Businesses spend a lot of time, money and energy thinking about how they can sell products and services to their customers. While that’s all well and good, they should really be thinking about how to collect feedback from their customers.
There’s nothing wrong with focusing on sales, but customer feedback is one of the most powerful untapped tools in any business’s toolbox when it comes to improving their overall business strategy.
We’ll be diving into the five main reasons why customer feedback is so important for your business as well as providing some ideas as to how you can go about gathering that kind of information. However, the overall message is simple:
When you know how your customers feel about your brand, you can develop superior products and services, better fulfill existing and potential customers’ needs, and therefore be more successful overall.
It’s easy to collect customer feedback with tools like online survey templates
You don’t have any excuse not to collect customer feedback nowadays. Whereas it may have been difficult to connect with customers in order to gather their authentic opinions and reviews previously, now there are tons of tools out there that make it incredibly easy to do so.
One of the simplest ways to collect helpful customer feedback with minimal effort is by setting up an online survey. This is because surveys are quick to make, can be used over and over again, are straightforward to send out, and can be completed when it’s most convenient for customers.
123 Form Builder is a great platform to use if you want to make your own customer feedback surveys. Their software has smart form capabilities, meaning that your customers will be asked pertinent follow-up questions depending on the answers they provide. They’ve also got a huge gallery of online survey templates, which will save you tons of time in your survey development process.
If you’re looking for additional ideas, here are some other places that you can collect customer feedback for your business:
- Social media platforms, like on Instagram stories or through direct messages
- Feedback boxes
- Customer feedback emails (especially those that offer some kind of reward in return for feedback)
- Feedback pop-ups
- Online communities like Facebook groups
5 key reasons why customer feedback is important for your business
Gathering customer feedback can do a lot more for your business than you might realize. In fact, it’s one of the pillars of a highly successful business. Keep reading to discover the five key reasons why it’s so essential.
1. Helps you deliver the best possible products and services
Regardless of size, type or industry, the center of any business is the quality of the products and services they deliver. If their customers aren’t satisfied with what they’ve got to offer, they simply won’t be able to survive in the business world.
Luckily, there are several different ways that gathering customer feedback can help you improve the quality of your business’s products and services.
First of all, customer feedback can help you make key improvements to your products and services. Imagine that you work for a software company and you’ve just launched a brand new software product. If you had tons of customers reporting different bugs and glitches, you wouldn’t just ignore them, would you?
No, you’d invest time and resources into fixing those bugs and glitches, which would give your customers access to an improved product. Not only that, but all the future customers that you haven’t even reached yet will get a superior product because of your previous customers’ feedback.
You can also ask for customer feedback preemptively in order to help you optimize your company’s products and services. For instance, many businesses choose to survey their customers to test out new product ideas or concepts and gauge their potential.
2. Gives insight into customer satisfaction
Without a doubt, customer satisfaction is one of the best indicators of business success. In fact, 73% of companies with above average customer service have been found to perform better financially than their competitors.
With powerful statistics like this one in mind, it’s only logical that ambitious businesses should seek as many insights as possible into how satisfied their customers are.
When trying to determine how happier your customers are with your business, it’s best to go straight to the source: by connecting with them and gathering their feedback.
This is an effective strategy in two key ways. If you gather feedback and discover that the majority is positive, that’s a good sign for your business. It will also give you insight into the kinds of things customers are happy with, giving you the opportunity to think about how you can replicate them in the future.
If your customer feedback isn’t as positive, you should take it as an opportunity to make improvements rather than criticism. If you can identify the things you need to improve as a business and adjust your strategy accordingly, you’ll make a big difference in your short and long-term success.
3. Allows you to make more informed business decisions
As you can see in the graphic above, there are several steps to go through to make the best-possible-informed business decisions. They’re easy to remember because all six phases start with the letter A:
- Ask: Formulate a focused question
- Acquire: Search for the best available data
- Analyze: Critically appraise and analyze the data
- Apply: Integrate the data with your professional expertise
- Announce: Decide and communicate
- Assess: Monitor the outcome
Customer feedback can be an essential component of both the acquire and analyze phases. This is because gathering in-depth customer feedback gives you a wide range of valuable data to analyze for your business decisions. Likewise, when you collect lots of customer feedback, you’ll have a large pool of data to pull from when you’re putting together your analytics and reports.
While business decisions shouldn’t be made based on data alone, it should play a significant role. Google even found that highly data-driven organizations are 3x more likely to report significant improvements in their decision-making processes.
4. Improves customer retention
Once you’ve got a solid base of customers that are loyal to your business, you’ll want to do everything in your power to keep them coming back for more. Not only is this an essential component of building a reliable customer base, but returning customers are a lot more valuable than new customers.
Tellingly, almost 65% of a company’s business comes from returning customers and 82% of companies agree that customer retention is cheaper than customer acquisition.
The key to improving your company’s customer retention rates is by making sure that your customers are satisfied with what you have to offer. That means that you have to be mindful of things like customer reviews, social media comments, and you guessed it… customer feedback.
The more customer feedback you collect, the more aware you’ll be of your customers’ overall satisfaction and the more opportunities you’ll have to address any issues that come up.
The business world is competitive and you can’t allow bad experiences with your business to go unchecked. Otherwise you’re risking your customers taking their business to one of your competitors.
5. Delivers an optimal customer experience
Customer experience refers to the entire experience that customers have with your brand. More than just customer service, it encompasses all aspects of customer journeys, including:
- Brand discovery
- Brand familiarization and pre-purchase
- Purchase
- Product or service quality
- Customer retention initiatives like loyalty programs
- Customer service
- Overall branding and company values
Because of the competitive nature of the business world nowadays, customer experience is more important than ever. People don’t just want good quality products, they want to spend their money on incredible products that are associated with above-and beyond customer experiences.
In fact, a Super Office study found that 86% of customers will pay more if it means that they’re getting a great customer experience.
Building a top-notch customer experience takes a lot of work, but one thing’s for sure. You need to know what your customers want in order to give them a great experience. Luckily, there’s no better way to get acquainted with your customers’ wants and needs than by collecting their genuine feedback.
Customer feedback is essential to any business’s success
As you can see, customer feedback is a big deal. When collected regularly, analyzed correctly and integrated into decision-making processes, it can have far-reaching positive effects on any kind of business. We’d even go as far as saying that it’s one of the biggest determining factors in any business’s long-term success.
With all the tools and software out there nowadays, you really don’t have any excuse. It’s easier than even to connect with your customers and gather their genuine feedback, so what’s stopping you?
Whether you want to improve your products and services, understand how satisfied your customers are, make more informed business decisions, work on your customer retention rates or optimize your overall customer experience, customer feedback can help you achieve all of that and more.
