Getting feedback is crucial to any company. Whether you are serving food or selling mobile phones, it is important to know what your customers think of your service and product.
They are the ones who will tell you what you are doing right, and what you are doing wrong. Using a messaging app like Viber can help you get this feedback quickly and at the right time, whilst the experience is still fresh in your customer’s mind.
Why is customer feedback so important?
The opinions of your customers are valuable for several reasons.
Firstly, they let you improve your products. Customers are always keen to talk about what does or doesn’t work to their liking. Armed with this knowledge you can improve your offering based on common complaints.
But why focus only on the negative? You can use their comments about what they do like to better inform you about your strengths, and this can help with making strategic business decisions.
Secondly, being able to demonstrate that you are listening goes a long way to smoothing over a negative experience. It lets you show you value their opinion, rather than just telling them so. An unhappy customer will see that you are interested and proactive about addressing their concerns.
In fact, just reaching out to them can improve retention by 11%. Even if the experience went well and the customer is happy, letting them know you are interested in what their personal experience was signals to them that they matter to you. Surveys can actually build customer engagement and brand loyalty.
Why Viber?
Once you have decided to run a survey to gather customer feedback, the question is how to best get it to your customers. Ideally, you want to get their feedback whilst the experience is still fresh in their minds. Going mobile is the best way to do this — it’s quick, simple, and convenient for your customers. You can even contact them minutes after a purchase.
As one of the top 7 messaging apps in the world, Viber is one of the best mobile channels with which to accomplish this. Viber has a 76% market penetration in the CIS region and offers GMS customers a cost-effective and secure messaging service for engaging customers.
And of course, it offers a conversational, 2-way messaging interface that facilitates interactive projects like consumer surveys. As the top messaging app in Ukraine, Viber can deliver a clear, responsive survey to as many customers as possible.
Setting up your customer feedback campaign with Viber
A Viber survey simply creates a 2-way messaging session which sends customers questions and logs their answers. GMS’ experts can help your company set up an effective, responsive campaign by connecting your CRM or other client management system to GMS Business Communications Suite via a simple API.
Then, when a customer connected to your system makes a purchase (for example, through a loyalty programme using a discount card) it will trigger an automated text message asking them a simple question. They can then reply, and the response will be added to your database.
A great feature is that when this is connected to your CRM system you can turn your results into a detailed breakdown. This means that you can see how your brand or product is perceived by particular segments of your customer base. You can see how men between 30-40 feel about your service, for example, or how your company is perceived by women who buy Apple products.
Deciding what questions to ask
So, Viber can send customers survey questions. But what questions do you want to ask your customers?
Think about areas that you want to improve or just the kinds of feedback you will find helpful. Use these to structure your questions to ensure you get the feedback you can use.
Whilst customer engagement is a nice additional benefit, what is important is actionable information, so you should not just ask for general comments about their experience, as these are difficult to use to improve service and it takes a lot of work to analyse and compare different responses.
Instead, ask questions that guide responses to the topics you are interested in. For surveys like the one described above, where you are interested in a customer’s experience, questions that can be answered “yes” or “no” are not terribly helpful, because they do not tell you the reasoning behind a customer’s response.
Skip straight to “why” and “how” questions, as this actively solicits some specific feedback that hopefully highlights an area to improve on.
An alternative is to ask for customers to rate their experience. (Or perhaps you like the Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) method, which asks how likely a customer is to recommend a service to a friend.) For example:
This is another benefit to using Viber. An SMS needs the customer to text back their answer, which can potentially cause friction and poor response rates, even if they just have to choose a number between 1 and 5. You want to make the process as simple as possible to complete.
You could also use the customer’s initial reply as a trigger to send a follow-up. For example, after asking them to rate your service you can ask for suggestions for ways to improve your stores.
Think carefully about how you do this: too many messages will get tiresome quickly and customers will ignore your surveys. Limit yourself to just two or three questions and run such surveys for a limited time when there is a particular area of business you want to improve.
Conclusion
A Viber survey can help you get important feedback from your customers. With the insights gained you can work out what customers do and do not like, learn how to improve your service and refine your business strategy.
At the same time, you also show you care about their opinions and that you are interested in addressing their concerns, which helps customer retention. Surveys can help a business in a variety of ways, and GMS, as Viber’s official partner, has a wealth of experience delivering innovative, dynamic Viber campaigns for our clients.
GMS Business Communications Suite offers detailed analytics and feedback, as well as additional controls and a user-friendly interface. It can even combine Viber with push and SMS messaging, in order to guarantee delivery, starting with your preferred channel.