In the last few years, there has been an increased emphasis on customer experience. But note that much of this attention was only for B2C markets. There is no denying the fact that B2B customer experience and its performance still needs more refinement.
Customer feedback is a powerful guide that provides you with essential insights into every part of your organization. Always remember that high satisfaction doesn’t equate to high loyalty. For instance, your customers can be delighted with your services and products. However, that doesn’t imply that they will be your loyal customers forever. Customer experience is integral to both satisfaction and loyalty. Companies are now operating in the age of an experienced economy where consumers expect more than ever before.
What’s more, organizations are competing with each other to outperform each other. A huge number of powerful brands operating in the B2B sphere connect to customers on an emotional level. Always remember that a positive customer experience encourages the customers to communicate with the brand more.
B2B Businesses nowadays has access to a vast electronic landscape that presents marketers with a wide variety of conventional approaches. On the other hand, there exist several unusual sources that offer businesses actionable insights on customer feedback. But before delving into the unique sources to collect customer feedback for B2B businesses, let’s know more about customer feedback.
A Brief Overview Of Customer Feedback & Its Significance In The B2B Market
As the term suggests, customer feedback is the view of a specific customer about the quality of your service or product. For many marketers out there, customer feedback is the ultimate way to assess the quality of their services and products.
Customer feedback Is important Because of The Following Reasons:
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Assists you with Product Improvements
Well, you know your product by heart. Unfortunately, that is why you may not see its imperfections. Honest customer feedback would help you understand the downsides of your product, which would ultimately help you in improving it.
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Asking The Customers For Feedback Makes Them Feel Involved
Asking for the customers’ opinions in the form of feedback is a great way to involve them. When you ask them for service experience or product reviews, your customers feel privileged.
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Good Customer Feedback is useful for Personal Recommendations
In the B2B sector, word of mouth marketing is beneficial. Moreover, personal recommendations are also ideal when the customer comes to you.
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Customer Feedback Helps In Acquiring New Clients
Before buying a product for the first time, it is quite likely that you go through the reviews. These reviews can powerfully persuade a first-time buyer to carry out business with you.
Now that you know about customer feedback and its importance, here are some unusual sources to collect customer feedback. Note that B2B marketers can fine-tune their 2021 marketing endeavors by relying on these unique sources to collect customer feedback.
Related : Everything You Need To Know About Asking Customers For Reviews/Feedback
Collecting Feedback Through Unconventional Ways
Well, B2B marketers are emphasizing collecting feedback from customers in the most unexpected of places. Also, catching up with a client of yours at the most unexpected time would help you in getting frank insights.
Quite interestingly, you can make video reviews an optional and straight forward segment of customer feedback surveys. On the other hand, you can also allow customers to leave behind audio feedback. Contrary to the text-based reviews, video and audio inputs have no limitations as such.
So your customers can leave behind detailed and accurate feedback. In this manner, your business would also gain crucial insights about the point-of-view of the customers. To be precise, traditional survey-based forms are becoming obsolete.
As a B2B company, if you want to be the game-changer, you should adapt to the trends of gathering video and audio feedback from your customers. Video feedback will also help B2B brands to be more empathetic. What’s more, they can address the concerns being put forth by the customers.
Also, video feedback is an excellent way to surprise your customers in 2021. The ability to just leave the recording of their voice or recording a video clip without typing will be appealing.
Collecting Feedback from Tools Like Google Question Hub
In case you don’t know, Google question hub is a platform developed by Google, which emphasizes unanswered questions. As a B2B marketer, you should always get to the core of questions your customers are likely to ask.
In this manner, you would learn a lot about their preferences and views. So as you can see, Google Question Hub mainly focuses on unanswered questions searchers are on the lookout for. This tool can be an excellent opportunity for B2B marketers to look forward to differentiating their answers and content.
Quite impressively, this tool uses the categories of the topics to organize unanswered questions. As a user, you can add your own answer in the form of detailed write-ups like blogs. No doubt, earning the trust of customers and prospects is valuable to your business.
As a marketer, you can not only fill the content gaps, but it also helps you to provide the right answers. Also, if you are looking at new ways to learn more about your customers, Google Question Hub is an ideal platform.
Realize The Power Of Arranging Social Polls
There is no denying the fact that this modern-era of marketing is heavily influenced by social media. By organizing polls on social media, you would avail yourself of a two-fold advantage. You can help with quality customer feedback, and at the same time, you would get content marketing elements.
You can collect feedback from your customers by communicating with them via social media platforms – a new communication alternative that is becoming popular is creating polls. Customers who engage with your brand by answering the polls are more likely to endorse your brand.
What’s more interesting is the fact that social media polls are a great way to build customer loyalty. When you involve customers in decision making, it automatically bolsters their relationship. Modern-day B2B brands also rely on polling to create a community and encourage interaction. You can utilize social media polls to:
- Avail new insights on marketing
- Ascertain the preferences of the customers
- Opening up new channels for communication
- Comprehend the demographics of the consumers
Be Seen On Reddit
Well, you would always feel the need to consult newer platforms to find out honest thoughts from people. It is important to note that Reddit is one such platform on which B2B marketers can rely. Users on Reddit can spend hours researching various kinds of stuff.
Overall, the best way to get the most out of this platform is to interact with it. On Reddit, stimulating your posts will make you appear them higher in subreddits. The AMA threads or Ask Me Anything threads can be quite useful in helping you to get customer feedback.
When these threads are live, you can create a post announcing who you are. Moreover, you can also encourage Reddit users to ask you questions about your company and products. Another great strategy to attract your customer’s attention is by participating in subreddits.
When you create a discussion, you can provide your prospective customers a place to talk about. They will be happy to leave their feedback on your products and services too. Note that Reddit is a niche platform, and hence you should brainstorm with your team before using it.
Exploring New Avenues Of Customer Communication
When the context is about collecting user feedback, your organization’s website is a key asset. Modern-day websites can contain a variety of user data and feedback, which you aren’t aware of. Moreover, if you want to go the extra mile, you can implement chatbots.
Chatbots are the new normal for those organizations that are looking forward to boosting operational efficiency. With chatbots, you can efficiently resolve many types of customer queries and issues. Chatbots are also a great way to collect information about the preferences of your customers.
Also, chatbots provide various benefits that can enhance the online experiences of your customers. And as chatbots are powered by Artificial Intelligence, they would provide you with deep insights into your customer’s preferences.
On the other hand, apart from chatbots, B2B marketers can focus on powerful data extraction tools. As their name suggests, these tools can make it easy to extract data present in huge volumes. In case you don’t know, there are various chat applications that marketers tend to overlook like:
- Microsoft Teams Chats
- Hangouts in Google
- Chat logs in Skype
- Chat logs in Zoom
- Chat logs in custom applications
Related : Data-Driven Customer Service Trends Prevalent For 2021
Over to you…
Customer satisfaction tends to assess the performance of the organization in abundance. Getting closer to the clients or prospects requires the implementation of many methods. A great way to excel in providing a great B2B customer experience is to place the customer at the core of the company’s functions. Let’s hope that the ways mentioned in this article for collecting customer feedback would help you greatly in understanding your customers more and taking your marketing efforts to the next level. If you haven’t tried any of them, it’s never too late to try something new 🙂