Table of Contents
- What Exactly is Customer Feedback?
- Types of Customer Feedback
- Surveys
- Reviews
- Direct communication
- Focus groups
- Usability tests
- Related Reading
- What is the Importance of Customer Feedback
- Customer Feedback: Your Business’s GPS
- 1. Deeply Understand Your Customers
- Segmenting Customer Feedback for Targeted Product Improvements and Sales Growth
- Leveraging Customer Feedback to Refine Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Continuously
- 2. Make Customer-Centric Decisions
- Using Customer Feedback to Drive Product Development and Enhance User Experience
- 3. Boost Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Boosting Cross-Functional Collaboration by Effectively Analyzing and Sharing Customer Feedback
- 4. Improve Your Products and Services
- Leveraging Customer Feedback to Shape Product Roadmaps and Enhance Backlog Management
- 5. Build Customer Trust and Loyalty
- Building Customer Trust and Loyalty Through Transparent Feedback Implementation
- 6. Increase Customer Satisfaction and Retention
- Enhancing Customer Retention and Satisfaction Through Feedback-Driven Service and Personalization
- 7. Attract the Right Customers
- Using Customer Feedback to Attract and Convert Ideal Customers on Key Website Pages
- Related Reading
- How Do You Collect Customer Feedback?
- Capture Customer Feedback on Your Website
- Use Feedback Boxes to Get User Input on Operational Issues
- Conduct Customer Interviews for Immediate Feedback
- Create Suggestion Boards for Collaborative Feedback
- Use Transactional Emails to Collect Feedback
- Listen to Social Media Feedback
- Hold Quarterly Business Reviews
- Implement Live Chat on Your Website
- Customer Feedback Surveys
- Boosting Credibility and Conversions with Testimonial Software for Authentic Client Feedback
- 5 Best Practices For Making Sure Feedback Is Valuable
- 1. Don’t Waste Your Customers’ Time
- 2. Let Customers Speak Freely
- 3. Segment Your Customers for More Accurate Feedback
- 4. Timing is Everything
- 5. Offer Multiple Feedback Methods
- Related Reading
- Build a Wall of Love for Free Today with Testimonial
- Build Trust With Authentic Customer Testimonials
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Title
What Is The Importance of Customer Feedback?
Date
Nov 12, 2024
Description
Understanding the importance of customer feedback matters for businesses will drive improvement, innovation, and stronger customer relationships.
Status
Current Column
Person
Writer
If you have shopped online, you know how reviews can make or break a sale. Before buying a pair of shoes, I will research the seller and the product and read reviews to understand my purchase better. I’m not alone in this behavior. Customers increasingly turn to feedback from their peers to inform their buying decisions. A study by PowerReviews found that 82% of survey respondents read reviews when researching a product, and 67% of respondents said that reviews were more important than the product description written by the seller. Businesses can no longer hide behind glossy marketing brochures and slick advertisements. Customers want to hear from other customers, and the best way to do this is through customer feedback.
Feedback and best customer feedback tools help you collect, organize, and display this information to boost sales and build trust with your audience. In this article, we'll discuss the importance of customer feedback and how you can use testimonial software to collect better reviews and improve your business.
What Exactly is Customer Feedback?
Customer feedback is the narrative customers share about their experiences with a company's offerings. It spans the spectrum from:
- Glowing praise
- Pinpointing what they adore
- To stark criticisms, highlighting what falls short
Grasping the nuances of this feedback is pivotal, enabling businesses to build their products, services, and overall customer experience to better echo customer expectations.
Types of Customer Feedback
There are several types of customer feedback, each offering unique insights:
Surveys
Structured questionnaires that gather specific information about customer experiences can be conducted:
- Online
- In person
Reviews
Publicly posted feedback on:
- Websites
- Social media
- Third-party review platforms like:
- Trustpilot
- Google Review
Direct communication
Feedback is received through direct interactions with customers, such as:
- Emails
- Phone calls
- Face-to-face conversations
Focus groups
Small, diverse groups of customers provide detailed feedback in a controlled setting.
Usability tests
Observations of customers using a product or service to identify areas of confusion or difficulty.
Related Reading
What is the Importance of Customer Feedback
Whether positive or negative, customer feedback helps you improve your product and create a customer-centric business—especially since 70% of customers are likelier to shop with brands that understand their needs.
Use our list of customer feedback benefits below to find out how your customer feedback strategy can improve the customer and product experience (PX) alike:
Customer Feedback: Your Business’s GPS
Customer feedback is like a GPS for your business. It helps you navigate customer preferences and improve their experience over time so you can drive sales and boost retention and loyalty. Whether positive or negative, customer feedback enables you to enhance your product and create a customer-centric business—especially since 70% of customers are likelier to shop with brands that understand their needs.
Use our list of customer feedback benefits below to find out how your customer feedback strategy can improve the customer and product experience (PX) alike:
1. Deeply Understand Your Customers
Gathering customer feedback helps you acknowledge and improve the customer experience of your product or service. It lets you reach customers wherever they are in the customer journey by giving you visibility into crucial touchpoints or missed opportunities. Collecting customer reviews, sentiments, and criticism across channels also helps you populate your CRM and product backlog with nuanced insights to better understand and meet customer needs and create robust user personas and profiles.
Segmenting Customer Feedback for Targeted Product Improvements and Sales Growth
For example, if you're a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business collecting feedback to improve cross-functional collaboration among teams with your product, segment feedback based on:
- Like an ops manager,
- Your ideal customer persona (ICP) determines which of their specific needs aren’t being met.
- Which features should you prioritize to positively impact sales? Then, include your findings (e.g., ops managers would like a feature for file sharing) within the 'Ops Manager' persona or customer profile for more granular details of their experience or desires for future reference.
Leveraging Customer Feedback to Refine Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Continuously
Here’s how to apply your customer feedback to understand your customers deeply:
- Create and continuously discover your ICP: collect customer feedback through surveys, feedback forms, customer interviews, focus groups, and testimonials to iterate your ICP and keep user personas up to date. This ensures you're always meeting customer needs across different segments. For example, after collecting B2B usability surveys, you might discover an increase in product purchases from marketing managers, so you know to add them as a user persona.
- Respond to customer feedback on social media and review sites to form a rapport with your customers, update them on the status of their requests, or contribute to their success. By administering and acting on social media polls or reviews, you’re showing your customers that you are proactive about their feedback and suggestions.
2. Make Customer-Centric Decisions
Customer feedback lets you make people-centric decisions that drive product and customer success. It gives you direct insight into what:
- Changes customers want to see
- How they use your product
- What they expect from you
- How well it fits into the current market
Using Customer Feedback to Drive Product Development and Enhance User Experience
How to apply customer feedback to make customer-centric decisions and create customer delight:
- Spot and categorize trends or patterns in your feedback to determine which features, products, updates, or services will most impact the customer experience. For example, let’s say you ask customers to rate their experience after downloading your new project management software and provide a reason for their score. After collecting their feedback, you might discover you need to create an iOS-compatible version of your product to appeal to a larger audience.
- A/B test your hypothesis about your:
- Product
- Website
- Web design
- User experience
It lets feedback drive your entire product and customer experience.
3. Boost Cross-Functional Collaboration
When cross-functional teams have access to customer feedback, everyone has the freedom to act on urgent customer requests or issues that negatively impact the customer experience. This gives you a holistic view of customer-facing and non-customer-facing teams’ understanding of the user experience, leading to unique internal insights that help your business better meet customer needs.
Boosting Cross-Functional Collaboration by Effectively Analyzing and Sharing Customer Feedback
How do you apply your feedback to boost cross-functional collaboration?
- Educate team members on how to analyze feedback: if you’re using tools or dynamic visual dashboards to interpret your feedback, make sure everyone involved knows how to analyze the data and glean actionable insights.
- Keep teams aligned and prepared to navigate widespread:
- Customer complaints
- Concerns
- Questions
4. Improve Your Products and Services
Customer feedback is an invaluable resource that helps you improve your product or service, mainly because customers use it to complete daily tasks and accomplish their goals.
Leveraging Customer Feedback to Shape Product Roadmaps and Enhance Backlog Management
How to act on customer feedback to improve your product or service:
- Update your product roadmap: use your customer feedback to inform your product plan and how it will be updated over time. For example, after collecting results from a product-market fit survey, you might have better insight into when to release your product based on market demand. So, you’ll need to update the timeline on your product roadmap to keep product teams on the same page, which will help you improve your service.
- Improve product backlog management based on typical customer requests (or market demand) for features or updates, bugs, and infrastructure optimizations. Use your feedback to help manage and prioritize your product backlog so you can create relevant products your customers will love.
- Maintain a positive feedback loop and ask for feedback every time you update your product, roll out a new feature, or release a new product, so you constantly learn, improve, and meet customer needs.
5. Build Customer Trust and Loyalty
Close to 55% of customers say they trust brands less than they used to, so building customer trust and loyalty is now more important than ever. Collecting and acting on customer feedback lets you do just that.
Customer feedback helps you continually check in with your customers, spot areas for improvement before they churn, and show them you’re proactively searching for solutions to their problems.
Building Customer Trust and Loyalty Through Transparent Feedback Implementation
How to implement your feedback to build customer trust and loyalty:
- Share glowing reviews and testimonials of real customer experiences with your product or service across digital assets, including on social media platforms and your website. Using customer feedback as social proof boosts your credibility and wins you more (repeat) customers and sales.
- Be transparent about your progress in implementing customer feedback. This tells your audience you’re taking responsibility for their experience, no matter how long it takes to roll out.
- Learn how to navigate negative reviews: Removing any signs of negative feedback isn’t enough to build customer trust. Instead, focus on being honest and upfront about your mistakes and telling your customers how you plan on learning from them.
For example, after spotting a negative review from a customer who received the wrong order from my e-commerce store, I use the review platform to publicly apologize and reimburse the customer—and regain their trust.
6. Increase Customer Satisfaction and Retention
Feedback helps you determine new ways to satisfy and retain your customers. It gives you direct visibility into what your customers want and need to fulfill their jobs to be done (JTBD)—and what they expect from your product and brand.
You impact your customers' expectations of your brand through your communication with them, how well you automate our processes, the quality of our product or service, and our customer service resources.
Enhancing Customer Retention and Satisfaction Through Feedback-Driven Service and Personalization
How to apply your feedback to increase customer retention and satisfaction:
- Provide top-rated customer service: use your feedback to identify ways of improving the resources, onboarding process, communication channels, and accessibility of your customer service software and teams
- See what loyalty programs customers respond to: reward loyalty with programs your customers want to participate in. For example, if we receive overwhelming feedback about the ineffectiveness of our referral program, we know we need to improve it to keep loyal customers engaged.
- Cater personalization and outreach levels: the right amount of personalization and outreach, like well-timed promotional emails or post-purchase pop-ups, entice customers to do business with you.
7. Attract the Right Customers
Solid customer feedback helps shed light on which customer types use your product the most (or least)—and how they use it to achieve their goals. These types of customer insights let you tailor your marketing content and campaigns to speak to user needs directly and better position your product to the customers who get the most value from it and, ultimately, buy it.
Using Customer Feedback to Attract and Convert Ideal Customers on Key Website Pages
So, how do you apply your feedback to attract the right customers?
- Use customer feedback to inform conversion copy on crucial website pages, like product or landing pages. By using the same language your ideal customer uses to describe your product, you appeal to and attract more of the same type of customer.
- Highlight customer reviews and ratings on product and checkout pages: use customer feedback as social proof on key decision-making pages—like product and checkout—to convince customers of your product’s ability to solve their problems.
- Place customer interviews and testimonials on your homepage and landing pages. Include:
- Videos
- Quotes
- Case studies
Testimonials on your website’s homepage and relevant landing pages so potential customers can determine whether your product fits them—and increase your ability to retain customers.
Related Reading
How Do You Collect Customer Feedback?
Capture Customer Feedback on Your Website
Websites are a great place to collect customer feedback. You can have a dedicated feedback page to collect reviews for products and services, use a website intercept to collect feedback on customers’ experiences as they browse your site, or install a feedback tab so users can report their issues without disrupting their journey.
Use Feedback Boxes to Get User Input on Operational Issues
While surveys are great for capturing big ideas, you’ll want to get user input on operational issues that may annoy them before they lead to customer churn.
Feedback boxes are an ideal way to collect this information. You can place them on your company’s website to get user feedback about minor issues, such as when a site isn’t loading correctly.
Conduct Customer Interviews for Immediate Feedback
Interviews involve company staff asking pre-ordered or random questions to a customer either face-to-face or via phone. The primary advantage of a customer interview is that it opens up a conversation that might provide more actionable information.
Here is how to get more out of a customer interview:
- Ask how long the customer has to take the interview
- Be an active listener by mirroring customer responses and being more open
- Start with general inquiries and be more specific as you build rapport
- Use open-ended questions and probe for clarity
Create Suggestion Boards for Collaborative Feedback
Suggestion boards collect feedback from users who can also see the feedback from others. These boards allow customers to collaborate by creating feedback posts that everyone on the board can comment on. Companies can then analyze the suggestions and identify which areas need attention by the number of comments or votes on the boards.
Use Transactional Emails to Collect Feedback
Transactional emails are the emails a customer receives after signing up for or upgrading a service. Research has shown that they have a higher open rate than other emails, making them an essential platform for customer feedback.
You could integrate a few questions to get the customer feedback when they are most receptive after purchase or when a customer is exiting a plan.
Listen to Social Media Feedback
Social media posts, comments, and discussions contain candid information about your product or brand. You can scour social media platforms for direct mentions of your company or products.
Alternatively, you can create a poll on a social media site and ask for immediate feedback from the public. You'll likely capture immense feedback, which you can use to align your products or services with customers’ wants.
Hold Quarterly Business Reviews
The quarterly business review is a quarterly meeting to discuss how your products and services are helping your customers. Because benchmarking data is available, these meetings allow you to analyze your return on investment for your product or service.
Implement Live Chat on Your Website
Live chats involve your sales or customer representatives engaging with customers in real time to solve their issues promptly. You can integrate a live chat feature throughout your company website or on specific pages.
Customer Feedback Surveys
A survey entails asking your customers to provide feedback by filling in an electronic survey form (long form) or providing feedback on-site or in-app (quick survey). To achieve a high response rate, you can use the following tactics:
- Ask questions that meet your needs
- Make sure your questions are simple
- Keep the number of questions to less than 10
- Use open-ended questions to elicit more information
Boosting Credibility and Conversions with Testimonial Software for Authentic Client Feedback
Testimonial simplifies the process of building trust and credibility for businesses. Our testimonial software allows an accessible collection and display of authentic client testimonials featuring:
- Video and text options
- An embeddable ‘wall of love’ widget
- A clever Email Assistant
- Third-party review imports
This is ideal for:
- Content creators
- Agencies
- eCommerce
- SaaS companies
Testimonials help boost your credibility and conversion rates by showcasing real customer experiences. Build a wall of love for free today with Testimonial.
5 Best Practices For Making Sure Feedback Is Valuable
1. Don’t Waste Your Customers’ Time
When creating a survey, it’s crucial to keep it as short as possible while still offering useful data. Surveys with too many questions increase the risk of respondents giving up halfway, leaving you with incomplete data. Keep it simple and ask questions your customers will want to answer. Put yourself in their shoes.
This will help you keep your questions short and easy to answer. If unsure, look at how larger companies like Amazon and eBay ask for feedback. Carefully consider the structure and questions in your survey; each should give you valuable data to help you take action or come to a conclusion. If it doesn’t, don’t include it.
2. Let Customers Speak Freely
Whatever method you use, allow your customer to tell you what they think in their own words. Closed options on a survey or feedback form restrict the information you’ll receive and the insights you can pull from it.
While these questions can help you monitor trends over time, open-ended questions can give you a better picture of your customers and how they feel about your business. So make sure you offer customers a mixture or an option to provide more information than just scoring your services.
3. Segment Your Customers for More Accurate Feedback
The questions you want to ask repeat buyers may differ from those you ask those who only bought once or returned their order. Tailoring your questions will yield much more useful responses.
4. Timing is Everything
Asking at the right time can increase your response rates. For example, in most cases, asking for comments on a product a week or two after the customer has received it rather than a year down the line makes sense. Asking for feedback if there’s been a shipment delay could annoy your customers.
5. Offer Multiple Feedback Methods
It’s best to offer several ways for customers to feedback on their experience; for example, some might like the real-time nature of social media, while others may want to give more detailed, private comments.
Related Reading
- Capterra Alternatives
Build a Wall of Love for Free Today with Testimonial
Build Trust With Authentic Customer Testimonials
Testimonial simplifies the process of building trust and credibility for businesses. Our testimonial software allows an accessible collection and display of authentic client testimonials featuring:
- Video and text options
- An embeddable ‘wall of love’ widget
- A clever Email Assistant
- Third-party review imports
This is ideal for:
- Content creators
- Agencies
- eCommerce
- SaaS companies
Testimonials help boost your credibility and conversion rates by showcasing real customer experiences. Build a wall of love for free today with Testimonial.
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