The Most Valuable Channels for Customer Reviews

E-commerce has been shifting for some time now, accelerated recently by the social distance mandate that forced all of us in front of our screens for even longer periods of time.

As everyone’s online presence continues to grow stronger by the day, so do brands’ interactions and relationships with their consumers. This has meant a shift in marketing techniques, a slight shift away from traditional brick-and-mortar models, and an overdrive in fostering positive and happy relationships with customers.

One of the most important ways to cater to the customer experience is by listening to feedback.

But with more data to process than ever before, this isn’t always a simple task, especially if you don’t know where to start. Looking at customer feedback channels is the clear path to start, but which channels are the most valuable? Let’s take a look.

Social Media

Not that social media was dead pre-pandemic, but the world observed an increase in social media use as we moved into quarantine. There are plenty of interesting implications that come out of this, but one, in particular, responds to how customers use social media to connect with brands. Especially since (e-)commerce shifted drastically to contactless shopping, feedback was quick to follow.

Social media is a platform where people can share their honest and unfiltered opinions about any topic. You can find all sorts of natural reviews of any service or product with a simple keyword search. These searches are not only a great way of taking a peek into what is being said about your brand, services, and/or products, but are also a great opportunity to interact with these users directly.

Responding to any sort of mention, good or bad, is a great way of showing your customers that you care about their experiences. And holding yourself accountable for bad experiences, publicly, is always good PR.

Anonymous Feedback – Surveys and Polls

Social media is a great way to see what people are saying on their own, but there are two pretty big limitations.

First, not everyone is equally outspoken. While the veil of the internet does tend to grant us some otherwise absent confidence, this isn’t quite enough for everybody.

Chances are, there will be plenty of customers who still don’t feel comfortable posting feedback publicly online, or who would rather tweet about something else.

The other limitation is that people will post whatever they want to post, which isn’t a great resource to collect specific data you might be interested in. They are responding to their experiences, sure, but not in a quantifiable way.

A solution to both of these limitations is to use anonymous forms of feedback, like surveys and polls. These provide customers the platform to voice their opinions anonymously, and in such a manner that the data is immediately useful to you, since you are controlling the prompts.

Unlike social media, nobody gets a serotonin boost out of following a link from a corporate email. This makes it crucial to ensure that your surveys and polls are quick, accessible, easy-to-fill-out, and sometimes even incentivized. You’ve never walked out of a Subway eager to tell somebody about your experience—until they started offering cookies, that is.

Community Forums

Still, there are limitations to both of these channels. While together they are able to inform you about what people are naturally thinking with respect to your brand, and about specific data that you’re interested in, both rely (usually) on individual feedback in order to draw bigger trends and focuses. Luckily, there’s a solution to that, too.

Community forums are a space, often hosted by the brand, that allow the brand community to come together and discuss different topics and concerns related to the services or products.

This can help you pinpoint community trends, and not just depend on correctly piecing together a data set. Moreover, if something suddenly goes wrong with a service or a product, a customer isn’t going to think where’s that survey link? If it’s a unique instance, they might go to social media. If it’s a common grievance, it’s bound to make its way to a community forum.

Another reason forums are so useful is that they are relatively cheap. If you are hosting the form yourself, there is site-building and maintenance to take into account, but it can certainly be less to worry about (and less expensive) in the long run than designing and analyzing every individual poll and survey, or mining through social media to piece together trends.

With forms, the data, narrative, and sometimes even possible solution, is all right in front of you.

Automated Feedback

We consider these three channels to be some of the most important, if not the most important, channels to focus on. Still, there will be customers who will not actively engage with any of these channels. While there will invariably be some customers you simply never hear from, there is one simple tool that can help you try and rescue as much feedback as possible. Automated widgets and chatbots.

If you keep the interaction short and sweet, widgets and chatbots can be easy ways for customers to interact and leave feedback in just a few moments, without taking the customer too much out of their experience.

Especially as AI advances, these automated tools are becoming more and more effective, and they may very well serve as your best bet to get feedback from individuals who will otherwise refuse to interact with your brand outside of the shopping experience!

However you decide to formulate your feedback analysis, it’s important to keep multiple channels in mind. As we’ve explored throughout this piece, each channel offers unique and important perspectives that are important to take into account.

Generally speaking, the more channels you can keep tabs on, the better. But adding more to your plate can also be pricey and time-consuming, so if you’re looking for the most valuable channels to consider, these are our suggestions.