Published on October 20th, 2021 | by Christopher Porteus

Customer Feedback: Why It Matters And How To Get It

Any good customer experience strategy values customer feedback. Both mom-and-pop shops and corporate giants alike have to deal with customers.

Good customer experience can do wonders for your business. The majority of customers are likely to trust companies with good customer experiences. According to research, this majority is at a whopping 90%.

It’s already an entire feat to build a business, but you need to keep a steady stream of customers to keep it running. One way to do this is to get customer feedback and act on your findings.

How Customer Feedback Helps Your Business

Customer feedback is any information that customers provide on a product or service. It is an integral part of the customer experience. Prioritizing it can lead to significant benefits for your business. Here are a few of them:

It Measures Customer Satisfaction.

Customer feedback allows you to gauge if your customers are happy with your business. Upon reading a customer’s review, for example, you’ll already have a good idea of their opinions. Do many other customers share their thoughts? What are their primary concerns?

Whether good or bad, paying attention to what your customers say helps your business. It lets you stay on top of your operations and make decisions when necessary.

The success of a business depends on many factors. But, research shows that customer satisfaction is one of them. There exist significant associations between satisfaction and a business’ market and financial performance.

It Helps Improve Your Products/Services.

Whether good or bad, customer feedback is valuable. Your customers don’t have to share their thoughts with you, yet most times, they do. This means they expect you to listen.

Suppose you’re getting good feedback. Then, that’s awesome. It means what you’re doing is on point. And, you already have the tools for your business to perform well.

Getting bad feedback, which can be harmful in large amounts, can also be helpful. It points out your weak spots and allows you to innovate.

Before sharing your business with the world, you’ve probably already done your research. You found out what people wanted and sought to offer them something of value. But how do you know if you’re on the right track?

Keeping an eye on customer feedback keeps you in tune with your customers’ needs and wants. Making it a constant practice is essential. Trends change, and to stay successful, you need to innovate alongside them.

It Helps Maximize Your Team’s Potential.

Getting to know your customers’ needs and wants requires you to take action. How are you going to meet your vast clientele’s demands? To execute your strategy well, you need to mobilize your team.

Deciding to execute a campaign to improve customer experience can be energizing. Having your employees look toward specific goals can boost work engagement.

Depending on your campaign goals, every department will have something to work on. And since campaigns usually have limited time frames, it’s easy to see results as well.

It’s an excellent way to foster teamwork and revive motivation for every employee or team member. It stimulates creativity and taps everybody’s potential.

It Shows Customers You Care.

Every business sets out to fulfill a need. That is the main priority. Being able to meet that need is a significant factor that pushes companies to success.

Keeping your customers happy makes them want to do more business with you. Being proactive in providing the best customer experience is one way to do that.

Seventy-eight percent of consumers express loyalty to brands that understand them. The same thing goes if these brands value what they want to achieve.

What makes your customers loyal? Instead of trying to speculate, you can ask them directly.

When done well, asking customers for their opinion makes them feel valued. Customers who have a high-quality experience are 2.7 times more likely to stay loyal to a brand than those who do not.

How to Get Customer Feedback

Communication has seen a lot of advancements in the past decades.

Now, there are many ways for businesses to reach out and get feedback, or the other way around. It’s not uncommon for customers to volunteer their thoughts.

Each method has its characteristics, which you may want to assess depending on your needs.

Long Form-Based Surveys

This method takes a more traditional form. Due to its length, it provides a comprehensive picture of customer opinion. You can ask anything here. These questionnaires can consist of open-ended questions and scoring systems, among others.

But, it can also feel like a chore to do. A good tip is to keep it at a reasonable length. Consult with researchers to come up with open-ended questions that can be easy to answer.

If you can’t help but go the longer route, it wouldn’t hurt to give customers an incentive. You can send them an on-site freebie or a coupon they can use.

You can do this online or offline. It’s best to host it on your website, but if you can’t, there are a lot of online platforms available. Some popular ones are Typeform, Google Forms, and Surveylegend.

Short In-App Surveys

This type of survey is a quick and easy way to get feedback when your business involves app usage.

In-app surveys work best when they are short, quick, and to the point. You can put this in place by attaching questions to specific tools or features.

For example, you can ask your users to rate a product or feature through a star or thumbs up-down system. You can also make use of multiple-choice questions.

It’s a quick way to gauge their opinions without limiting your app’s usability. Remember, they are there to use your app. You can save the longer, open-ended questions to your survey form.

Social Media Posts

Social media is becoming the avenue of choice for customer feedback and interaction. It’s free, instant, and powerful.

What makes social media worthwhile is that it already has an engaged user base. It is not solely a business platform. This characteristic makes users feel more comfortable with expressing their opinions.

Businesses can get feedback by asking for it. For example, through a post asking for comments, a short poll, or through widgets.

But customers can also post feedback voluntarily. They can do this through the comments section, a page rating, or their posts.

Using social media can be one of the most powerful things you can do. This organic content can boost or damage your business. Of course, the breadth of its effects depends on whether a post goes ‘viral’ or not.

In Conclusion

Businesses have a lot to gain by paying attention to customer feedback. They keep businesses alive and help them grow when used correctly.

Gathering feedback is only half of the work. To maximize the information you have, you need qualitative data analysis (here’s a good break down of this process).

It helps you identify patterns and connections in your customers’ feedback. This will help you come up with strategies for your business to thrive.

About the Author

Christopher Porteus Chris Porteous is a veteran in the tech space, founding Framestr and writing about his experiences scaling startups. When he's not working, he's writing about the latest tech products and providing insights on how to utilize technology to improve your life.