In our latest series for auto dealerships and repair shops, we’re encouraging you to get strategic and intentional with customer feedback. Our first article discussed the benefits of a customer feedback loop, including improved service, greater customer satisfaction, and more data to make business decisions. Now we will discuss the more practical aspects of a customer feedback loop. First and foremost, how should you get feedback from customers? Let’s explore this topic below.
9 Ways to Get Feedback from Customers
How to best get feedback from customers depends on your unique auto business. Factors impacting your decision may include your team (and their skillset), resources (time, money, etc.), the extent to which you use technology, and what your customers feel comfortable with. For this reason, we’re including a long list of ideas for getting feedback so you can choose the methods that will work best for your auto business.
We split our list into direct methods of getting feedback from the customer and indirect methods (where you get the input without directly interacting with the customer). It’s a good idea to mix direct and indirect methods, so keep that in mind as you evaluate this list.
Direct Methods for Getting Feedback
Direct methods include strategies where you directly ask the customer to share their feedback. Here are some of the options.
1. Informal Ask
The most low-key way to get feedback from customers is to informally ask them, either in person or on a phone call. For this method, you don’t have a strict set of questions; you’re just interested in learning about their overall experience with your auto business and how they feel. You can train your staff to ask how the customer feels or what they think at different points in the customer journey, including when researching, test driving, or signing paperwork. If you use this method, remember to have a system for logging the answers for future reference.
2. Formal Survey
Informally asking for customer feedback should be a routine part of interacting with customers, but you can gain even more insights with a formal survey. In your survey, you can ask specific questions to understand the customers’ buying experience in several ways:
- Customer Satisfaction Survey: Measures how satisfied customers are with particular areas of your business.
- Net Promoter Score: Measures customer loyalty by asking, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?”
- Customer Effort Score: Measures a customer’s level of effort; essentially, how easy is it to do business with your auto dealership?
By creating a formal survey and collecting answers from many customers, you can look for patterns and trends to see what it’s like to do business with you and how you may improve the process. Formal surveys are usually created using software and distributed online through emails or text messages (or printed and mailed to the customer).
3. In-Depth Interview
Another method to get feedback on survey questions is via an in-depth interview. In-depth interviews are typically conducted one-on-one with a customer, in person (live or virtual). They take more time and effort because you’ll have to find customers willing to speak with you, set up appointments, and have someone in your auto business conduct the interview. However, they can be more valuable than an online survey because the interviewer can probe the customer to understand their answers better. With today’s technology, you can conduct in-depth interviews virtually using tools like Zoom and Google Meet.
4. Focus Group
You may also use focus groups to get feedback from customers. Instead of interviewing customers individually, you’ll invite multiple customers to a joint session to ask about their experience with your auto business. The benefits of a focus group include that you’ll save time (compared to individual interviews) and get rich data from your customers. However, some drawbacks are that individuals get less speaking time, and a few vocal members may dominate the group. Like in-depth interviews, you can conduct focus groups in person or via virtual meetings.
5. Text Message
A final direct method for getting feedback is to send a text message. In a recent survey, 53 percent of auto repair customers said they want text communications from their auto shop. With a VoIP business phone system, you can easily send text messages to get quick customer feedback or share a link to a longer survey. Learn more about using business text messaging in this article.
Indirect Methods to Get Feedback
Indirect methods allow you to get feedback from customers without asking them directly. In some cases, this makes it easier to obtain feedback. However, on the flip side, you may not get the exact information you are looking for because you didn’t direct the feedback with specific questions.
6. Online Customer Reviews
We’re in the middle of a series for franchise business owners about how to unleash the power of online customer reviews. So far, we’ve discussed 20 review websites you should know about and how to encourage reviews (with more articles to come). By selecting a few review websites and monitoring them regularly, you can get valuable customer feedback and understand how your business is perceived and portrayed online.
7. Social Media Monitoring
Another indirect method to get feedback from customers is to monitor social media channels. This includes what people post on your own social channels (in comments, messages, etc.) and what they say elsewhere. You can get this information indirectly by searching for mentions of your brand, competitors, and keywords related to your product, service, or industry. You can handle social media monitoring manually or using special software.
8. Analyze Sales & Customer Service Calls
Another indirect method of getting feedback from customers is to analyze phone calls. While your sales and customer service teams may not be asking for feedback specifically, the calls can shed light on customer sentiment, frustrations, and the customer’s overall experience. Clarity’s call recording and live call monitoring features are ideal for analyzing phone calls. In addition to using these tools for training your staff, you can also indirectly collect customer feedback.
9. Website Statistics & Heat Maps
A final indirect method to get feedback from customers is to monitor and review your website statistics. Using a tool like Google Analytics, you’ll be able to track the number of users who go to your website, how long they stay on the site, where they come from, and your most popular pages. You may also use a heat mapping tool to understand what website visitors are doing on your pages. Heat maps can tell where visitors click, how far they scroll, mouse movement, and what gets the most attention. Statistics from Google Analytics and heat maps are indirect methods of getting feedback because they tell you how visitors behave on your site and what matters to them most.
More Help Getting Feedback from Customers
The above list includes 9 direct and indirect methods to get feedback from customers. We encourage you to review the list and choose a few strategies to focus on. A mix of direct and indirect methods will help you gather the feedback you need to understand your customers and improve your auto business.
Chances are, your plan will include creating a customer feedback survey to get the information you need, whether it’s an online survey, an in-depth interview, a focus group, or one or two questions you want to ask via text. This is a big topic, so our next two articles will discuss creating your survey and the specific questions you may want to ask. Stay tuned for more to come!
