The power of customer feedback – part 1: Why is it essential?

There’s a handful of things that are absolutely essential when running your own business. Maintaining good relations with your customers, pleasing them and listening to their needs are undoubtedly amongst the most important ones to name. The truth is, only satisfied customers will happily return to you, spend more on their purchases and spread a good word about your brand. It is therefore fundamental to constantly be investing enough resources and energy into keeping your customer experience positive. But how do you find out you’re doing it right?

Customer feedback, information provided by your consumers about how satisfied or dissatisfied they are with your product or service, will help you stay on top of the game. By paying enough attention to what they have in mind, you can secure customer loyalty and improve retention by reducing customer churn. 

It’s usually gathered by using a customer feedback form and it’s the greatest resource of learning about your company’s possible gaps for improvement. Whether it’s missing features, an incomplete sortiment, tidiness of your store or willingness of the staff, your customers will tell you what you’re doing right or wrong and why. If you then treat that information appropriately they will never leave you. All in all, customer feedback is a gold mine that’ll help you adjust your actions to your customers’ needs more accurately.

In this article, we’ll try to explain why customer feedback will help your business stay ahead of your competition.

WHY SHOULD WE CONDUCT CUSTOMER FEEDBACK?

It is no coincidence that top performing companies all understand the enormous importance of customer feedback and its impact on their business. As research shows, it’s anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one satisfied. Loyal customers is what keeps your business growing. They provide stability and give you a chance to plan ahead. If they fluctuate too much and if the acquisition drops, an undesirable decrease of business follows inevitably.

Let’s point out the key reasons why customer feedback is the breakfast of champions!

1. It helps you reveal the aspects of your product or service that need improvement.

The day to day work with your product or your service and knowing every little detail of its every feature might eventually lead to your partial blindness. Being enclosed in your bubble can corrupt your perception of the product and hide its imperfections. And this is where your customers might open your eyes! They provide you with an exact summary of what is right and wrong about your product or service. And even though it might hurt your feelings, it’s your customers you’re doing the whole show for after all. Knowing what you lack and steering the development of your product or service the way they wish for is the best way to give them a reason to choose you again in the future. They might even help you identify your USP (unique selling proposition).

2. You’ll earn more money by making the right business decisions.

By monitoring customer satisfaction and finding out what your consumers’ preferences are, you can truly focus on using your energy and time efficiently. You’ll know who your customers are and you’ll feel more secure about what it is that should be worked on the most. That way, you won’t waste your time on things that seem important to you but aren’t appreciated by your customers or users. As mentioned above, your customers might often provide you with ideas that you may not have considered yourself in the first place and suggest a direction worth your effort. Take their suggestions into consideration, based on these insights you can then reallocate your efforts confident that they will be worthwhile. You’ll end up giving them what they want which equals a reason to do more business with you in the future.

3. It increases customer experience and improves retention.

Satisfied customers will stay with you. Showing your customers that you value their opinion is priceless. By listening to customer feedback and acting accordingly, you’ll make them feel heard, involved and important – all they need for the best customer experience. They’ll feel like your main focus is to solve their problems, not to get their money which increases customer loyalty. As a matter of fact, highly-engaged customers buy 90% more often and spend 60% more per transaction. Involving them into the “team of creators” creates positive connotations with your brand for them. They will feel attached to your product or service, get more devoted to your brand and increase your sales.

4. It will increase your customer acquisition.

A positive customer feedback is a great source of information for other potential consumers! If your customer feedback survey returns to you with a wave of awe don’t be scared to make a use of it. It can be used as testimonials, published on your website or social media (of course with the author’s prior approval) and embrace the power of these brand ambassadors who won’t go far to talk you up. Because, let’s face it, a positive word-of-mouth is most probably still the most effective (and cheapest!) way to acquire new customers. Referrals are also the most common source of attracting new leads. Nowadays, having positive reviews at your disposal is much more powerful and trusted by people than commercials and expert advice. Getting positive customer feedback is therefore invaluable. It will help you build a strong reputation which draws your current and potential customers’ attention more naturally and leads to building more new business.

5. Good customer feedback will boost your internal motivation.

Customer feedback can also offer a good insight into what the effort of your team or employees is like. That, being appreciated especially by team leaders or company owners, can point out who’s doing a great job or not and why. By identifying the good moves from the bad ones, dealing with the customers can get even more effective which leads to better customer experience, higher customer satisfaction and therefore increased sales. Besides, being praised by customers increases the team’s morale and motivation and leads to a higher employee engagement. Gaining confidence and being assured that your business is on the right track makes the entire process of building and maintaining it so much easier and more pleasant.

BREATHTAKING RESULTS – ZERO EFFORT

As you can see, there are many credible reasons not to underestimate the power of customer feedback. Especially in the modern age of powerful online survey tools such as Survio, building an effective customer feedback form doesn’t require too much effort. It only takes a few clicks to create a survey from scratch or by using one of the many ready-made survey templates.

In the following article, we’ll show you how to build an exquisite customer feedback form as well as provide you with some tips on how to boost its effectivity by asking the right customer feedback questions and more useful tips. To top it up, we’ll provide you with a template that will make conducting your customer feedback a lot easier. Til then, follow us, ask questions, write notes and leave comments via Facebook, Twitter or by e-mail and don’t miss out on anything!