Webinar Recap: Want Loyal Customers? Ask for Feedback on Mobile

Mobile has changed everything, including the way companies ask for, receive, and use customer feedback. Feedback today is more accessible than ever, thanks to mobile. From quickly iterating on new features, to remedying a sour situation with a customer who has had a negative experience, mobile customer feedback can have immediate and lasting impact on several areas of the business.

To understand how mobile can be used to benefit both the customer and the company, we partnered with SurveyMonkey on a consumer report diving into how mobile has changed the way consumers and companies share, collect, and act on feedback. Based on the positive community interested the consumer report received, we decided to take it one step further and offered a webinar on the topic, using data from the report to cover:

• What today’s consumers expect from companies
• How customer feedback impacts loyalty
• Best practices for collecting both quantitative and qualitative feedback
• Three actionable tips to increase the volume of your customer feedback

If you missed the webinar, you can listen to the full recording here.

You can also view the slides from the webinar below:

In today’s blog post, we’ll recap a portion of the Q&A session at the end of the webinar. (To gain even more knowledge on mobile customer feedback, check out Apptentive and SurveyMonkey’s joint report, Feedback and Loyalty on the Mobile Frontier.)

Let’s begin!

Webinar audience Q&A

Below are some questions we received from listeners during the webinar. Although we were able to answer a few during the talk, we couldn’t get to them all, and have answered the rest here!

Q: You hinted that customer feedback can be really helpful for product launches. Do you have any examples of this in-action?

A: Yes! The company that comes to mind has a food and beverage app. They launched a new payment process, starting with three stores in Portland. They wanted to know if customers liked this new in-app feature, what the kinks were, and how they could make it better. They had employees physically at the locations surveying customers who had used the feature, and they also surveyed customers [directly] in the app, and were able to target people who had used the feature twice. Within two days, the company had a couple of hundred responses.

The feedback really helped their product team fix the kinks, get the bugs out, and have an impact on their product right away. As we mentioned during the webinar, the problem with focus groups is they are not always going to be your exact customers, but this company was able to talk to the customers who had already used the product and wanted to help the company make it better. This direct feedback helped the company roll out the feature in the U.S. and go global while continuously surveying those power users who were using the feature frequently. Feedback collection and using surveys for product launches is super powerful.

Q: It seems like closing the feedback loop takes a lot of time. How can companies do this efficiently while still being effective?

A: That is, in many ways, the crux of the challenge that we face here. It does take time. There are probably techniques that you can use to scale that using platforms. The other way we’ve seen people do it is to really focus on one type of person. Maybe they’re using the NPS scale, and they’re focusing on detractors. They are the ones they want to follow up with in a more personalized manner.

For example, take a company who we heard about through BAIN Consulting that had a commitment to following up with the feedback they received. Closing the loop was so high of a priority that they put in a survey program that only surveyed the amount of people that they could respond to. If they got a 10% response rate to surveys, they’d send 1,000 surveys a day and then stop, because they only had the capacity to respond to 100 people a day. They would make sure that they could actually get the feedback in, have it understood, and do the follow up program. So there are different ways to respond, and the question to ask employees who are doing survey follow up is: If you can’t really dig into the results, how is the feedback helping you? So often the value we see people get out of feedback programs is when they dig in a little bit and potentially have another follow up conversation.

Q: Why do you think customer expectations are higher on mobile?

A: They’re higher on mobile because mobile is so personal. Mobile are the devices we call our parents on, the device we use for social media to talk to our friends, and the device we use to take pictures. Mobile devices are also always in our pockets. You’ll leave your keys somewhere, but you’re not going to leave your phone.

Because of the personal nature of mobile, companies need to be really careful with how they reach out to gather feedback. For example, there was a recent study of push notifications that found when companies use push notifications inappropriately, they can hurt the customer’s experience. Instead, you want to reach out in a more personal way, and you want to really be careful of the frequency. Before you set up any mobile feedback campaigns, think about how you would want to be treated on mobile, and think about how often you would want companies reaching out.

Q: What kind of response to customer feedback is appropriate? Does it have to be a thorough response to the customers specific feedback or is a quick, generic response letting them know you’ve seen they’re feedback okay?

A: The quick, generic response is tricky because it doesn’t really show that you’re listening, especially when it’s immediate and there’s no reflection of the feedback the customer just provided. That response does significantly diminish the experience, and people have seen enough of those responses that we know them when we see them.

The question then becomes how do you use sophisticated marketing techniques with the tools available today to tune that message a little bit? Again, you might respond differently to a customer who is a detractor than you’ll respond to a customer who is neutral, and even differently than you may respond to a customer who responds positively. You may target customers who are driving high revenue for you, and you want to make sure you really personalize those responses. Your trial customers are people who haven’t finished the conversion process, so maybe they get a more generic response. There are many ways to respond, but you have to be careful that responses don’t feel canned, because that comes through to customers.

Q: If customers expect a response from a company after leaving feedback, why would a company with limited resources want to increase the volume of feedback they receive?

A: When you have limited resources is exactly the time you want to reach out for feedback. Here’s why: If you have a mobile team, you know mobile developers are hard to come by. I’m sure you wish your team was bigger than it is, because they’re never as big as you wish they were—right? If you collect customer feedback, you can use that to help guide your product roadmap.

For example, instead of guessing which feature is not providing a good experience to your customers, you can actually ask customers which feature they want to see more of. Alternatively, you can fix glitches because your customers will tell you about them. If you set expectations with customers up front, you can say, “Hey, we’re a small team, it will take us some time to get back to you, but we really value your feedback,” and customers appreciate that. We’re all human, and at the end of the day, if you’re upfront with customers, most of them will appreciate it. As a company, you set expectations, and you can turn the volume of feedback up or down, depending on what you have time for. You can include a survey versus an open ended feedback form when you need it. Do what’s best for your company at the time, but that feedback can greatly improve your product roadmap and help guide you.

Wrapping it up

I hope you enjoyed the Q&A from our webinar. Be sure to follow Apptentive and SurveyMonkey on Twitter to join us for the next one! Also, don’t forget to listen to the recording the webinar to hear the full discussion.

If you have any additional questions on how to gather, or use mobile customer feedback, leave your thoughts in the comments below so we can keep the conversation going.