It all starts from knowing your objective – why are you gathering feedback? What purpose is it serving? What business issue are you trying to solve? From there, you will be able to identify with which audience you need to engage in order to give you the most relevant and actionable information – whether it is your existing customer base or your entire consumer audience at large. Then, you can decide what type of engagement to use.
There are essentially three different ways to engage your audience to gather feedback – an active approach, passive approach, and targeted approach. An active approach means that you are directly soliciting the consumer for feedback. This would typically entail randomly displaying, to your audience, an invitation to participate in a survey. This methodology yields the most representative, reproducible sample and distribution of responses, and is best used when trying to inform on strategic initiatives, such as branding efforts and alignment, longer term loyalty, etc. The data can be collected over time, allowing for tracking performance of key metrics on a continual basis. And because you are prompting to participate, sample size can be maximized, enabling for deeper analyses of subgroups.
A passive approach typically refers to a methodology where the respondent self-selects in order to provide feedback. This usually appears as a link or persistent call to action that the respondent clicks or selects, leading them to a means through which to provide feedback, which in most cases is a comment card. Human nature being what it is, consumers generally engage with comment cards when they have something to complain about, resulting in a negative bias in the results. That said, this type of approach is extremely useful in obtaining tactical information that helps remediate problems or issues. And because many organizations tie this data in with their CRM systems, they can alert, escalate and resolve customer issues very quickly. However, it is important to note that because this type of engagement relies on the respondent to self select to provide feedback, data collection can be on the low side. Therefore, it is equally important to underscore that the results should not be projected out to a larger audience, and realize that they are most valuable for addressing customer complaints and reputation management before unhappy customers vent their frustrations on social media or other channels.
Finally, a targeted approach to collecting feedback means that a survey can be deployed to a specific group of people based on certain criteria that have been met. Perhaps the goal is to gather feedback from customers who abandoned their cart experience, or who read a specific article. Or to ask opinions of the current customer base by sending a survey via email. Leveraging information they already have about their customers – whether it is behavioral data, membership or customer data, organizations can ask questions to a very specific population in order to optimize specific initiatives. This allows brands to keep the research simple, focused and quick, which in turn helps boost completion rates.
Regardless of engagement, a general rule of thumb is to keep its content targeted and cohesive. In today’s world, attention spans are short and time is limited, so best to avoid using any customer feedback mechanism as a fishing expedition to gather information on a myriad of subjects. Remember that the engagement you use is an extension of your brand, so making participating in it a pleasant and positive experience is paramount. Your audience is the greatest source of brand building guidance – and using the most appropriate engagement method to dialog with them can provide the most valuable and powerful insights.
