or products on popular social media channels (TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram) to gather useful feedback. The following points may help you learn what users feel or think about your brand.

• How many comments specifically mention your brand on each day/week/month?
• How many comments are presently seen with reference to your product attributes without any mention of your brand?
• Have you noticed any increase in activity?
• How many mentions of your brand and ‘social media’ activity do you receive in comparison to your competitors?
• What are your most active and least active social media channels?
• What is the overall sentiment (positive/negative/mixed/neutral) of the comments and mentions?
• What type of ‘social media’ sentiment is received by your direct competitors?

You may even use a monitoring tool (Mention/Talkwalker/Google-Alerts) to observe the mentions of your brand as well as your competitors’ brands on different social media channels.

Applying in REAL

You have to perform the following tasks after collecting and evaluating the customers’ feedback.

• You may use an online automation tool (Zapier) to route the customers’ feedback to a central database from the channel that is used for the survey. This step enables you to develop a constructive loop for the customers’ feedback and let everyone in your company see –
  • Where the feedback is?
  • Who wrote the feedback?
  • What is it about?
  • If there are any attached files?
  • Current status of feedback.
• You may receive hundreds of feedbacks each month and it is difficult to remember the nature of each feedback. However, the best way to remember the nature of each feedback and to act upon the feedback is to create stories using different types of stories. For example,
  

  You may create ‘happy stories’ using positive feedbacks and ‘sad stories’ using negative feedbacks.

  However, it is essential to collect customers’ consent before writing a story based on their feedback. You may add a disclaimer along with a ‘signature’ field to the survey in order to receive customers’ consent.

• You have to prioritize the customers’ feedbacks based upon their impact on your business. You may triage the feedback based upon the following criteria.
  • Impact: What will be the impact of a change if it works?
  • Confidence: How confident are you regarding the effectiveness of this modification on a scale of 1-10 (1 equals to zero confidence and 10 equals to extremely confident)? Will this modification truly resolve an issue?
  • Ease of Modification: How difficult is the modification based upon the feedback?
• KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a measurable value that businesses use in order to demonstrate how effectively a company has been achieving its primary business objectives.
  You may assign a KPI related to ‘customer feedback’ for each department and team as well as for each member of a team. It enables you to keep the customer feedback at the forefront and to ensure that your e-commerce business remains customer-centric.
• Finally, you have to assess the result after implementing customers’ feedback and you may ask yourself the following questions.
  • Are your customers satisfied or happier than before?
  • Are customers repeating the purchases?
  • Is there a customer churn? What does it look like?
  • Is there any improvement in the conversion rate?
  • Do you notice more positive mentions of your brand on social media?

Conclusion

The success of your business largely depends upon how the products are marketed and sold. However, it is equally important to collect customer feedback for eCommerce business to learn what they think about your e-commerce store or brand. It allows you to cater to the target audience what they demand and let you succeed by moving ahead of the competitors.