7 Reasons Why You Should Collect Customer Feedback

Whether it’s through reviews, social media comments, or surveys, customer feedback gives us valuable insights into what they expect from us. It helps us understand:

• Their common concerns
• The problems they encounter
• What they’d like from us
• What we’re doing wrong
• What we could do to improve, and more

In other words, customer feedback takes the guesswork out of your product development, customer support, and market research processes. Find out the 7 ways your business can grow from surveying and listening to your customers:

1: Improve Your Products and Services

As end users of your products and services, your customers are the best people to tell you:

• What’s wrong with your product
• What your product/service is lacking
• Which features aren’t working as they should
• What features would improve their experience

Use these insights to make improvements to your existing products and services, or come up with new product/service ideas. Here’s an excellent example of a Tesla car owner tweeting a suggestion to Elon Musk, and Musk responding with a decision to use that suggestion.

The complete redesign of the new “Sonic the Hedgehog” movie after a massive backlash is another excellent example.

2: Find Out If Your Customers are Happy

Happy customers = loyal customersLoyal customers = long-term success customer feedback helps you understand if your customers are happy and measure their satisfaction rate. A lower satisfaction rate is cause for concern.It means you should reassess every aspect of your operations to deliver higher customer satisfaction.Apple uses Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to measure customer satisfaction rate.

>0 NPS is good>50 NPS is excellent>70 NPS is world-class

3: Understand Their Needs and Expectations Better

Customer feedback tells you exactly what your customers need and expect from you.It takes the guesswork out of your audience research efforts.These insights can fuel your marketing campaigns, product development, and more.McDonald’s UK switched from plastic to paper straws as a result of a customer-led campaign with almost 500,000 signatures.

4: Enhance Customer Experience

With a better understanding of your customers, you’ll know exactly how to deliver an experience they like. Customer feedback helps you discover areas where your website, user experience, or customer support is lacking.Nordstrom prompts shoppers to leave a feedback about their experience shopping on the site.

The survey asks you to rate your experience based on page load speed, loading consistency, etc.

5: Understand What to Prioritize

Customer feedback highlights your company’s strengths and weaknesses.This helps you understand which areas to focus your efforts on first.For example:

• If you have low rating with site load speed, prioritize on speeding up your site.
• If survey responses highlight multiple problems with employee interactions, it indicates a need for training.

Uber addresses rising safety concerns with plans to listen in on rides. This feature will give users the option to activate audio recording on their trips.

6: Retain Customers Better

Highly satisfied customers = loyal customersSo to enhance customer retention, deliver an exceptional and memorable experience first.

• Use customer feedback to measure existing satisfaction rate and identify areas for improvement.
• Find out what makes your customers come back for more and what makes them leave.
• Use these insights to build a robust customer retention strategy.

7: Feed Your Marketing Campaigns

Customer feedback also provides you with insights to feed your marketing campaigns.Use it to identify:

• Their biggest pain points
• Their interests and hobbies
• Which platforms they frequent the most
• What social causes they support
• What tone of voice resonates with them
• What they dislike about competitor campaigns

All of these insights can help you build a winning marketing strategy. Netflix, for instance, crowdsourced ways to better promote their shows in the following tweet from a team member.