Customer feedback is a major driver of change and improvement for any business. It tells you about your service effectiveness, about the problems — and praises — that your product elicits.
And yet, collecting this feedback all too often relies on tedious customer feedback forms and slow emails. As a result, customers tend to only report the experiences that are the most negative or exceedingly positive.
One way to inject speed and ease into the feedback process is via a chatbot. A chatbot is quick, casual, and continuously available – inviting a steady stream of everyday feedback. And, even better, it does do without representing a massive onus for customers or customer service reps.
So, here’s a closer look at why you should make use of a customer feedback bot.
The current state of customer feedback
First, let’s look at the importance of collecting feedback. You need only consider the value consumers place on it.
For example, 77% of consumers view brands more favourably if they seek out and apply customer feedback. Plus, 89% of customers want to provide feedback. They want to share their experience and opinions — and they want their thoughts to be heard. 52% of customers, meanwhile, believe that companies need to act on the feedback they’re given.
Yet the state of customer feedback collection paints a sorry picture. More than half (53%) of shoppers believe their feedback doesn’t go to anyone who can act on it.
And accuracy is also a problem. Take surveys, for instance. According to SurveyMonkey, the longer the survey, the less time a customer will spend answering each question. So, you get less accurate answers the more you ask.
Enter a customer feedback bot and its utility.
Types of feedback
A customer feedback bot will take feedback in a conversational format. This means that it’s able to collect qualitative feedback, as well as quantitative.
In other words, with a feedback chatbot, customers aren’t restricted to pre-selected answers and scales of 1-5. While these question types can certainly feature in the mix, a bot can also support more open-ended questions.
This means that customers have space to say exactly what they want to say, in a format that feels fast and low-effort.
A customer feedback bot capitalises on engagement
Perhaps the biggest boon of using a customer feedback bot is the way it capitalises on customer engagement.
A feedback chatbot is there when your customers are. That is, the customer isn’t asked for their opinion out of the blue, but when they’re already engaged with your business. They’re already on your website, they’ve just completed a transaction, etcetera. Chatbots actively engage customers, and higher engagement can translate to more feedback given.
Plus, chatbots can offer attention no matter when customers want to reach out. This means you’re offering greater accessibility to your feedback process. You reduce the hurdles to leaving feedback, so it’s easier for customers to let you know what they think.
Friendly tone
Unlike web forms and satisfaction surveys, chatbots collect information through conversation. This creates a much less formal setting for customers.
A customer feedback bot sets a friendly tone for feedback collection. Customers can say what they want when it comes to them. (Rather than, that is, slogging through a formal survey, they simply have a friendly conversation.)
Helpful features
Using a customer feedback bot brings some handy features to your feedback collection process, too.
A chatbot can apply sentiment analysis to the answers it receives. Feedback gets automatically sorted into positive, negative, and neutral categories. This makes for easier review, storage, and use.
Chatbots need constant tuning and maintenance to ensure up-to-date, efficient, and effective experiences. Bot analytics help with this ongoing management, by offering insight into how well your customer feedback bot is performing.
Hybrid chat allows agents and bots to tag team — and the bot to support the agent too. This means that, in the context of a customer feedback bot, an agent could choose to answer (for example) a negative feedback response right away. They would take over from the bot and work to address the unhappy customer.
With a customer feedback bot, all conversation data (and so feedback) can automatically sync with your CRM. There’s no copy and pasting, just enriched insight loaded into your CRM.
Chatbots vs tedium
The boons of having a chatbot to answer and assist online customers are well-known. They’re always on, they can help multiple users at once, and they reduce tedium faced by agents. But that’s not all that those bots can do for you — or your customers.
Using a customer feedback bot provides a friendly, responsive, and engaging channel for customers. And, in turn, this creates a comfortable, familiar space to leave their thoughts and feelings.
To explore what a chatbot enriched with sentiment analysis, hybrid chat, and analytics can do for you, get in touch with the WhosOn team today.
Useful links
Online engagement: you must do better than ‘contact us’