Benefits of Customer Feedback: 3 Reasons Why You Can’t Ignore It

Guide your business through choppy waters with a steady hand by understanding exactly what your potential customers are looking for!

Getting a good grasp of what customers want by analyzing their feedback helps in improving the customer experience.

When your customers feel good, achieving high customer satisfaction scores follows naturally.

Higher customer satisfaction scores translate into retaining your existing customers and adding new customers.

When you take full advantage of all the benefits of customer feedback, these new customers become as loyal to your brand as your older, established customers.

In this blog, you’ll learn how to use feedback from customers so that you can get to know your customers, involve them in your decision-making process, and as a happy result, delight them!

Know Your Customer

• Learn what your existing customers like & do not like from customer feedback

Each customer is unique, which is why listening to the voice of every customer and empathizing with them should be very important to you.

Recall your latest online shopping experience and think through these “if”s:

• Was the experience satisfactory?

If yes, did you share your experience with anyone else?

• Were there shortcomings in the process, or an experience that irked you?

If yes, did you complain to customer service or leave negative feedback?

• Was the response from the company adequately empathetic?

If yes, did you feel a little more favorable towards the brand?

Customers, especially ones who feel that they deserved a better experience, like to feel appreciated and heard.

These vocal customers, who felt wronged but were satisfied by your teams’ care, will spread positive word-of-mouth about your brand, which is marketing gold.

Even though it’s hard to meet every customer’s high expectations, the least you can do as a business owner is to give them the appropriate channels to share their concerns and get their grievances addressed.

• Make a variety of questions with templates, or use these templates as starting points for Do-It-Yourself (DIY) surveys
• Understand customer experience using Sentiment Analysis, to quickly analyze a large number of responses, create unique calls to action based on the customer’s emotional score and more.

Questions to ask:

• “Is There Anything on This Site That Doesn’t Work the Way You Expected It To?”

• “What Was Your Biggest Fear or Concern About Purchasing From Us?”

Here’s how online learning platform Udemy used the power of customer feedback to learn crucial information about their users:

Involve Your Customer

• Make your customers & prospects feel involved & important

There are multiple routes of getting (and responding to) feedback from customers. One of the most popular routes (especially for the young demographic) is through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Involving your customers with multiple channels of feedback can yield many insights into what they think of your brand.

Due to its open-to-all nature, social media is a double-edged sword.

Praise for your brand may get amplified, but so can criticism.

So be on a sharp lookout for customer feedback, and take advantage of customer feedback software to automate the process of responding to mentions of your brand if the volume of feedback becomes too large to handle for your social media or customer support teams.

• Send appropriately customized thank you messages (for positive feedback) & acknowledgments (plus an action plan, if required, for negative feedback) to customers 
• Categorize customer feedback according to relevance & bookmark the most important ones to include the points in your product/service R&D process.

Questions to ask:

• “What’s One Feature We Can Add That Would Make Our Product Indispensable for You?”

• “Have Feedback or an Idea? Leave It Here!”

Delight Your Customer

• Improve your products & services constantly in line with feedback from customers

Customer feedback is of no use if it’s not analyzed and used to improve your product/service in line with their expectations. You don’t just need to know how happy or sad your customers are – you have to try and make them happier and reduce their pain points.

To achieve this, you have to monitor your customer support and figure out if your customer representatives are providing clients with the best experience possible.

You Need to Learn From Their Input and Incorporate That Learning Into Your Output.

The benefits of customer feedback will translate into actual profits only when they are ingrained into your business processes.

Here’s Bretagne Abirached from SapientRazorfish talking about the importance of user research and feedback when it comes to building a brand strategy:

Over time, your processes will become more customer-centric than they were before. And that is a great place to be if you have big ambitions for your business.

• Use customer feedback insights to form accurate product roadmaps & customer journey maps
• Integrate customer feedback into business processes to improve your products/services

Questions to ask:

• How Likely Are You to Recommend Us on a Scale From 0 to 10?

• “What Other Information Would You Like to See on This Page?”

In a Nutshell: Make Your Customers Feel Loved

The feedback loop illustrated above is a simple image to keep in mind, even though the process itself can take several iterations to perfect. The last step, following up with your customers, is time-consuming and resource-intensive, but it has great value.

When customers get a feeling of being a valuable part of something larger than themselves, it becomes more likely that they will speak positively about their good experiences with others. This naturally leads to more people becoming aware of your brand.

And finally, the practical upshot of everything we’ve discussed: listen to customer feedback attentively, act upon the best of their advice proactively, seek their honest opinions regularly, and strategize your way to the top of your industry!