It’s just a fact of being in a business: one day your customer will complain about something whether it is about your service, product or website. Somewhere down the line, there will be a hiccup and it is the nature of the business that involves dealing with people / customers. But often, some complaints can be avoided if you allow your customers to easily communicate with you, get back to them in a timely fashion and allow them to provide feedback via different channels.
For any business, customer feedback is paramount for knowing your customer’s needs and expectations. In order to be successful in your business, you must listen to your customers. The feedback from your customer is very valuable information that can help you improve your product and services.
When you openly ask for feedback from your customers, while it’s sometimes uncomfortable to face customer complaints, it is important that you do it on regular basis. Research shows that customers who are able to get their complaints resolved in a timely manner are more likely to stick with you and recommend your products or services to others. Here you some measures that you can take in order to stop customer complaints before they happen:
Ask for feedback
Asking for a feedback from your customer helps you build strong relationships and increase customer satisfaction. At the end of the day, the only reason your business is able to survive in the market is that of your customers. So, you better listen to your customer who pays you for your product and services. There are many ways by which you can gather feedback from your customer such as:
- Contact us form: Make sure, you have a working “Contact Us” form that is easily accessible (or visible) on your website. This simple form allows your customer to get in touch with you to get more information about your product / services, complain about your product or simply tell you how great your product is. By adding a “Contact us” page on your website, you can prove to your potential customer that you are real and running a trusted business.
- Conduct survey: One of the most effective ways to get your customer’s feedback is to conduct a survey. You can simply ask your customers to take a survey on your website (if you have that functionality) or use 3rd party tools like survey monkey.
- Product reviews: Product reviews can be a very important factor for your customers in making a decision to buy a product from your online store. It is important to decide the placement of customer reviews on the product page so that people can easily see them. Tip: nopCommerce supports news, blog, forums, polls and product reviews and ratings which allows asking for feedback on products that give customers a voice and lets others know what people think about your products.
Make sure your customers can reach you easily
When you are dealing with products that are sold by many other competitors, it is your job as a store owner to provide quality content that will distinguish you from other sellers. The quality content will make it easier to attract online shoppers to your site. Another important thing is to try to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and see if your store site is easy to navigate. Is it easy to find information for products or services that you are offering to your customers? Just having an online store is not enough these days so make sure you are also on the entire social media sites so that customers can reach out to you via different channels.
Test Thoroughly
Whether you are launching a new product on your store site, updating design / layout of your website, trying new features and doing some kind of technology upgrades, testing is crucial to success. UAT (user acceptance testing) whenever possible is always going to help uncover hidden issues.
Always consider talking to your hosting provider (or server administration) in regard to how to minimize the risk of overload and what steps are necessary to overcome the issues. It is a good practice to test your website in advance for performance issues as well as security threats.
Customer Service
A bad service experience can easily motivate your customers to go to your competitors. Customer satisfaction is the key to a successful business. Never assume that you know what your customers want. In order to be successful, try to follow a customer-oriented philosophy in which you ask your customer’s feedback and then act on it. Train your employees who are communicating with customers on the regular basis that a good customer service is one of your company’s most valuable asset and it is important to help a customer on every step. This can significantly lower down the complaints.
Author: Lavish Kumar