Direct customer feedback vs Social Media feedback – which is better?

These days, most businesses are focused on investing more to improve their customer experience. When customer review is held at the highest regard, collecting their feedback is now more essential than ever.

Collecting feedback helps a business owner to get an idea about what the customers think about the brand, service, and product quality. It goes beyond mere likes and dislikes and helps you to understand how you can improve your services/products and where to stand in the competition.

While there are a great many ways of collecting customer feedback, in this blog, we will break down of most common forms of collecting feedbacks – direct customer review and social media feedback. Here’s everything you need to know about the methods – meaning, pros and cons, and differences.

What is Customer Feedback?

Customer feedback is the information, input, and insights shared by the customers about their experience of using your services or products. These feedbacks guide companies to identify the issues and make necessary improvements for better customer experience.

Why is Customer Feedback Essential?

Collecting customer feedback is highly valuable for enhancing the quality of your products and services. Using the feedbacks essentially makes the customers the decision-makers of your company which greatly benefits all the departments and makes a business thrive. It will undoubtedly evolve you and your business.

2 Most Effective Customer Feedback Methods

When you first think of evaluating customer feedback, the first thing that can get to your head is the overwhelming amount of possibilities. Hence, before you start with the process, you need to understand why you need their feedback. When you identify the purpose and choose the method for the process, it becomes a worthy investment of time.

Try to discuss and answer the following questions with your team before getting started:

• What part of the customer experience needs improvement? Target the most beneficial aspect of customer insight.
• What’s your plan for the collected feedback? There’s no point in gathering customer reviews if there’s no actionable change. Let’s say your customer survey report shows that customers find the payment process consuming. Ensure that you are ready to invest and fix the issue.
• Which customer feedback channel suits your business the best? Not all customers are open to all types of methods. Identify the best way before you approach your customer for feedback.

Direct Customer Feedback:

Direct channel customer feedback means sending an email, completing a web survey, and sending a text message.

Surveys: While you want to ask a ton of questions to your customer about the service or product, you must keep short slider surveys that reach your target audience quickly. Hence, make sure you:

• Only ask specific questions related to your goals.
• Write open-ended questions.
• Create proper rating scales
• Avoid loaded questions

Email: Email is another way of gathering customer feedback directly. To improve the chances of hearing back from your customers:

• Set your expectations and add a short sentence to your email to build trust
• Create a good workflow for organising your email feedback
• Inquire into the customer’s issues and send customised responses

Social Media Feedback:

In today’s time, social media is the gold mine of customer reviews. More than 2.50 billion people use social media, and they are active on various social media platforms. So there is no better place to interact with your customers and collect feedback. Your customers can publicly ask questions and directly leave feedback for other potential customers to see.

Here are some practical tips for gathering customer feedback through your business's social media channels.

• Post links to your surveys on multiple social media platforms
• Use Facebook Messenger chatbot to connect directly with the customer who comments on your posts.
• Send a direct message for highly personal feedback.
• Implement contests to increase customer engagement
• Invent a hashtag related to your business and let your customers know about it in posts

Direct Customer Feedback vs Social Media Feedback – Pros & Cons

Let’s now discuss the perks and challenges of both methods of collecting customer feedback:

Direct Customer Feedback:

PROS:	CONS:
Feedback is delivered directly to designated staff. Feedback gets delivered by text or email All feedbacks are related to your business Helps to take immediate actions Personalised communication with the customer Pre-empts the negative comments beforehand	Requires unique marketing materials/instructions Marketing materials/instructions are visible and open to the customer Requires customers to read instructions

Social Media Feedback:

PROS:	CONS:
Social media portals are widely used. Most customers are familiar with social media platforms and use them. Social media tools are free.	Must monitor business’s multiple social media platforms Feedback is visible to the public. Negative feedback can impact the business. Need to identify specific feedbacks from the ocean of comments Have to monitor multiple #hashtags or keywords Laborious and time-consuming Requires dedicated resources Difficult to have a follow-up dialogue with a customer

 

Which Is Better?

On analysing all the factors, it's safe to state that a business must use both the options to gather customer review. Direct feedback helps you address customer service issues, whereas social media allows you to create buzz around your products and services. 

For the success of a direct feedback channel, you must have designated staff to receive a text or email alerts directly whenever feedback is submitted. They must reply immediately and provide appropriate support. The entire process should be automated to avoid confusion.

Similarly, social media monitoring is crucial to monitor all the platforms using the hashtags and keywords to identify comments relevant to your business. It then must be forwarded to the right team for follow-up action.

Conclusion:

Now back to the million-dollar question, which method is more efficient. We would recommend the direct feedback way as it is immediate, targeted, no additional workforce, and the feedbacks are always relevant to your brand.