Capturing customer feedback is perhaps the most important part of creating effective business tools and products for your clients.
If you look too far into the future and follow through on only your product vision, you miss out on the most valuable part of creating exceptional experiences – what your clients think. To innovate or truly solve the problems your customers encounter, it’s imperative to develop a feedback program that gets you closer to their truths.
What is Customer Feedback?
Gathering customer feedback is a process that starts with questions: What’s the best way to gather feedback without being invasive? What are the appropriate channels and tools for collecting feedback? What action will you take as a result?
Customer feedback is the information you get back from your community – the insights, issues, and input shared regarding experiences with your company, product, or services. This feedback is meant to guide improvements and can empower positive change.
Finding out what your clients think is the only way you can give them a better customer experience.
Exploring the Benefits of Customer Feedback
Happy Customers Create New Business Opportunities
When you embrace the feedback model you develop loyalty. Client happiness is key, and by listening to your customers you are showing that you are a proactive business that values customer insight. Did you know that one happy customer can lead to nine referrals? Satisfied clients share positive experiences and take them along when they move to new organizations. The better your reputation in the industry, the more likely it is you see an increase in profits.
Discover More About Your Product
By not collecting and addressing customer feedback, you miss out on valuable insight from the people who use your product the most – you know, the ones who pay for your services? Some fixes can be simple and go a long way in meeting customer needs. Other forms of feedback can be valuable for the long-term vision of your product’s evolution. How cool would it be if one of your clients discovered an opportunity for a new feature?
Build Customer Loyalty and Reduce Churn
It’s much more lucrative to keep an existing customer than it is to earn a new one. By having an equal focus on acquisition and retention, you’re saving your business thousands of dollars in the long run. Client acquisition is expensive – it’s time consuming and requires many resources. By reducing your churn rate, you’re saving money, building your reputation and profiting at the same time. That’s why it’s imperative to know why happy customers stay and why others leave, you can take the right measures to keep the right customers.
Make Better Data-Driven Decisions
By actively seeking the opinions of your customers and consistently measuring their satisfaction, you will gain a clearer perspective of your product and service performance.
By putting that data to work for you, you can propel your brand forward based on feedback and innovation.
How to Gather Feedback
Do it for the Customer Experience
No matter what stage you’re at or what size your company is, collecting feedback is a crucial tool for you to improve customer experience and therefore crucial to your success.
So, what are the ways you can effectively gather feedback? Here’s a look at just a handful of options:
Surveys
By creating an engaging customer survey experience you can capture feedback without being too pushy. Here are some questions to consider when developing your survey:
Is it interesting? Be sure your questions give opportunity for customers to voice their opinions.
Is it easy? Stay on topic, keep the questions short and direct.
Is it representative of your brand? Use your brand voice and attributes throughout, there should never be any doubt about who your client is talking to.
Is it rewarding? Whether you choose to offer an incentive or not, be sure to thank your responders for their time and tell them what you intend to do with their answers.
Depending on the nature of the survey questions, you can email it, publish on your site or even post in your social channels.
Feedback Portal or Widget
A feedback portal gives your community a dedicated place to share, vote on, and even discuss ideas for product features and improvements. With an in-app feedback widget and API, you enable users to quickly share feedback from within your mobile or web app.
Usability Testing
Usability testing offers a way to see how easy it is to use something by testing it with real users. Users are asked to complete tasks, typically while they are being observed by a researcher, to see where they encounter problems and experience confusion.
More Options
Depending on your product, you can access customer feedback through product or service reviews, focus groups, direct calling and tracking customer support chat conversations.
How to Use Feedback
It’s simple, act on it
In order to show your customers you value their input, you have to take action.
Don’t collect valuable feedback and do nothing with it.
The information you gather can be used to improve products and customer service experiences, increase loyalty and customer retention, build out marketing campaigns and messaging, improve UX design and more.
By understanding what drives your customers, what frustrates them and what makes them happy, you can make their lives easier and workplace experiences better. Acting on feedback builds positive associations with your brand and increases profitability.
