Opportunities to Measure Customer Satisfaction

As an online seller, you should always be concerned with how your customers are experiencing your website and how you can make it better. Without customers you would not have a business, so trying to fit their needs is in your best interest. If you take the time and effort to measure customer satisfaction, you can improve your business.

There are a number of ways to gauge customer opinions, all of which you can implement to get the most well-rounded results. You can find out what visitors of your site think of the navigation, layout, and usability. Using their answers to your advantage can make a better experience for future customers. If you find that there are common problems coming from multiple customers, then it is a sign to make change.

Methods of Gathering Information

1. Reviews

One way to see what customers think of your specific products is to have a rating and review section for each product page. This way, after they buy an item they can say how they feel about which other customers can also see. Not everyone will remember to leave a review though, so you may want to send out an automated email to customers asking them for a review on their most recent purchases. This type of feedback will help you when deciding on new items because you’ll know the types of things people have liked thus far.

2. Surveys

Another way to get feedback is through an email survey. You can send out a qualitative or quantitative questionnaire asking for whatever information you see fit. Hopefully you already have a database of emails from every customer; you can require their email before checkout to accomplish this. This would be especially helpful in getting opinions on the design of your website to see if it is user-friendly.

3. Emails

Having a contact page on your website is very important for people to reach you. Customers should be able to contact you on their own accord if they have an issue or need assistance. Making yourself available will also open up an opportunity to see how people react to your site.

What to Do with Your Feedback

Based on the feedback you receive, you can make improvements to your online shop. Some requests might be specific or vague. For example, if a customer asks for you to stock a particular item, then you immediately know the issue and the solution and you can decide from there how you want to handle it.

If you get a less detailed answer (maybe that your site is hard to navigate), then you may need to follow up for more information. By initiating a conversation, customers may appreciate that you are concerned with their thoughts. This could encourage them to come back, especially if you took their feedback and made use of it.

Repetitive Feedback

There are other cases where it seems you keep getting the same questions and concerns over and over again. It can be very agitating for you to open your business email every day to hundreds of emails that all talk about the same thing. You certainly cannot ignore the emails, but you also cannot craft an answer for each one.

A simple way to avoid hundreds of emails with the same question is to create a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for people to refer to. You may already have one, but you should add to it based on customer feedback. When you initially made your website and FAQ page, you could not have thought of every possible question. By going over the questions people ask you often from your emails, you can expand your FAQ to further encompass the common issues.

What if it Needs a Longer Answer?

You may come across a question that many people ask but that cannot be answered simply in a FAQ. If this is the case, you need a different format of spreading information that allows for longer answers. If it is a common question, you don’t want to have to retype the same long answer for everyone who emails you about it.

In this case, you can consider starting a blog. There are a lot of company sites that have began blogs to further educate their audience and to promote their products. It can be a place for you to answer that stubborn yet complicated question. You can even link to it from your FAQ so that you might receive less emails about it. Starting a blog can also be useful in many other ways, including spreading news about your business. It can take a lot of time and effort to maintain, but it might be in your interest if people have bombarded you with questions.

Conclusion

Feedback from consumers can be very helpful in updating your online store and making it more accessible. There are many methods of gathering opinions from people and using any or all of them will assist you with this. You get to decide what to do with the information once you have it.

If you feel that changing your site or products is in the interest of you and your customers, then go for it. However, if you think that there are not many people experiencing the problems that one person claims, then you also have the freedom to disregard them. It is really up to you to decide what is best.

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