Kevin Owens, Chief product officer, Fuel Cycle

It’s no secret that getting customer feedback is challenging. Many customers only share feedback after a negative experience. And that makes sense: Sharing your feedback after a negative experience has a reward. You’ll get consoled or even receive a replacement product—money back or credit towards future purchases. When it comes to sharing positive or neutral feedback, however, there’s no incentive for customers to do so—that is, unless you make it worth their while.

The Customer Feedback Conundrum

Feedback from the people who are actually using your product on a regular basis is incredibly valuable. It can help you make product updates, add or remove features, understand customer intention and, at the end of the day, keep your customers happy.

The reality is that today’s consumers do want brands to understand their experiences. A study by BloomReach found that a whopping 87% of consumers prefer companies who best predict their intent and recommend products intuitively. Despite this desire for personalization, consumers simply aren’t motivated to share their feedback. Just look at this interview with OpinionLab, chief marketing officer Jonathan Levitt, where he revealed that 80% of consumers have abandoned a survey after starting it.

Many brands find themselves in a conundrum. Consumers want brands to make changes based on their experiences, but they lack the drive to actually share their experiences with brands.

Give the People What They Want

The solution is fairly simple. Consumers use products because of an underlying want or need, so incentives like gift cards, product samples and exclusive deals can be the push they need to provide effective feedback.

Brand-operated online communities, for example, provide customers with a private space to freely share their experiences so brands can gain in-depth insights and make the changes customers actually want. Most importantly, these communities need to be easy to use and offer a good reason for why consumers should visit them.

Take ELLE, for example, the magazine’s online community, known as its “Inner Circle”, is a space where fans can take surveys and participate in discussions in exchange for being entered to win clothing, beauty and accessory items that are featured in the magazine. These “trusted advisors,” as ELLE calls them, are more likely to return to the community to provide additional feedback because they know there’s a vested interest in them.

Beat Your High Score

To maximize customer feedback, brands should take rewards a step further by gamifying the overall experience. Gamification involves using concepts from traditional games and applying them to different situations, like customer experience, which increases engagement and incentive.

If we look at today’s most popular games, like Candy Crush, Super Mario Run and Words with Friends, a pattern of specific qualities emerge. The top-performing games feature competition, advancement and rewards. Players usually compete against each other for a specific reward, while progressing levels.

When applied to customer feedback, gamification can take many shapes. Let’s say a brand wants customers to complete three surveys to learn more about millennial beauty habits. As already noted, getting a customer to complete even one survey can be difficult. So the brand could gamify the process by turning each survey into a new level that customers must complete for achievement badges or points that translate to product rewards or even community recognition. To make the levels increase in difficulty, the surveys could become lengthier or more in-depth as a customer progresses, or the time limit to complete the survey could decrease with each new level.

Alternatively, the brand could ask customers to upload photos or videos of their beauty routines as part of the feedback process. Based on submissions, the brand may want to dig deeper with a certain segment and direct them towards different activities to learn more about that group’s purchase habits or preferences.

Brands can also use avatars to gamify customer feedback. Let’s say a brand wants customer input on what style of sunglasses they should sell as part of their summer line. The brand could allow customers to create their own avatars (think: The Sims) with whichever pair of sunglasses they like most. Customers who selected the most popular pair could then receive the sunglasses as an exclusive reward.

With the multitude of products and services available today with a click of a button, consumers are more and more willing to switch brands on a dime. Brands can no longer rely on traditional means to solicit feedback, such as simply asking a customer to complete a survey after a purchase. Getting feedback is a two-way street and if customers don’t feel like there’s anything in it for them, they won’t participate. Gamification is just one way to generate meaningful feedback, however, its true value is bigger than that. The only way to compete in today’s crowded market is to put in the work to make your customers feel truly valued.

Fuel Cycle provides technology that enables online business to create communities, obtain customer feedback and provide customer service.