negative feedback

What to do with Negative Feedback – 5 Proven Steps to Improve It

General

Sending out surveys always brings results, some positive and some negative.

While you may find yourself cringing as the negative results pile in, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. You of course appreciate the positive comments because they are reassuring, but the negative survey results are a growth opportunity.

Most business leaders know that negative feedback doesn’t have to spell disaster, and they instead turn it into a positive experience. (tweet this)

In this article, we look at what to do with negative feedback and five proven steps to improve it.

#1: Don’t Let Customers Down

Once your customers have taken the time to complete your survey, you don’t want to let them all down. Show your customers you value their time and their feedback by providing a response.

If you don’t, you show customers their input is useless, and they’ll likely never complete another survey for you again.

What happens after your customers send their survey feedback is the most important part of your survey

#2: Review Your Survey Responses

Gather your team and make sure everyone has read and re-read the customer feedback.

Delegate someone to respond to the negative feedback and someone to respond to the positive feedback.

Discuss together how your staff should handle their responses, especially to the negative feedback.

For starters, they should respond immediately. This isn’t something you want to fester. After all, the last thing you want are negative reviews all over Google and Facebook.

You can improve the customer’s opinion of you by learning more about what they’re upset about, remaining empathetic and showing you care. This is all regardless of whether you think the customer is right or not.

#3: Take Action

As you prepare to take action, it can be helpful to have a template for your employees to follow. Set guidelines and parameters so your staff is well-versed on just what to say.

They should always customize the response, though, so the template is really just an initial guide.

You may find that you can improve your negative feedback with the right response. Customers may even end up sticking with your company because of the way you handled their negative feedback.

Your follow-up is key to keeping the customer and turning them into one of your most loyal ones.

Train your staff to create a response that renames their concern, acknowledges it, and then lets them know how you can remedy it. Always let them know how much you value their input and how sorry you are for the problem.

#4: Review Responses

The next step is setting aside a time to meet with your staff to discuss your negative feedback.

This is so important because it’s the only way you’ll improve your business and your service and avoid negative feedback in the future.

#5: Analyze Your Data

Finally, as you review responses and make a plan for turning things around, you want to really analyze your data.

This means looking where the negative feedback came from. Is it just one department? Is it a particular area of the city or country?

By analyzing the data, you’ll find areas where you might provide more training. Or, you might learn you need to add a staff person because the wait time is too long. You also might find problems with products.

Analyzing your data provides a wealth of information and lets you know where to act.

Final Thoughts

When businesses respond promptly to negative feedback, they benefit. If you ignore, you’re likely to suffer in the form of bad reviews all over the internet.

Communicate with your customers. Try to fix the problem, and once you have, reach back out to those same customers and let them know what you’re doing to fix it.

This means contacting them more than once and showing them that not only did their feedback matter, but you took steps to make sure it didn’t happen again. Thank them one more time and let them know their role in affecting change.

Providing good customer service is vital to the success of any business. So, when you get negative feedback, you want to do everything in your power to improve it.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

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Harnessing The Power Of Regular Feedback

Survey Tips

Do you know how your customers feel about your services and your products? Do you know what you’re doing right and where you can improve?

By building constant feedback into your processes, you can learn more about how to fine tune and increase your business.

Through regular customer feedback, you have the opportunity to improve loyalty, retention and sales.

In this article, we look at harnessing the power of regular feedback so you can learn more about your customer’s satisfaction levels.

You’ll find there are several ways to gain customer feedback and use it to improve your business.

Use Surveys for Regular Feedback

When it comes to surveys, you have several ways to reach your customers and at different times in their journey with your company.

Survey After First Purchase:

For example, you can survey your customers after their first purchase, their sign up for your service, or their sign up for your free trial.

It’s important to find out what your customers thought of their first experience with your company from your products and services to your checkout process and the ease of using your website.

You’ll find out from this survey where you can improve your processes.

Survey After Subsequent Purchases:

Each time your customers make subsequent purchases, you can also survey them. Once they’ve used your products and services and come back for more is a great time to ask more in-depth survey questions.

Survey At Specified Times After-Purchase:

Another time to survey your customers is at specified times after their purchase. You might consider three months, six months and one year afterwards.

For these surveys, you want to know what they think of your products and services long-term, if they’re still using them and if so, why.

If they haven’t made a purchase in a while, you also want to find out why.

Customer Satisfaction Survey:

Yet another survey you can send is after a customer has an interaction with your customer support team.

For example, someone calls in and has a question. After the phone call, you send a survey to find out your customer’s satisfaction level.

This survey helps you learn about the quality of your customer support. This is highly important to your business as you’ll find your customers will not shop with you if they receive poor service.

You can harness the power of this feedback to create employee training manuals and training sessions to help your staff learn more about providing great service.

Having this feedback helps you continue to monitor your service staff and make improvements or changes as necessary.

Engagement Survey:

You’ll find that gauging customer engagement is helpful to know as you grow your company. (tweet this)

By learning how engaged your customers are, you learn why they stay or why they leave. You’ll gain insight into your customer churn rates and the reasons why they are high, normal or low.

You can then make improvements in your products and services to try and increase retention.

For example, perhaps your items always arrive broken. At this point, your customers may disengage from you and decide they’re better off without your product because they don’t want to wait for a new shipment.

Learning this from a survey, you can then find a new shipping company that won’t consistently break your items.

You should send surveys after each interaction your customers have with your staff as this is highly useful regular feedback for your business.

Leverage Review Sites

Claim your social media business pages and review site listings.

Why? You want to do this so you can monitor your online customers reviews. By taking ownership of these profiles, you can respond to all positive and negative reviews.

While you didn’t necessarily ask for the feedback, you can still harness it by responding appropriately to each review so when others search for your business they see you are empathetic, appreciative and involved.

Track Your Reviews

Sites like Google, Yelp, Yellow Pages and more can affect your business by the sheer number of reviews that are possible.

It’s vital that you track your reviews and monitor your feedback as they affect your business.

Now, let’s look at how to use your regular feedback as a tool in your marketing arsenal.

Feature Feedback on Your Website

Once you’ve got the feedback, not only can you use it to improve your business, products and services, but you can use it as a marketing tool.

The easiest way to highlight your feedback is on your website. Take a look at these ideas:

Create a page for your reviews. Highlight the positive ones so visitors from your website can see what others think of your company.
Add reviews on product pages and also have a spot for people to leave reviews of their own. Adding reviews to your product pages means people don’t have to leave their shopping experience to read your feedback.
Create customer feedback videos. These pack a real punch because they are real people talking about your business in a visual manner. Video is a top marketing tool today, and one you should use.
Highlight customer stories on your blog. These could be testimonials written by your clients that also include a photo and/or video.
After you send out online surveys, you can feature the results on your blog along with a synopsis of your findings and what you plan to do with the results.

Feature Feedback on Social Media

We live in an age of social proof – it seems most of your customers want to see what others think about your business before making their own purchase.

Use your social media platforms to invite your customers to leave reviews. Highlight these reviews in your email marketing and send people to your social media review pages.

Showcase Feedback in Other Places

You’ll find other arenas are the perfect place to showcase your feedback, whether it’s from a survey or an online review site.

Use the feedback in your email marketing. Highlight it in your eBooks, white papers and other downloadables.

Don’t forget to include blurbs in your print marketing as well.

Final Thoughts

You want to harness the power of regular feedback because your customers’ opinions are important to the success of your business.

Asking your customers what they think, using customers surveys, shows them you care and are dedicated to improvement. The same can be said for monitoring and responding to online feedback.

Make regular feedback part of your daily processes and watch your business grow.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

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How To Interpret Negative Feedback On A Survey

Survey Tips

No business likes to receive negative feedback. It certainly doesn’t feel good.

But, instead of getting defensive and angry, you can turn it into an opportunity for growth and change.

In this article, we look at how to interpret negative feedback on a survey so you can use it to improve your business.

First, let’s look at some steps you can take to evaluate your data.

Interpret the Data

First, you want to read through all of your survey data. Don’t make immediate conclusions because that comes later.

After the initial reading, you can begin organizing the results.

Next, you want to look for patterns in your data. Your online software can help you do this. See which responses were the most popular and note the outliers.

You should start to see a pattern. For example, perhaps more respondents were happy with one of your products, but not another. This is where you’d find what you needed to fix.

For some people, it helps to view the data in a visual format like graphs or charts. Make sure you’re looking at the data in the way that best helps you understand it.

Finally, decide what responses necessitate action from you and make a plan for taking care of the issues.

Really Listen

Your first step in interpreting any negative feedback is to really listen to what your customers are saying. It’s hard to do this right after you read the feedback.

So, take a step back, breathe and return to review it after you’ve calmed down.

Read the response carefully to make sure you understand exactly what your customer is telling you.

Respond to the Customer

If you know the name of the customer who responded negatively, you should contact the respondent within 24 hours.

It’s usually best to respond with a phone call, but if you don’t know the number, you can send an email.

It will mean a lot to your customer that you took the time to call and make things right.

Your goal is to do everything you can to remedy the situation with your customer. This isn’t the time to be defensive or angry. You want to turn an angry customer into a loyal one by the service you provide.

Make sure your customer knows how much you appreciate his/her taking your survey and providing you with feedback. Ask him to give you more information, then apologize and provide solutions.

Make Changes

Once you’ve analyzed your survey data and compiled both your positive and your negative feedback, you are well-poised to make some changes.

Take the negative feedback and discuss it with your team. Brainstorm ways you can prevent this type of feedback in the future while providing the best customer service possible.

You can also take this one step further and craft an email to your survey respondents, thanking them for completing the survey. Then, you want to let them know what steps you are taking to remedy their issues.

This lets all of your customers know you are serious about the survey and truly value their thoughts and opinions.

Final Thoughts

Perhaps the most important thing about your survey is that you do something with the results, both negative and positive.

It does you no good to send out a survey and ignore the data.

If things are going great, congratulations. But, don’t stop there. Ask yourself how you can make things even better.

When you get negative feedback, you must respond and take action. This shows your customers that you value their comments. It lets them know that as a business, you intend to improve your service and products.

Once you’ve taken the steps necessary to correct your mistakes, consider sending a second survey.

You can ask your customers specific questions that focus on the negative feedback you received from the first survey to find out if you’ve improved.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: Jordan Ladikos on Unsplash