Smart marketers appreciate the value of social media. You tune into the latest industry chatter, engage with customers on Twitter and monitor social media for mentions of your brand. Listening to customer conversations about your brand or business yields incredible insights into your customer’s needs and passions. Unfortunately, many marketers are only listening to their customers with half an ear. While they focus on public social media chatter, they often forget to listen to their customers when they are most invested in their business – while they are on the brand’s website.

Listening to customer feedback on your website is easy and incredibly useful. Below are the 7 advantages of direct customer feedback over traditional social media listening.

1. Customers are More Invested 
   Customers come to your site for a reason; to research a product, complete a purchase etc. These customers have a vested interest in completing their task, and will let you know when something is not as it should be. The feedback you gather from these customers will impact your bottom line.
   
   
2. Real, Meaningful Conversations 
   Your customers want their voices to be heard and acknowledged. Show them you care by inviting their feedback on your site, replying to their feedback messages, and implementing their ideas. Unlike public social media, website feedback is a safe environment that is conducive to meaningful, productive conversations. Freeing your conversations from off-putting color commentary typical of many social media channels allows you to ask provocative questions such as “What could we have done better?” without creating a public relations or social media nightmare.
   
   
3. Customer Responses Are Unbiased
   In social media your customer comments are public statements. In website feedback customers are free to share personal experience with no concern for peer approval. Customers who consider peer approval before sharing feedback are generally (a) less likely to share their feedback and (b) prone to sharing unproductive, negative commentary.
   
   
4. Feedback Is Fresher 
   Customer feedback collected on your site captures the customer’s state of mind, frustrations and ideas while your site experience is fresh in their minds. In contrast, support, social media and sales conversations hours or even days after the customer has left your site are less likely to yield meaningful results. Over time, customers tend to forget the little tweaks that can yield the strongest returns for your business, such as a confusing button, a missing payment option, or an incomplete product description.
   
   
5. Insights Are On-Topic 
   With on-site customer feedback, you can choose the topic of conversation. Your product team can ask customers for feedback on your login process, and your merchandise lead can ask for feedback on your product selection. And best of all, you can target the right customers.
   
   
6. Insights From The Right Audience 
   While it is always helpful to collect feedback across every page on your site, you can target specific audiences on your site with larger invitations for feedback. A targeted, more prominent feedback invitation will deliver the insights you need without disrupting the rest of your customers. For example, you can target new customers on pages with high bounce rates to understand why they are leaving. Or you can target loyal customers to understand why they are loyal to your business. You can even target customers taking a long time at checkout, offering assistance to help them complete their purchase while learning how you can improve your checkout process. By combining the right targeting parameters and the right questions, you can understand any customer journey. These insights would be incredibly difficult to gather through social media listening.
   
   
7. Analytics Become Exponentially Smarter 
   Your analytics tell you what your customers are doing. Customer feedback will tell you why they are doing it. A good customer feedback platform will integrate with your site analytics, making it easy to use your customer feedback to understand and improve any analytics trend.

Getting Started
It has never been easier to impact your bottom line with customer feedback. Contact Kampyle's Success Team to learn just how simple and powerful customer feedback can be. We look forward to speaking with you!

Originally posted on the Kampyle blog.