“How did you hear about us?”
No matter where you choose to spend your money, you have likely been invited to participate in a customer satisfaction survey at some point in your life. Depending on your habits, this may have been as recently as this week! It seems that whether you’re buying groceries, flying from an airport, or just applying for a job, it seems that most businesses are deeply invested in customer reviews.
How did we get here, you may ask?
Customer feedback hasn’t always been such a primary concern for businesses. Looking back through time, customer feedback was seen more as an annoyance than a cornerstone of improving business. Customers could reach out to a business via the post, or speak directly with workers at a physical location, and have done so for centuries. In fact, one of the oldest pieces of writing currently known to historians is a clay tablet from 1750 BC complaining about the quality of a shipment of copper they received. Another great example is the term “baker’s dozen”, where to ensure a fair amount of baked goods were received for a particular price, bakers would include an extra baked good in case any of the others came up lighter than expected. Undoubtedly, this habit came about as a response to customer complaints of being shortchanged on their bakery orders. For as long as humans have been doing business with other humans, there have been forms of customer feedback.
Moving into the digital age, normalized forms of human interactions were translated to the realm of information on the world wide web. While there will be other more specific examples, we’ll go into detail on later, one particular note that shows the transformation from physical to digital is Angie’s List.
If you aren’t already familiar with Angi (formerly Angie’s List), the service is dedicated to collecting reviews on local trades, most notably homeowners looking for services like repairs, installs, or tending to their lawn. It wasn’t uncommon for businesses to exist which put their name out everywhere but would do a poor job, getting their money and disappearing into obscurity until the next sucker would sign up. Angie’s List sought to stamp out this negative experience by curating reviews of local businesses to prevent bad agencies from getting more first-time buyers in the door. While this could certainly be managed locally without outside help, the internet gave rise to online access to such services without hearing about it from friends, increasing the danger and risk of trying out new businesses. This business model turned out to be a huge success, with Angie’s List now being a publicly traded company. Proving to be an incredibly successful business angle, Angie’s List wasn’t alone in emboldening customers to speak publicly about their experience with products and services.
Adoption on a Wide Scale
All over the internet, different businesses discovered the power of user reviews. Without this becoming a biography of “review companies”, businesses like Yelp and Amazon were early to the practice which we now find commonplace- many buyers won’t jump on a product or service unless if it has a number of positive reviews. This supplanted the social and physical aspects of buying a product in a way that benefits non-personal shopping. You may not be able to hold something in your hands or try it on before you buy it, but hundreds of other shoppers can share whether the material is good, whether it was easy to install or clean, or even how true to size it would likely be.
This just goes to show how beneficial user feedback is to all businesses, not just products and services marketed to a customer base. Whether it’s movie reviews, product reviews, or feedback on vacation experiences, businesses all have come to realize that seeking user feedback provides:
- Increased Sales: According to Spiegel Research Center, products with reviews tend to have a higher conversion rate than those without. Products with five reviews have a likelihood of being purchased 270% greater than those without reviews.
- Trust and Credibility: BrightLocal's research found that 93% of consumers read local reviews to determine a business's quality, and 91% trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
- SEO and Visibility: Reviews contribute to a business's search engine ranking and visibility. Moz's Local Search Ranking Factors survey indicates that online reviews are among the top factors influencing local search rankings.
- Consumer Behavior: A report by PowerReviews revealed that 86% of consumers hesitate to purchase from a business with negative online reviews, emphasizing the impact of negative feedback on consumer decisions.
- Product Improvement: Customer feedback collected through reviews and surveys helps businesses understand consumer preferences and pain points, guiding product development and improvement strategies.
By diving deep into customer feedback, customers feel that they’re getting a better deal overall. This is shown by comparisons in retail to online shopping, going as far as to put entire shopping malls out of business as customers prefer the convenience and trust of online shopping far more compared to an in-person experience.
These changes have transformed the relationship between paid experiences and customers, but the road doesn’t end here.
The Future of User Testing
So user feedback is amazing and everyone loves it, right? That’s the impression of the situation that has been given so far. Unfortunately, not everything is perfume and roses when it comes to customer feedback.
There’s a few different avenues of issues which persist in collecting customer feedback, which goes far beyond what you might expect.
Starting simply, how do you ask for feedback? Is it after being on hold to get a problem solved for 2 hours? Are the questions being asked actually getting to the heart of the issue at hand? For example, if a tire company puts a link to a customer survey on the paperwork for getting their tires replaced, we can expect that most reviews will be exasperated and negatively view the experience, as reaching out to the manufacturer for a replacement on a vehicle very rarely happens in positive circumstances. Does that mean the customer service or product is of low quality? Not necessarily, but because of how and when the customer is being asked for feedback, it’d be easy to get that impression.
Another example: People are barraged with unending waves of distracting information at all times. Try and think back to the last time you heard a jingle on a commercial. What were you doing? Was it an advertisement that you put on? Or one that happened while you were in transit doing something else? What were you thinking about when you heard it? Did you hear the entire jingle clearly? Have you heard it before? What life circumstances were present (or absent) while you were subjected to the jingle?
For all these reasons and more, it is exceptionally difficult to pinpoint a specific response to a specific question when thinking of surveys or customer responses. Placing trust in a single person to be able to filter out all other influences and just focus on your product is a fool’s errand, but must be done because of how huge the payoff is to integrating customers’ voices into your product. Even then, succeeding in filtering out all distractions and asking a customer to respond to a particular question or product out of context introduces its own issues, such as being responses only from people who are already fans of a product and would be happy just to be included at all.
Businesses now expect to integrate customer feedback into their offerings, either after purchase or as part of the design steps of product development. Customers now expect to be included and have a unique voice that contributes to public discussions and building trust with brands they feel comfortable with. The big problem being access to customers and ensuring that the information from them is reliable, truthful and useful.
How can it be done?
By cutting out the middleman and getting right to the source of information: customer brain responses to your product. The information that businesses look for is out there in the world. Current methods of trying to grab hold of this information is crude and imprecise. By taking the human communication of thoughts, feelings, and reactions out of the equation, customers are able to more directly say exactly how they feel, by not saying it at all.
The world of neuroanalytics provides the bridge between user research and unique customer experiences in a way that has never before been possible, either with a quick turnaround or at scale. Braintelligence has enjoyed repeated success in identifying and analyzing customer emotional states as a response to products and media in a way that simply captures everything a customer could communicate. Any hiccups, frustrations, enjoyment and elation is reliably measured and easily understood by outside parties from anywhere in the world.
This new frontier in customer communications has only just begun. Soon, users will be able to reliably share their emotional neurological responses to company questions or products from the comfort of their own home, integrating customer feedback with product and service development directly.
If you want to be on the forefront of customer feedback and analytics, reach out today for a free demo and consultation.