Discover the importance of customer feedback

There is a saying that feedback is a gift, and this certainly applies to customer feedback. 

When you get feedback from your customers, you can learn more about their opinions and make improvements to your products. 

By improving your products/services, you will improve customer experience (CX), which will lead to more sales. 

If you look at it this way, feedback, whether positive or negative, is the best thing your company can get. 

Your customer feedback strategy, however, must be smart. The first step is to recognize how important customer feedback is. Then you must know how to collect it, and then what to do with it. 

Your customers give you feedback about your products and services, as well as about your organization as a whole. 

Feedback can come in a number of formats. You can receive it via direct channels like surveys, focus groups, etc. It can also come to you indirectly via unsolicited emails, social media comments, or review sites. 

Feedback can be positive, negative or neutral, and while it can be hard to hear, it’s often the negative feedback that is the most useful. To quote Bill Gates, “your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Timely and relevant customer feedback allows you to pinpoint what is working for your customers and what is not. This lets you make the necessary changes to retain existing customers, as well as gain new customers. 

Why Is Customer Feedback So Important?

Customer feedback, and how you decide to harness it can have a big impact on your future growth and profits. Here we’ll go through 7 reasons why customer feedback is so important and beneficial: 

• Increased Customer Satisfaction
• Improved Customer Engagement
• Better Product Development
• Enhanced Customer Experience
• Improved Customer Retention
• Increased Customer Referrals
• Informed Business Decisions

1. A higher level of customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction feedback allows you to learn how satisfied your customers are with your products, services, and brand overall.

This is critical because, as you might think, satisfied customers are more loyal, and loyalty leads to repeat purchases.

Customers who are dissatisfied with your service are more inclined to defect to your competitors at the first sign of a bad encounter.

Customer satisfaction surveys, such as the Customer Contentment Score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and Customer Effort Score (CES), are excellent tools for gauging your customers' pleasure and satisfaction.

You can use these surveys to see how your consumers feel about your firm as a whole or to drill into specific pain points they're having. You'll have a better chance of resolving these concerns before they become significant problems, which will improve customer satisfaction.

2. Increased Customer Interaction

It's human nature for people to like giving their ideas and being heard. People who feel heard in a conversation establish trust; it is validating and makes us feel important.

This is supported by research. According to a recent Microsoft survey, 89 percent of respondents claimed that they wished to give brands feedback.

You can't afford not to listen and appreciate your consumers' comments when they actively come to you with their ideas.

A good customer feedback loop is required to promote customer engagement. This includes requesting input, analysing it, acting on it, and letting customers know they've been heard, closing the loop.

Changes you make in response to client feedback are likely to benefit your customers. The extra benefit is that they will feel more engaged knowing that they were heard.

3. Product Development that is Better

You are acting foolishly if you design and launch products without user feedback. Instead, you should use client feedback to guide the development of your product.

Feedback can also tell you whether or not your customers are inclined to purchase a potential new product.

Allowing your customers to help prioritise your product roadmap increases the likelihood that it will be something they want to use and would refer to a friend.

You can closely track where your product is falling short with rapid product feedback, such as in-app surveys or feature requests, so you can alter it or add new features and functions.

This type of feedback is advantageous because it leads in items that perform exactly how the customer desires, increasing the likelihood that they will return for more.

4. Improved Customer Service

Regularly collecting client feedback allows you to identify areas of your customer experience journey that can be enhanced.

Improving customer experience can have a significant influence on earnings because satisfied and loyal customers are more profitable. According to one survey, 84 percent of organisations that sought to improve customer experience experienced a rise in revenue, while 92 percent reported an increase in loyalty.

Over the years, the value of a positive client experience has progressively increased. It used to provide you a competitive advantage, but today it only keeps you in the game. To put it another way, to be successful, you must consistently improve your customer experience.

Feedback reveals the nuances of what is going on in your client experience, allowing you to address any concerns on a more detailed level. This helps you remain ahead of the competition by allowing you to remedy any weak links throughout your customer experience journey.

5. Customer Retention Increased

Customer retention is critical to the success of your company and its bottom line. According to studies, selling to a current client is 60-70 percent likely, whereas selling to a new consumer is just 5-20 percent likely.

So it makes sense to keep your current customers happy, and feedback is a great way to find out if they are and why.

When you know this, you may take steps to boost client loyalty and satisfaction, which, as we all know, has a direct impact on retention.

6. Customer Referrals Have Increased

Word of mouth is a very effective strategy to attract new customers. You need your current consumers to be raving about you, and if they aren't, you need to take steps to rectify the situation.

People come across online reviews, which are equally crucial types of customer feedback and have a lot of influence. According to one survey, 79 percent of consumers say they would trust an internet review as much as a recommendation from a friend or family member.

By continuously monitoring this input, you may make changes that will improve people's perceptions of your business and lead to more referrals.

7. Business Decisions Based on Facts

When properly assessed, customer feedback can yield a plethora of useful information. These can then assist you in making better business decisions, which will benefit your consumers.

What exactly are actionable insights, and how can they benefit your company? They are, in essence, any type of data that will aid in the implementation of meaningful improvements. They must, as the name implies, lead to action, and in order to do so, they must be related to your business goals, explicit, and unambiguous.

These helpful (possibly profit-generating) insights may never reach you unless you go out and hunt for or ask for client feedback.

What Is The Best Way To Collect Customer Feedback?

There are a variety of methods for gathering input, and it's ideal to try as many as possible to have a good picture of what you need to work on. Here are a few to think about:

Surveys are a tried-and-true method of gathering feedback. With a survey, you can cover a lot of ground. The Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES), which we stated earlier, are the most common customer feedback surveys.

It's also vital to consider the formats in which you send these to your consumers.

Email is a popular and efficient method. Sending a survey in-app while your consumer is using your product or on your website after a touch point is another fantastic technique to collect precise feedback. You can also ask survey questions via the phone or by mail.

You should also think about the type of data you collect from your surveys: quantitative or qualitative.

As a result, you'll have to decide whether you want to ask closed-ended or open-ended questions in your surveys.

Chat

Your customer's live chat sessions are likely to be ripe with relevant feedback. This is where your customers go to get their questions answered and to tell you what isn't functioning right now.

By going over these discussion logs, you can start to notice any patterns that are emerging so you can address them. As a result, your customer service personnel will be less burdened, as fewer requests will be routed to them from your first chat bot filter.

Monitoring of social media

Both direct and indirect client feedback abound on social media. We're all used to social media's open dialogue and how simple it makes it to engage with brands. It's also a location where customers may vent about their negative experiences with brands.

You can assist clients who are experiencing issues and avoid a PR crisis by monitoring social media activity related to your brand. You may also learn more about your products by reading client comments on social media.

Interviews

Speaking with your consumers is a fantastic method to get to know them better. Because it isn't always the most practical and can consume a lot of resources, you should only target a small group of people.

However, interviewing your clients yields positive results since you can go deeper into their responses, hear their tone of voice, and truly get what they are saying.

Forms for providing feedback

A feedback form is the vehicle that takes your questions to your consumers, and the design of the form can have a significant impact on whether or not they complete it.

The good news is that there are several well-designed and easy-to-customize feedback form templates available. You can also start from scratch and design a form according to your company's branding and design guidelines.

You may find some amazing feedback form examples here.

It is easier to send out your feedback form once you have completed it. The homogeneity of the form, together with well-designed questions, will result in surveys that are simple to complete and produce accurate data. Once your data is clean, the analysis process will be considerably easier.

What Should You Do With Customer Recommendations?

Your feedback may include a wealth of insights, but if you don't sift and evaluate it, you'll never know, and all of those insights may be lost.

As we've seen, there are a variety of ways to get input, which means you're dealing with potentially massive data sets. This covers both numerical data from closed-question responses and text data from open-ended responses. Without the correct tools, processing massive amounts of data (especially qualitative data from open-ended questions) can be difficult.

You may use programmes like Excel to compare outcomes from prior quarters and construct basic charts and graphs that show how you're doing from one quarter to the next for numerical data like NPS scores.

Machine learning solutions that can assist you examine your feedback automatically are required for text data.

MonkeyLearn Studio (seen below) uses artificial intelligence to sort through your qualitative data using techniques like sentiment analysis, topic analysis, and keyword extraction.

You can then slice and dice your data in the built-in data visualisation dashboard, making it simple for anyone, not just data gurus, to understand text data.

Sharing insights across teams helps to bring everyone on board and makes it easier for everyone to work toward the same end objective.

MonkeyLearn's templates for analysing certain sorts of feedback scan, analyse, and visualise your data for instant insights.

Conclusion

The value of customer feedback cannot be overstated.

Customer feedback, whether you like it or not, will determine the direction your company takes. You need satisfied, happy, and devoted customers to guide your firm toward greater profit. You need feedback to figure out if you have these kind of customers, or to improve things if you don't.

After that, you must properly assess the feedback.

Using quick and effective analytical tools like Excel and MonkeyLearn Studio makes combing through client feedback for insights much easier.

Sign up now to learn how to turn your customer feedback into actionable insights that will help you develop your business and enhance your revenues.