Feedback from your customers is the most important information you can gather. This information is essential to the expansion of your business—using their questions, comments and concerns to adapt your products and services to align better with the expectations of consumers worldwide. In order to generate productive responses from your customers, make sure to keep messages brief, use effective mediums of communication, and incentivize those responses.

Keep Messages Brief

The longer the message, the more time it requires to process it and the less likely readers are to complete or respond to the request. Keep your messages brief! This will require efficient use of language and asking the right kinds of questions, making that “processing” straightforward. Use direct demands. Provide easy grading systems or scales… stars, emoticons, thumbs up or down or to the side, anything that is a visual representation of customer experience is a quick way to generate comparative feedback. Prioritize information and organize it into short surveys in favor of lengthy questionnaires that won’t hold people’s attention long enough to complete them.

Find the Right Way to Communicate

Find good channels for connecting with customers. Take advantage of social media platforms that offer constant interactive content between you and them, allowing for frequent check-ins on how they are feeling about your business, what they want to be different, and how they think you could get there. Other means like company websites or in-person questioning utilize the time they are already focusing on your business to consider these questions. Even more effective than any of these in response generation is simply texting. Texting has a near 100% open and response rate. With phones as a constant companion in people’s hands, you can feel confident that your messages are being received and considered, and reach the widest audience available.

Incentivize Responses

Motivate your customers to respond to your request for feedback through reward! Loyalty programs are a popular way to get consumers invested in their company; you can also use loyalty programs to offer rewards to those loyal consumers in return for their valuable opinions on your company’s status and potential growth. Give them the inside scoop, deals, discounts, whatever will get them clicking on those surveys that are so important to your development.

Improving your customer response rates will subsequently improve your ability to learn, adapt, and grow through societal trends and market fluctuation. Increase the amount of responses you get through effective questioning, use of popular communication mediums, and incentivized rewards—the feedback will pour in and your business will benefit from it!

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