InsightIQ Blog

Quick and Dirty Customer Feedback Solutions

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Apr 6 2009

Customer SatCustomer feedback is critical to the growth and success of any company. Surprisingly, many companies make it difficult, if not impossible, for customers to offer feedback on products and services or offer recommendations on how to improve a company's offering.

As a consulting organization, Quaero has the pleasure of building partnerships with our clients which in turn enable natural communication and feedback channels. We leverage these relationships at the end of each engagement to have open discussions with our clients regarding our services. These discussions allow our team to understand not only what is working but more importantly, what we need to be doing better. The feedback we receive is invaluable and is critical factor in how we continue to improve the level of service that we offer to our clients.

So you are probably thinking, "That's great but how do I easily receive feedback when I have 1 million customers?". Great question.

Luckily there are some quick and dirty (and free) ways that allow both large and small companies to open up communication channels with their customers and reap the benefits of unsolicited and collaborative customer feedback:


GetSatisfaction

GetSatisfaction.com calls their service a "People-Powered Customer Service" offering. It allows your customers to ask questions, share ideas, report a problem, and most importantly give praise to your services. It's social setting lets customers interact with each other as well as the company. Wholefoods is an example of a large brand that leverages the service.

 


Twitter

Twitter.com describes itself as "a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?". From a company's perspective it is a way to interact directly with your customer's in a forum that is open and collaborative. Comcast has leveraged the service to greatly improve their customer service efforts. The recent development of a tweet-centers versus a call-centers is sure sign that Twitter is becoming a viable feedback channel.

 


Disqus

Disqus.com improves the experience of your customers when they comment on your blog. It's threaded replies allow real conversations to develop within the comments on your blog. If you don't allow your customers to comment on you blog, you are missing a great opportunity to engage and learn from them. Disqus is a great way to do just that. As their site says, "there's no difference between a great comment and a great blog post".

 


PollDaddy

Polldaddy.com is a solution that allows you to "engage your audience" through easily developed, integrated, and monitored polls & surveys.  Whether it is adding a polling widget to your website or delivering complex surveys via email after a customer interaction, the solution allows you to quickly deploy a feedback channel in a matter of minutes versus hours or days.

 I know. I know. In my last post I said that marketers were sick about hearing about Social Media. I may have said the "hype" is getting tiresome, but I never said it should be ignored. At some point Marketers should expect to see enterprise level solutions for managing all on-line, off-line, and social media customer interactions, but until then these types of lightweight solutions represent a great place to start.

Why not give it a shot? With the approaching on-slot of marketing interns looking for a rewarding and fun summer job, companies have a great opportunity to leverage some highly motivated talent, who already understand the world of Social Media, to gain valuable exposure to a wealth of customer feedback without making a large investment. I know I would love that job and experience if I was 19 again.

Let us know how it goes.

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