Stephen R. Covey, accomplished author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and other bestselling books, observes: “It takes humility to seek feedback. It takes wisdom to understand it, analyze it and appropriately act on it.”
It’s imperative that a small business owner understands the importance of customer feedback and how it can help shape your products, services, and marketing plans. With effective strategies in place to regularly review customer feedback, a business owner will be ahead of the game. Here’s information about how to gather customer feedback, analyze the data, and use the information to improve operations.
Customer feedback is information provided to you by those who have purchased your products or services. This information is a valuable resource to let you know if you’re on the right track or need to make any changes. You can collect customer feedback through surveys, social media posts, or online review sites. To stay ahead of the competition, listening to customer feedback, whether it is positive or negative, prompted, or unprompted, should be part of your business operations. The business owner or a dedicated team member should be tasked with regularly soliciting feedback and addressing it, if necessary. You should have policies in place to answer any questions or address any issues that arise from feedback to protect your brand reputation.
No customers, no sales. It’s simple – you need to listen to those who can make or break your business. Here are some solid reasons customer feedback can be helpful for a business.
Products and services improvement
Customers can provide valuable information about your products and services that can help you improve. Market research before you launch a product is helpful but won’t tell the whole picture until you start selling.
You want your end product to meet expectations, solve problems, and fulfill customer needs. There’s no better way to discover if you’ve met these objectives than going directly to those who have purchased your goods or services.
Measure customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction and loyalty is a crucial factor that determines a company’s financial performance. It is directly linked to many benefits, such as increased market share, lower costs, or higher revenue. Many studies confirmed that there is a close connection between customer satisfaction and business performance.
Showing you value customer opinions
When you ask for feedback, you’re letting customers know that how they feel is important to you. This helps establish engagement and can lead to customer loyalty. Asking for opinions shows customers that you are genuinely interested in fulfilling their needs and making them happy.
Creates a good customer experience
The customer experience encompasses each and every interaction someone has with not just your customer support team, but your whole brand. That means your website, your social media, your storefront, and more than just your customer service. Each potential touchpoint between your company and your customers is part and parcel of the customer experience, both in person and online. When you improve the customer experience, you increase your sales.
Improves customer retention
Customer retention refers to the activities and actions a business will take to reduce the number of customer defections. Improving customer retention helps a business retain as many customers as possible.
Leads to word-of-mouth recommendations
About 62% of consumers search online for reviews and information before purchasing a product and a whopping 90% believe brand recommendations from friends. Think about the last time a friend told you about a great shopping experience – didn’t it make you want to shop there too? When you ask for customer feedback, those customers feel valued, and are more likely to give a positive review.
Generates data to help make business decisions
There is no need to guess about the effectiveness of your business efforts. These days, there is an abundant amount of data to help you gauge your business success and keep you on track.
Learn how to listen to customer feedback and turn those insights into actionable takeaways for your business.
Here are general questions to get you started on a customer feedback generating program. Of course, every business is unique, and you should have specifically tailored questions to get the feedback you need.
To help you crunch the data, adopt a “satisfaction scale section” to create a consistent approach to quantifying this subjective survey feedback. A few ways that you can implement this scale are:
If you have the budget, purchasing Customer Satisfaction software can be a smart investment. This specialized software allows businesses to collect, organize, and manage customer feedback. Some Customer Satisfaction software can integrate with Customer Relationship Management and Product Management solutions. Of course, if you have a small business, customer feedback is easy to DIY. Just make sure to use the valuable information to set your business up for future success.