8 Advantages of Having a Feedback Widget on your Website
Gathering customer feedback is very important for your customer support strategy, as is staying in touch with your customers on every step of their journey with your brand.
A good way to stay in contact with your customers is by employing a feedback widget on your website, knowledge base, or any other customer-facing website you own.
A widget is usually a pop-up form that first appears as a tab on the corner of the user’s screen. It opens out as a list of form fields that users can fill in. Its purpose is to encourage users to get in touch with your team with any questions or problems, at any time.
Users can also attach screenshots to their query, or search through relevant knowledge base articles from the widget.
“When customers share their story, they’re not just sharing pain points. They’re actually teaching you how to make your product, service, and business better.” Kristin Smaby,
Being Human is Good Business
Here are 8 benefits of having a feedback widget on your site.
1. You can Ask for More Information
A widget makes it easier to solve queries if agents can have more background information for each ticket.
Feedback widgets provide a place for customers to attach screenshots and more information, making it more likely that your agents can give customers a quality answer on their first response.
You’re helping your customers frame their questions in a helpful manner. By thinking about their problem in this structured way, it might mean that they don’t need to ask their question after all – they might solve it themselves!
2. You’re Setting a Low Barrier for Feedback
“It takes humility to seek feedback. It takes wisdom to understand it, analyze it, and appropriately act on it.” – Stephen Covey
If someone has to dig through your website to find your email in order to send you their feedback, it’s likely to increase their frustration. This is especially the case if the customer is already experiencing problems.
You’re setting a low barrier for someone to give feedback with your widget since it allows customers to contact you without remembering company information.
Without a widget or a similar feedback mechanism, you’ll miss out on hearing from many customers who can’t be bothered with an overly long process. These same customers might end up canceling their subscription or asking for a refund instead.
3. You can Gather On-the-fly Feedback
Providing a method for feedback in the interface reduces context-switching – one of the prime factors stopping users from being successful with your product or service. Therefore, having a feedback widget is a form of contextual help1.
In traditional modes of seeking help, a user has to switch contexts from what they were previously doing to find the answers they seek. It’s like putting down the hammer to pick up the instruction manual. This results in splitting their attention between tasks.
A support feedback widget is much more convenient.
Even better, if you’re a software company delivering your product or service through a web interface, you can invite your customers to give their feedback as they are using your product.
4. You can Easily Triage and Direct Feedback
Triaging your support tickets means you can easily organize large volumes.
Providing a standard email address for your customers to contact you means you will receive a lot of unstructured emails. Your agents will have to read through them one by one and decide how to prioritize them.
Sorting through hundreds of unstructured emails is a burden on your support team and slows down response time. A well-placed feedback widget can massively speed up this process.
If you use a feedback widget, you can use custom fields to collect specific information, like product, order number and priority. These custom fields in your widget integrate with the way you configure your help desk ticketing system so you can collect the relevant data and use it to direct tickets into specific queues.
This makes sure feedback goes directly to the right team.
5. It Shows Your Customers You Care About Them
A customer feedback widget forms part of your overall brand image which you present to your customers. Making it extra easy for customers to contact you shows that you truly value them, and care about their feedback.
A customer-centric culture is one of the key factors for a company’s success. Consumers will spend 17% more2 on a product or service if they receive outstanding customer care.
Even if someone doesn’t use your widget immediately, it’s reassuring to know that help is only a click away.
“Feeling unappreciated is the #1 reason customers switch away from products and services.” – New Voice Media3
6. It can Auto-suggest Helpful Information
Your feedback widget can integrate with your knowledge base, providing a next-level self-service experience. It can pre-populate information in the form as customers fill it and receive auto-suggested answers. Customers love being able to help themselves. In fact, 70% of customers4 say they expect a company to include a self-service support option.
Widget integration means that your customers can select the option that best matches their query, and potentially even find the answer to their problem in your knowledge base. Support never has to intervene.
7. It Improves the Overall Sales Process
Every company has some hotspots on its website where it’s crucial to gather more feedback. For example, your payment page where your customers are likely to abandon their basket, or on the sign up page. A feedback widget helps you lower this drop off rate.
Locate your widget wherever you want customers to interact with you and ask for feedback in case something goes wrong. At the very least, you’ll learn something from their feedback for next time.
8. It Helps You Automatically Tackle the Most Urgent Queries
It’s important to tackle your most urgent queries as quickly as possible.
This means enabling customer support ticket triage. If your customer feedback is structured in the widget form fields, this means you can flag particular keywords to be automatically prioritized. Customers trying to solve urgent issues never have to wait in the queue and they’ll be impressed with how quickly you respond to them.
Without this feature, you run the risk of overlooking critical problems by working only on a first-come, first serve basis.
For example, if a software glitch means your customer has lost all their data, then faster response time will go a long way in appeasing them.
I Want a Widget!
After reading these benefits, you’re probably excited about the prospect of having your own feedback widget. Check out how Freshdesk offers a customer feedback widget that integrates with the ticketing system here.
Source:
1 – https://academy.whatfix.com/contextual-help/
2 – https://www.inc.com/peter-roesler/american-express-study-shows-rising-consumer-expectations-for-good-customer-service.html
3 – https://www.newvoicemedia.com/blog/the-62-billion-customer-service-scared-away-infographic
4 – https://www.slideshare.net/stevenvanbelleghem/the-self-serving-economy/13
