The importance of customer feedback
Asking about the importance of customer feedback is like talking about toothbrush without toothpaste.
Yes.
Customer feedback is an important aspect of running a business that often gets overlooked.
With a primary vision in focus, it is easy to stray away from aligning your product offering with what your customers truly want. Resulting in an offering with a poor market fit that doesn’t truly solve a problem.
The best option to counter this is through obtaining quality and honest customer feedback — let’s explore this more in depth.
Without further ado, let’s cover the importance of customer feedback and what are its true benefits.
What Is Customer Feedback?
We hear this term gets thrown around a lot — but do we know what it truly means?
Feedback is helpful information and criticism that pertains to a certain action between two, or more, actors.
Business feedback refers to the process of acquiring a customer’s opinion about a company, product, or service.
Finding out what your clients think is the only way that you can give them the best customer experience.
You can use this information to adjust how you do business and satisfy your clients’ needs more effectively.
In turn, improving their loyalty and overall success with your company.
Listening to your customers is the best way to propel your brand forward.
Importance Of Customer Feedback With Statistics
Customer experiences are so important because a customer review that spreads and goes viral can make or break your business.
It is said that one happy customer can lead to nine referrals.
But one angry customer can lead to 26 other angry customers.
If the customers are not satisfied, 13% of them will tell 15 or even more people that they are unhappy.
On the other hand, 72% of customers will share a positive experience with 6 or more people.
67% of customers mention bad experiences as a reason for churn, but only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers complain.
97% of potential buyers have admitted that online reviews influence their decision to make a purchase or walk away.
And finally, what about unhappy customers?
96% of unhappy customers don’t complain, 91% of those will simply leave and never come back (source).
Benefits of Customer Feedback
The customer feedback not only propels your business to a new level, but it also helps you uncover unexpected opportunities.
So, what are the different benefits?
Learn New Opportunities
By avoiding to listen to your customers, you are missing out on a lot of opportunities. Whether this is about fixing these customers’ issues or retaining them.
These are also valuable opportunities to learn and make sure it doesn’t happen in the future.
Build Customer Loyalty And Reduce Churn
It is also known that 13% of unhappy customers will share their disappointments with more than 20 people.
Instead, aim to satisfy all your customers in the future so as to gain a positive reputation and more loyal customers.
And how do you do that?
You listen to their feedback.
Aim to satisfy all your customers in the future so as to gain a positive reputation and more loyal customers.
It is much cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to earn a new one. In fact, it can be five times more expensive to attract a new customer, than to keep an existing one.
This is going to pay-off and reduce the amount of lost business, or churn rate.
Stay best friends with your loyal customers, as they are extremely valuable. Once you know why your happy customers stay and why some leave, you can take the right measures to keep the right customers.
Get More Referral And Build Reputation
Besides helping you retain customers, feedback also brings you new business.
Thanks to the feedback you receive, you are able to make your customers happy. They thrive with you.
This nudges them to refer new customers and build a positive brand reputation for you.
They talk about all the benefits of your brand.
In a nutshell, customer feedback is more important than ever. Stop hoping that your customers will give you their feedback.
Be proactive, create a customer-feedback friendly company.
More positive customer experience leads to a better reputation, and ultimately, an increase in profits.
More positive customer experience leads to a better reputation, and ultimately, an increase in profits.
Make Better Data-Driven Decisions
By proactively listening to the voice of your customers, and measuring their satisfaction, you are able to get an overview of your performances over time. Hence, muster things up and correlate the data with what you are doing or changing internally.
The more you listen to your customers, the better they will be. Or, in other words, the more loyal they will be to your brand, and therefore, increase their likeliness of being customer advocates.
Improving Customer Experience
Receiving customer feedback is absolutely crucial to improving the customer experience and increasing your ROI and customer retention rate.
A slight improvement in Customer Experience has the ability to produce an increase of $823 million over 3 years for companies with $1 billion in annual revenue.
No matter your stage, this simply goes to show how improving the customer experience can lead to an astonishing increase in profit.
With this said, businesses who care about improving each and every aspect of the customer experience is bound for success.
In order to do this, however, businesses must first learn from customers in what way their experience can be enhanced. This information can only be obtained through enticing and engaging customer surveys.
So how do I get customers to answer our surveys?
It’s simple, really. Customers just want three things:
- To voice their opinions without having to endure long, irrelevant questions
- To have fun while doing so
- To be rewarded somehow for completing the survey
What To Do With Customer Feedback?
Showing your customers that you value their voice and inputs means that you have to take action.
Act-On Customer Feedback
The whole purpose of customer surveys is to get customer feedback on how to improve your business. Don’t just collect the data and do nothing. When you respond to your customers’ feedback through your actions, this will make them feel that they are valued.
Customer feedback is perhaps the most neglected of services among businesses.
Only 52% of customers are confident about brands acting on their feedback.
This must be fixed. You have to actually listen, learn how to turn your dissatisfied customers into your best fans, learn from that feedback?
Customer Feedback Examples
Customer feedback holds all the key to your company success.
Yes, we have said that already.
But what are some real-life examples?
The Case of Eventbrite
This is the story of Julia Hartz, Eventbrite’s CEO.
She managed to listen and turned the user feedback into a key learning piece of her journey.
In a recent Masters of Scale podcast episode, Julia talks about the importance of customer feedback. She demonstrates that all customer feedback holds all the secrets to your success.
Julia managed to extrapolate user feedback, and act quickly in order to turn those inputs into a growth opportunity.
The key was to not only talk to the customers but also get their opinion. She created customer feedback form, observed user-behavior and drew a conclusion.
She also analyzed the different use-cases and where the customers are coming from.
And it worked! They grew from a simple ticketing app to a full-service platform for event creators.
I believe customer feedback is the coiled spring that catapults your company forward. It will continually adjust your trajectory, while keeping you on target.
Reid Hoffman — founder of LinkedIn
You can listen to the full episode below.
How To Ask for Feedback From Customers?
We have covered the importance of customer feedback.
The different methods to collect
- Survey responses
- Reviews
- User experience testing
- Focus groups
- Customer Call
- Customer Support Chat conversations
We will now talk about one of the most effective methods to get customer feedback: using customer feedback survey.
Don’t get me wrong, it is only effective when done right.
Customer surveys identify your customer’s level of satisfaction with an existing product. It is also an outlet for your clients to express their opinions, share insights and voice out their expectations for your products and services.
Did you know that the average person gets distracted in 8 seconds?
This means that you only have 8 seconds to convince customers to actually answer your survey before they lose interest and redirect their attention elsewhere.
If this doesn’t worry you, then your business is destined for stagnancy, or worse, failure.
How to Create a Good Customer Feedback Survey?
Creating a good customer survey is not easy. Although this is not the pricmary topic of this article, we will remind you of the basics of creating a customer feedback survey in 5 steps.
You would want it to be answered by your customers for it to provide real value to your business. Here are 5 tips on how to make the ultimate customer survey:
1. Define Your Goals
In order for your customer survey to be effective, you have to know what it wants to accomplish. Have a defined goal before doing anything else. Write down what you want to know from your customers and start from there.
2. Create Clear Questions
Every question you include should help you get closer to the goal you drafted in tip #1.
Ask straightforward and specific questions.
Select one question type for the whole survey. You won’t want the participants becoming confused at the varying question types.
3. Keep It Short
Ideally, the survey should only include five to ten questions.
As mentioned above, customers have a very short attention span.
If you bombard them with dozens of questions, there’s a high chance that your completion rates will drop significantly.
3. Offer an Incentive
Although this is not always relevant, depending on your use-case, offering a survey incentive is a good way to boost up your survey engagement, and get more responses.
We cover this topic in a separate article.
4. Review
Before your survey goes live, make sure to proofread it to ensure that it is free of any errors.
Nothing looks more unprofessional than misspellings and wrong grammar not only in your customer survey but in EVERYTHING that you decide to publish.
So, take time to review everything before you put it out on the internet for lots of eyes to see.
5. Find The Right Touchpoint
Publish it to your website, include it in your emails and post it on your social media profiles.
Make sure to tell everyone what the survey is for and explain briefly why it is important that they give honest answers.
It is also recommended that you include a completion time at the beginning of the survey. The ideal completion time for a survey is 3 to 5 minutes.
Wrap Up
So, convinced?
Are you going to stop waiting for your customer to give their feedback and start genuinely show them that you care about their input?
It will ultimately contribute to your overall reputation, and turn your promoters into customer advocates.
Are you going to stop waiting for your customer to give their feedback and start genuinely show them that you care about their input? It will ultimately contribute to your overall reputation, and turn your promoters into customer advocates.
By being proactive and effectively listening to their inputs, you will be able to drastically improve your business in the long run.
If you have any comment or question, feel free to engage in the comment below.
Originally published at Inside Feedier.
