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Satisfied customers buy more, recommend more, and most importantly, come back for more, making closing the feedback loop with customers one of the most critical aspects of your Customer Experience Management (CEM) process.

It involves identifying key touch points throughout the customer journey, seeking out feedback at those points, analyzing data, and then modifying strategies to achieve your business objectives.

Traditional feedback management processes often fall short of continuing the conversation after customers respond. Timely handling of customer feedback can show them that you’re listening and that you truly care.

This is also a great way to identify disgruntled customers before they become detractors and further delight customers who had a great experience to become promoters.

Why SMS is your best bet  

The feedback collection aspect of your outreach and communication strategy to be effective, personal, and brief – all features that the humble SMS lends itself best to. It’s imperative that your strategy makes it easy and almost effortless for your customers to interact with you. Text or SMS messages can be an incredibly powerful tool to do this – thanks to their convenience, speed, and the fact that people nearly always have their mobile device close to their hands.

Customization and automation

SMS with its scope for scale, customization, and automation can accommodate a diverse range of feedback at all customer touch points. Using text messaging for surveys provides your customers with a direct line of engagement that is more effective than a phone or email-based survey. In fact, more than half of consumers say they would prefer text as a customer support platform over their current preferred method.

Higher open rates and lower response time

With its impressively high open rate of over 98%, andshorter response times (people actually respond to texts within 3 minutes of receiving them), SMS provides a simple and efficient strategy that can help you reach out to your customers in a way that’s personal, yet non-intrusive. On average, it only takes 5 seconds to read an SMS from start to finish.

With the delivery occurring right on your customer’s phone, you can rest assured that the SMS survey will be quickly seen and far less likely to get lost in a busy inbox. A series of SMS messages staggered over a few hours can elicit better responses, information, and superior response rates.

More honest responses

With SMS feedback, your customers are going to feel more relaxed, which will result in responses that are more honest and thus, useful for your business. Customers are far more likely to tell you what they believe you want to hear over the phone than if you used SMS to ask the same questions. With SMS as a strategy to close the loop, you know your closed-loop processes are going to be that much more effective.

Ease of use

SMS customer surveys can both – be set up, and responded to in a matter of minutes. They’re easy to create and can also be distributed quickly, making them an ideal choice for all stages of and types of feedback collection – quantitative and qualitative.

How SMS can help you?

In the rest of this post, let’s explore how SMS can be incorporated into the below-listed stages of a successful closed-loop feedback strategy.

Collection stage

Collecting feedback with timely text messages soon after a  purchase or service delivery ensures that the feedback you receive is relevant. Text messages make it easy for your customer to give in-the-moment feedback while the experience is still fresh in their mind.  An SMS – based short survey, say with multiple choice options, takes far less customer effort than going through a questionnaire or a wordy email.

Research shows that on average 31% of consumers will respond to a survey via SMS with the average response time for users being just over 5 minutes. By identifying if messages have been read, you can further engage with customers based on how responsive they are, to your questions.

Acknowledgement stage

At this step, to build accountability, you need to let your customer know you’ve heard them. With its instant delivery, your customers know you’ve heard them right after they’ve shared feedback. This can create a positive impact on your customers at a very critical time in their feedback journey.

You can specifically use transactional one-to-one SMS messages triggered by certain behavior in the feedback collection process. Further, you can customize your messages to tailor your responses to the specific feedback – apologize for grievances and thank you for feedback. When text messages are customized to respond to specific feedback, your customers feel heard and cared for.

Action stage

At this stage, you can keep your customer updated with how you’re taking action based on their feedback. A simple, to-the-point message can do this for you. With its 160-character limit, your customer knows just what she needs to know – nothing more, nothing less.

Inform stage

Once you’ve addressed the grievance or resolved the issue, you can take this as an opportunity to inform your customer of the steps you’ve taken to resolve the issue. You can create further engagement – throw in an enticing offer, a personalized thank you message, and you’re more likely to have a loyal customer.

Conclusion

A well-structured and executed closing-the-loop strategy that listens to, and acts on feedback can build your business and build a very strong emotional connection with the customer. It can help you develop, differentiate your brand and build customer loyalty while improving how you do business.