Table of Contents
- What Is Customer Feedback?
- Types of Customer Feedback: The Good, The Bad, and Everything In-Between
- Related Reading
- Why is Customer Feedback Important?
- Improve Products and Services with Customer Feedback
- Leveraging User Feedback for Product Innovation
- Customer Feedback Helps Enhance Satisfaction Levels and Create Value
- The High Cost of Customer Dissatisfaction
- Customer Feedback Engages and Increases Customer Loyalty
- Effective Channels for Review Requests
- Customer Feedback Improves Acquisition and Retention
- The Power of Positive Reviews
- Customer Feedback Optimizes Resource and Training Allocation
- Customer Feedback Enhances Decision-Making Ability
- Customer Feedback Reduces Costs
- Leveraging Data for Efficiency and Cost Reduction
- Customer Feedback De-Escalates and Continues Conversations Offline
- Prioritizing Privacy and Building Strong Relationships
- Customer Feedback Creates a Better Customer Experience
- Data-Driven Customer Experience
- Boost Your Credibility with Testimonial
- How Do You Collect Customer Feedback
- Website Feedback: How to Collect Customer Feedback on Your Site
- Email: The Old Standby for Collecting Customer Feedback
- SMS: A Quick and Easy Way to Gather Customer Feedback
- Social Media: Listening to the Conversation
- In-Product Feedback: Getting Insights Directly From the Source
- In-App Feedback: Capturing Customer Insights on Mobile
- Customer Interviews: Getting Qualitative Feedback
- Focus Groups: Getting Customer Feedback Through Group Dynamics
- 5 Best Customer Feedback Tools For Gathering Insights
- 1. Testimonial: The Easiest Way to Collect Customer Reviews
- 2. Chisel: The Most Innovative Customer Feedback Software
- Key Features
- 3. TypeForm: The Most Engaging Customer Feedback Tool
- Key Features
- 4. Forms.app: The Easiest Customer Feedback Tool to Use
- Key Features
- 5. QuestionPro: The Best Customer Feedback Tool for Communities
- Key Features
- Related Reading
- What Should You Do After You Gather Customer Feedback?
- Share Customer Feedback Data With the Right Teams Immediately
- Close the Loop With Customers
- Turning Negative Experiences into Positive Ones
- Tailored Approaches to Customer Feedback
- Enhance Employee Experiences
- Empowering Employees Through Customer Feedback
- Improve Your Products, Services, and Processes
- Related Reading
- Build a Wall of Love for Free Today with Testimonial
- The Power of Online Reviews and Testimonials
- Leveraging Testimonials for Targeted Persuasion
.jpg?table=block&id=63572ce3-b33f-41e0-95bd-866bd59135f4&cache=v2)
Title
Why Is Customer Feedback Important? How To Collect Them & 5 Tools
Date
Nov 7, 2024
Description
Understand the value of customer feedback, effective collection methods, and the top 5 tools to improve customer insights and satisfaction.
Status
Done
Current Column
Person
Writer
Picture this: You're standing before a brick wall, staring. You know you need to break through to get to the other side. But, for your life, you can't figure out how. That's what ignoring customer feedback is like. Your business is stuck, and the wall is blocking your way to growth and success. Why? Because the best customer feedback tools uncover valuable details about what your customers think about your business. This article will illustrate the significance of customer feedback and how you can collect it to help your business reach its goals.
One of the best ways to collect customer feedback is with testimonial software. This simple tool can help your business understand why customer feedback is essential and assist you in reaching your goals.
What Is Customer Feedback?
Customer feedback is the narrative customers share about their experiences with a company’s offerings. Grasping the nuances of this feedback is pivotal, enabling businesses to build their:
- Products
- Services
- Overall customer experience
Types of Customer Feedback: The Good, The Bad, and Everything In-Between
There are several types of customer feedback, each offering unique insights:
- Surveys: Structured questionnaires that gather specific information about customer experiences; these can be conducted online, via email, or in person.
- Reviews: Publicly posted feedback on websites, social media, or third-party review platforms like Trustpilot or Google Reviews.
- Direct Communication: Feedback received through direct customer interactions, such as emails, phone calls, or face-to-face conversations.
- Focus Groups: Small, diverse customer groups 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
Why is Customer Feedback Important?
Customer feedback is paramount for businesses as it is an invaluable guide for strategic decisions. Actively monitoring, collecting, and meticulously evaluating customer feedback enables companies to gain granular insights into the following:
- Pain points
- Expectations
This nuanced understanding allows you to fine-tune their products, services, and overall brand experience, ensuring a custom approach that resonates with their target audience. For instance, if customers consistently desire enhanced features in a particular product, you can allocate resources to meet those specific demands, thereby staying ahead of the competition.
Customer feedback is a real-time customer satisfaction barometer, helping companies promptly identify and rectify issues. Quickly addressing concerns fosters customer loyalty and enhances the overall brand reputation.
Customer feedback isn’t just a measure of past performance but a strategic tool for future success. It empowers businesses to meet and exceed customer expectations, solidifying their position in the market and driving sustained growth.
Improve Products and Services with Customer Feedback
When collecting customer feedback for product development, insights can uncover existing issues and inspire new ideas. Successful new product development relies on understanding consumer needs and emphasizing the importance of integrating various feedback forms. Products addressing real-world problems are more likely to be valued by customers and, therefore, succeed in the market.
In a global survey by 280 Group, nearly 900 product managers reported that, on average, 20.9% of their products failed to meet customer needs. Incorporating customer feedback into the development process reduces the risk of product misalignment with consumer preferences.
Continuous discovery, involving ongoing solicitation and analysis of customer feedback, is crucial for creating products that align with consumer desires and streamlining the development process.
Leveraging User Feedback for Product Innovation
In the smartphone industry, brands leverage user communities and surveys to gather feedback on current devices and ideas for new features. This iterative process enables companies to avoid wasting resources on unwanted features and continually deliver value to consumers.
Customer Feedback Helps Enhance Satisfaction Levels and Create Value
Monitoring customer feedback helps you understand how well you are (or aren't) serving customers. Companies can use customer feedback to learn what customers like the most about their products. Depending on the data, you may learn that by leaning into your strengths, you can increase customer satisfaction and create additional value, for which some customers may even be willing to pay more.
How much more, exactly? Depending on your industry and clientele, perhaps as much as 10-30% more, going by Forbes contributor and CX expert Shep Hyken's willingness to pay findings.
When customer satisfaction levels begin to lag, feedback will grow negative, customers may buy less or jump ship to competitors, and profits will decline. When customers are dissatisfied, they don't keep it to themselves.
A bad viral product review can result in skyrocketing customer acquisition costs. The GM of Service Hub at HubSpot describes the state of customer acquisition in unequivocal terms like appalling.
The High Cost of Customer Dissatisfaction
According to research by SimplicityDX, e-commerce acquisition costs have increased 222% from 2013. Nevertheless, when you recognize early dissatisfaction signals, you can modify the product, service, and customer experience (or all three).
Customer Feedback Engages and Increases Customer Loyalty
People appreciate having their voices heard. Direct engagement with customers online can deepen a customer's connection with and respect for a company, strengthening their loyalty. When you directly respond to a customer's feedback, they may reward you with:
- Greater loyalty
- Increased purchases
- Positive word of mouth
Having a large number of loyal customers can improve the efficiency of marketing efforts. Additionally, engaged, happy customers respond favorably to direct feedback solicitations, particularly if you ask them immediately after a purchase.
Effective Channels for Review Requests
According to a BrightLocal survey conducted in 2023, 34% of consumers said they would likely leave a review if asked to do so via email. Thirty-three percent said they would provide a review in person during their experience or transaction. A further 32% reported that a receipt or invoice would be an effective way to request a review. (Social media reviews weren’t far behind, ranking a close 4th).
Customer Feedback Improves Acquisition and Retention
Listening to existing customers can also yield insights about marketing and sales strategies that make it easier to acquire customers. For example, a business may learn that its pricing is too high or that its marketing is turning off a segment of consumers. Customer feedback can help your business make the adjustments necessary to attract more customers and, in some cases, do so while reducing customer acquisition costs.
Businesses aren’t the only ones who pay attention to customer feedback. Other customers do as well. Many customers, especially those seeking a product or service for the first time, will skim customer reviews for potential red flags.
The Power of Positive Reviews
TrustPulse says 60% of consumers believe the number of reviews is crucial when considering whether to use a business. More reviews testify to a business's credibility and popularity, so quantity matters. Conversely, businesses whose customers speak negatively will find it more challenging to attract new customers and face growing customer acquisition costs and customer churn.
Customer Feedback Optimizes Resource and Training Allocation
Customer feedback also helps optimize training and performance. Imagine your business is introducing a complex new product. Suppose you receive customer feedback suggesting that your sales team needs help explaining aspects of the product's functionality or installation. Your business could respond accordingly by investing more time in training.
Reviewing touchpoints like call center feedback, chat logs, or other employee-consumer interactions, you can pinpoint errors stemming from inexperience and ensure that departments have a balance of senior and junior staff.
Customer Feedback Enhances Decision-Making Ability
It may be tempting to react immediately to customer criticism. A negative review or comment can send PR teams into overdrive, spurring designers, engineers, and product teams into action.
Still, reacting with adequate data might lead to spending considerable time and money making product modifications or operational adjustments, only to discover that the feedback needed to be more accurate. The feedback may reflect the sentiments of a few and not the majority of customers. Or perhaps customers don’t value a feature request enough to pay for it. When insights or sentiments are batches of unstructured data, they must be tested and validated before taking action to avoid these unnecessary risks.
Customer Feedback Reduces Costs
Using feedback data, your business can lower costs in nearly unlimited ways, potentially impacting everything from acquisition costs to churn rates. For example, you might identify potential design flaws through prototype testing and feedback before production starts, avoiding production errors and shortening the NPD process, saving time and money.
In some cases, feedback can help identify bottlenecks in the customer journey and pinpoint where to streamline. For instance, one energy company found that setting up a new utility account for customers moving to a new home required 18 steps.
Leveraging Data for Efficiency and Cost Reduction
That company used survey data to streamline its process and reduce new account opening steps to five, resulting in a 40-50% cost reduction. The number of complaints also decreased, as did the number of people handling them (from 109 to 20). Product reviews, sales data, and other indirect customer feedback may also help divest a product or brand before it becomes a liability.
Customer Feedback De-Escalates and Continues Conversations Offline
Acknowledging customer feedback is crucial, especially when monitoring reviews or engaging in social listening. A key aspect of this practice involves taking the conversation offline by inviting the customer to follow up directly via email or another direct route, away from the public view.
By doing so, you can address concerns or feedback with a personalized and focused approach, demonstrating a commitment to customer satisfaction.
Prioritizing Privacy and Building Strong Relationships
This private interaction respects the customer's privacy and encourages a more open and detailed discussion. Handling matters privately can also prevent escalation and negative public perception while striving for long-lasting customer relationships through direct and meaningful communication.
Customer Feedback Creates a Better Customer Experience
In today's competitive environment—once in which 73% of consumers told PwC that customer experience is their top decision-making factor driving purchasing decisions—prioritizing exceptional service must be a paramount focus.
Many businesses even have a team devoted entirely to ensuring service excellence from the moment customers visit their website (or enter a retail location's doors) to the moment they unbox the product.
Data-Driven Customer Experience
Positive customer experiences help strengthen brand loyalty and customer lifetime value. But it's nearly impossible to build a consistently high-quality customer experience without being in tune with precise data describing what customers:
- Need
- Want
- Value
Boost Your Credibility with Testimonial
Testimonial simplifies the process of building trust and credibility for businesses. Our software allows an accessible collection and display of authentic client testimonials featuring:
- Video and text options
- Embeddable wall of love widget
- Clever Email Assistant
- Third-party review imports
Testimonials showcase real customer experiences and help boost credibility and conversion rates. They are ideal for:
- Content creators
- Agencies
- eCommerce
- SaaS companies
Build a wall of love for free today with Testimonial.
How Do You Collect Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is vital for business growth. However, you shouldn’t just wait for reviews to come in naturally. There are many ways to collect customer feedback, starting with website feedback.
Website Feedback: How to Collect Customer Feedback on Your Site
There are a few ways to ask for feedback on your website. You could have a dedicated page on your site, which you can easily do with Testimonial.io, or you could use a web intercept.
Dedicated pages are best for product or service reviews. You can also have a feedback tab where customers can quickly answer a two-question survey without interrupting their browsing journey.
Email: The Old Standby for Collecting Customer Feedback
Reaching customers via their inboxes is a trusted, cost-effective, and familiar way to gather
customer feedback. Most people have an email account they regularly check, meaning your reach potential is large. Your customers will be used to seeing invitations to give feedback arrive by email, which means they’ll be comfortable seeing your request appear.
Another benefit is that they’re likely to feel confident clicking through to your feedback survey when it’s from a familiar and trusted email address and relates directly to a purchase they can remember making.
SMS: A Quick and Easy Way to Gather Customer Feedback
Like email, SMS is a channel that many people use, even if they’re not enthusiastic users of digital communications – and that means it’s a method that offers plenty of reach within your customer base. It’s also simple and low-cost to implement, although there is more of an expense than with email or social media due to network charges.
SMS is great for collecting a small amount of feedback, e.g., obtaining an NPS score for a single purchase. It's quick and easy.
Social Media: Listening to the Conversation
One in three consumers opts to share their concerns over social media instead of phone and email support. More and more businesses are now listening actively on social media and using its capacity for measurement and metrics to their advantage.
Besides answering customer complaints, social media, and third-party review sites are great places to collect customer feedback via listening and sentiment analysis. Whereas SMS provides an active response to a direct question (for example, how satisfied are you with your recent purchase?), social media and review sites also help you gather customer feedback that was provided indirectly (where a question was not asked).
They might tag the brand directly or share their opinion indirectly with their followers. But that’s not to say survey feedback isn’t an option. Many consumers are willing to voice their opinions and take short surveys via channels like Facebook and Twitter.
In-Product Feedback: Getting Insights Directly From the Source
One of the best ways to understand if your digital product meets your customer’s needs is to add a feedback request feature directly in the product interface, i.e., on a home screen or main dashboard. If there’s a product malfunction or issue, this method will allow you to receive a notification about it right away.
In-App Feedback: Capturing Customer Insights on Mobile
Mobile customer interactions are becoming increasingly popular, and companies must capitalize on the ease of submitting in-app feedback. This allows organizations to embed key questions and feedback forms in the app seamlessly. Profile and action criteria can ensure the correct feedback is solicited at the appropriate time.
Customer Interviews: Getting Qualitative Feedback
When you need in-depth, qualitative customer feedback, one-on-one interviews with a researcher can be valuable. Although they’re labor-intensive, meaning you can only reach a relatively small number of people, interviews can help you to validate hypotheses and observations you’ve made based on data from a broader population.
They can also help with understanding a complete customer experience, as opposed to a part like a checkout or a contact center interaction.
Focus Groups: Getting Customer Feedback Through Group Dynamics
Focus groups offer similar benefits to interviews but are likely to be more in-depth and more structured, as they are led by a moderator who will guide the discussion. Thanks to discussion and debate between participants, you’ll benefit from multiple points of view and may uncover more profound thoughts and ideas than you would with a single interviewee.
5 Best Customer Feedback Tools For Gathering Insights
1. Testimonial: The Easiest Way to Collect Customer Reviews
Testimonial simplifies the process of building trust and credibility for businesses. Our software allows an accessible collection and display of authentic client testimonials featuring:
- Video and text options
- Embeddable wall of love widget
- Clever Email Assistant
- Third-party review imports
Testimonials showcase real customer experiences help boost credibility and conversion rates. They are ideal for:
- Content creators
- Agencies
- eCommerce
- SaaS companies
Build a wall of love for free today with Testimonial.
2. Chisel: The Most Innovative Customer Feedback Software
Chisel is one of the most innovative customer feedback software today. Being the top-notch product management tool, Chisel knows that customer feedback analysis is the only path to your success.
In addition to providing an exclusive Product Feedback Pillar, Chisel has incorporated artificial intelligence's transformative capabilities to redefine how companies engage with and comprehend their customers' insights.
Key Features
- Idea Box is a central repository that organizes all user ideas in one place.
- Auto-labeling with AI for streamlined ticket organization.
- Feedback Portal to save and manage customer feedback with just a single link.
- Build surveys from scratch or use templates.
- Tailor audience panels as needed.
- Roadmap prioritization based on user feedback.
3. TypeForm: The Most Engaging Customer Feedback Tool
TypeForm has to be one of the most interactive and best customer feedback tools if you want surveys that engage your target audience. You can embed images, videos, icons, etc, in your survey forms. Moreover, you can create unique survey flows and tones to capture the most relevant customer feedback.
TypeForm also allows you to accept payment through its free customer feedback app. You can schedule your surveys to clearly define a process.
Key Features
Here are the main features offered by TypeForm:
- Unlimited surveys with 10 questions and 10 responses per month
- Skip logic and hidden fields
- Templates
- Downloadable survey data
- Integration with business tools like:
- Zapier
- Slack
- Mailchimp
- HubSpot
4. Forms.app: The Easiest Customer Feedback Tool to Use
forms.app is an easy-to-use customer feedback tool that helps you quickly create surveys, forms, quizzes, and questionnaires, thanks to its pre-made templates and AI form generator.
This form builder software offers various free features, including signature collection, payment acceptance, conditional questions, quiz creation with auto calculations, workflow automation, and advanced customization options.
Key Features
Here are the main features offered by forms.app:
- AI form generator
- +500 third-party integrations
- Various customization options
- Advanced data analytics and reports
- Accessible from everywhere thanks to its mobile application
5. QuestionPro: The Best Customer Feedback Tool for Communities
QuestionPro is a community feedback tool that manages all kinds of feedback through a centralized customer feedback platform. Its branching feature helps you collect the most accurate customer feedback data—both qualitative and quantitative. You can customize your surveys with your brand theme to improve brand recall.
Key Features
Here are the primary features you can enjoy with the QuestionPro free customer feedback tool:
- Unlimited free surveys with up to 300 responses per survey
- Access to 1 member
- 30+ question types
- Customized surveys for branding
- Skip logic
- Integration with Google Sheets
- Export feedback to CSV and XLS
Related Reading
What Should You Do After You Gather Customer Feedback?
Share Customer Feedback Data With the Right Teams Immediately
Customer feedback is essential for improving the customer experience, but it only works when you act on it. Specifically, you need to share the data with the right teams and get to work immediately.
Customer-centric organizations have buy-in from every department, including the executive team. They understand that one department is not responsible for great customer service, but relevant information must be provided throughout the organization to make better decisions.
Close the Loop With Customers
When a customer takes the time to share feedback—especially if it’s negative—always follow up. This is called closed-loop feedback, and it’s best practice to use ticketing and case management systems to ensure no customer gets missed. By following up with unhappy customers, you can work as a team to resolve the issue quickly and turn detractors into promoters.
Turning Negative Experiences into Positive Ones
Closing the loop has the potential to turn bad experiences into memorably positive ones. When you quickly and effectively reach out and solve the problem, you can hugely exceed expectations that a poor experience has lowered. With the right approach, unhappy customers can be converted, and customer feedback is important for informing your strategy.
Tailored Approaches to Customer Feedback
Closing the loop looks different for different parts of your customer base. When you can segment your customers, you can take a different approach with high-value customers, who might receive a personal contact, than with lower-commitment, more casual customers, where an automated contact might be more suitable.
Enhance Employee Experiences
There is an established link between CX (customer experience) and EX (employee experience). It stands to reason that happier and more engaged employees result in happier customers, but what about the other way around?
Empowering Employees Through Customer Feedback
Customer feedback can benefit your employees in several ways. First, it can provide the basis for training and career development. Second, it may highlight areas for improvement in how employees offer service. It may highlight outdated systems or policies that prevent employees from helping customers or help generate ideas for new approaches or processes. Third, it can create value for the employees who work face-to-face with customers.
When employees receive feedback and are empowered to act on it, they can feel a greater sense of agency, satisfaction in doing their job, and connection to the customer.
Improve Your Products, Services, and Processes
As mentioned, collecting customer feedback and gathering data only becomes useful when used to make organizational changes. Your customer feedback strategy aims to collect customer feedback and improve customer service.
Related Reading
- Capterra Alternatives
- Trustpilot Alternatives
- Review Management System
Build a Wall of Love for Free Today with Testimonial
Customer feedback comes in many forms. One of the most effective ways of building credibility is testimonials, specifically those from real customers who have detailed their experiences with your business and products. Why are testimonials so effective? Customers trust other customers.
The Power of Online Reviews and Testimonials
Eighty-eight percent of shoppers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. These unbiased reviews help reduce uncertainty and perceived risk, especially for buyers making high-stakes purchases. The higher the stakes, the more they look for clear, detailed information about products and services.
Leveraging Testimonials for Targeted Persuasion
Testimonials provide this kind of information, especially from users with characteristics similar to the buyer's. For instance, an eCommerce store selling hiking gear will have more success converting a buyer from a testimonial about their products from another hiker instead of the manufacturer.
How do you collect these valuable endorsements? Use a tool like Testimonial to automate the process.
Written by
.jpg?table=block&id=552ecf37-b2e8-4b3a-bafe-6d3dbd6ea219&cache=v2)
