The highest purpose of every brand in the world is to deliver value to customers. Whatever the industry, product, or service, nothing takes priority over customer satisfaction or, better still, customer delight.
If you genuinely want to know what satisfies your customers, ask them a few simple questions: “Do you like the product?” “What kinds of products do you prefer?” “What more would you like to see?” “What can we do to improve our products/services?”
However, conventionally asking these questions doesn’t always get a response. Your customers have busy lives and aren’t inclined to spend time reviewing every brand they buy.
What you need is a smartly-crafted product review mechanism that can score the response quickly and conveniently. And this is where Inbox Commerce comes in.
Inbox Commerce is a cutting-edge marketing technology that allows businesses to equip SMS, WhatsApp, and emails with dynamic, feature-rich components. Marketers can leverage them to send different types of product review/rating requests.
Inbox Commerce enables you to simplify the feedback process so customers can offer their opinions within seconds. Going a step further, consider incentivizing customers to share their responses, and your efforts will meet with success most of the time.
This article takes you through a few time-tested ideas on using Inbox Commerce to gather meaningful customer feedback through product ratings, reviews, comments, surveys, and more.
What is Inbox Commerce?
Inbox Commerce is a technological innovation that brings website and app-like features to your customers’ RCS messages, WhatsApp communication, and email inboxes.
At an advanced level, this technology allows users to do everything they would on a site or app – searching for items, providing/reading reviews, adding them to a cart, booking delivery time slots, finishing a purchase, viewing order confirmation, tracking delivery, giving feedback, and more – all within an RCS/WhatsApp message or email.
They no longer have to click CTAs and hop through multiple web/app screens.
In the context of customer reviews, you can use Inbox Commerce to send dynamic feedback forms with various eye-catching elements (stars, number rankings, emojis, symbols, gamified segments, and more). You can share them via RCS, WhatsApp, and email inboxes.
Why should businesses collect feedback from users?
Insights for iterative improvements
Feedback is often a treasure trove of insights, offering nuanced perspectives that aid in iterative product/service improvements. Analyzing feedback helps identify pain points, enabling tailored enhancements to meet user needs effectively.
Enhanced user-centric development
Direct user feedback fuels user-centric development strategies. It allows businesses to align their offerings precisely with customer expectations, ensuring they offer exactly what customers want and expect.
Trust building and credibility
Genuine user reviews establish trust and credibility. They provide social proof, fostering confidence among prospective customers and positively influencing their purchasing decisions.
Discovering unexplored opportunities
User feedback often reveals hidden opportunities or unmet market needs. It can trigger innovative ideas or features that users desire, potentially leading to new offerings and market niches.
Fostering customer loyalty
Engaging users through feedback mechanisms demonstrates a commitment to customer satisfaction. When users realize that a brand actively sees and incorporates user suggestions, they are more likely to patronize the brand with their attention and purchases.
Feedback and reviews play an integral role not only in refining current offerings but also in shaping future strategies, fostering trust, and nurturing a loyal customer base.
Supercharge your feedback loop
The crux of the matter is this: Inbox Commerce brings feedback mechanisms right to the customers’ SMS, WhatsApp, and email inboxes, and offers them unprecedented convenience in responding.
As a result, customers are more likely to record a review or a rating. Brands can identify what their target audience likes and what needs to be improved to align offerings with user expectations.
Inbox Commerce comprises three technologies – RCS (Rich Communication Services), WhatsApp Business, and AMP for email. Each empowers a previously ‘simple’ medium with extensive capabilities that drive customer engagement and feedback actions.
The major advantage of Inbox Commerce is that it lets users act within a message or email without getting redirected to a website or app. No redirects translates into increased customer responses.
Let’s look at the different formats of feedback mechanisms that can be sent via Inbox Commerce:
Numbered ratings
This is one of the most common ways to get a user’s impression of something they bought – a product or service. For example, ask them to rate their recent purchase on a scale of 1 to 5; the unit could be numbers or stars.
Inbox Commerce allows marketers to embed one-click input fields (in this case, numbers on a rating scale) within RCS, WhatsApp, and AMP emails.
You can add funny emoticons corresponding to each number on the scale to catch the customer’s eye. For example, No. 5 could be a happy smiley face, while number 1 could be a sad or grumpy face. And you get an instant response within the messaging screen.
Expression ratings
Numbered ratings don’t always cut it. Either they don’t adequately express customer sentiment or fail to catch the customer’s interest in the first place. To address this, consider using phrases in place of numbers.
For example, 1 could be: “It’s not remotely close to what I want or need.” and 5 could be: “It’s perfect! I would buy it again!” Such prompts provide a more expressive way of sharing feedback. Now you have your ‘come-to-the-point’ and ‘I-love-to-tell-you’ kind of customers covered.
You can embed these expression ratings seamlessly within RCS/WhatsApp messages and AMP emails.
Detailed surveys
When we say detailed, we don’t mean a survey with 4 pages having 8 questions each. No customer would want to plod through that!
However, sending more detailed surveys than feedback methods like ratings is still possible. Use Inbox Commerce to create simple but insightful multiple-choice questions that customers can answer with a single click. For simplicity’s sake, stick to 10 questions, no more. The questions are nested inside the RCS/WhatsApp message or AMP email, so users do not have to click a CTA and get redirected to a long-scrolling webpage.
Pro-Tip: Mention in the beginning that the survey is short – say something like: “This will take 3 minutes max, we promise!”
Interactive chatbots
Static text can only do so much, especially when people are looking at screens all day.
Insert a little interactivity to amp up the engagement.
Chatbots are an excellent option for this. By placing a customer feedback survey in a chatbot, users get the sense that they are interacting with the brand in real-time, which creates more engagement. RCS, WhatsApp Business, and AMP emails can carry such chatbots.
Text fields for direct user input
In cases like this, the well-known quote holds true: “… it’s the right to say any word you want to and to form any sentence you want to…” Sometimes, your customers simply want to feel heard in their own words and not pick a scripted option worded by a business.
Use Inbox Commerce to create an open text field in the RCS/WhatsApp message or email — a place for users to write, in their own words, their experience with a product or brand.
Reviews with a reward
No matter what kind of number, image, or text mechanism you use for review, some customers may just not be interested in giving feedback.
That is when you tempt them with a little reward. It could be anything – a 5% discount, an extra 3 days of premium membership… The point is to pique customer attention and keep them engaged long enough so that they complete the feedback.
Inbox Commerce lets customers submit their review and redeem the reward within a single message or email.
Know your customers better with Inbox Commerce
Thanks to Inbox Commerce, brands can collect extensive zero-party data – information willingly shared by customers that reveals their wants, needs, desires, and preferences. It is the most valuable data a business can acquire because these insights can translate to improved credibility and higher revenue.
Inbox Commerce – RCS, WhatsApp Business, and AMP for email – brings review forms and fields as close to the customer as possible, making it super easy to submit feedback. And the simpler something is, the more people will be willing to do it.
Connect with us to understand how you can benefit from our expertise and experience. Serving over 6,500 customers across 40 countries, Netcore delivers more than 1 billion inbox experiences every day – including 500 million emails and 700 million push notifications. Netcore’s AI is trained on 25 billion+ interactions from 1,300+ eCommerce stores, making it an invaluable asset for global brands.
