So you’ve done everything possible to satisfy your customers. You’re sure you and your customer support teams are doing everything they can to service them in the best way you know possible. You are literally treating your customers like kings and queens and are providing an amazing super service to match their wants and needs at every step of the way – or so you believe…

So how can you be sure your customer service strategies are working? How do you know if your customers are happy with their experiences in your company? What do they like and dislike about your products and services and more importantly, how can you best keep up with their ever-changing requirements?

Let’s take a look at the brief answer as to why customer feedback is so important for your business.

Why is customer feedback so important to your business? To fully understand your customer’s requirements, it’s necessary to talk to them and evaluate their responses. This can help with innovation, product development and also build a loyal customer base.

Now that we’ve taken a look at the short answer as to why collating the voice of your customers is so important, let’s delve a little deeper…

Why collect customer feedback?

Customer feedback is one of the most important things for your business. It helps improve product development, marketing, operations, and so much more. However, It’s one of the most important aspects of running a business that often gets overlooked.

Many companies could find themselves lacking sales or simply not keeping the right kind of customer base because they have not taken the time to listen to their customers as much as they should. Listening to your customers and applying those insights is the best way to move a business forward.

Making sure you align your product offering with exactly what your customers truly want. By simply moving on to other business projects without taking this into consideration could result in an offering that is a poor market fit.

The best option to make sure you’re fully understanding your product or service marketplace is to obtain qualitative and honest customer feedback.

There are 5 main reasons why you would want to collect feedback.

• Customer engagement
• Understand your customers
• Product improvement
• Obtain testimonials, reviews, referrals
• Evaluate and get better things

“Listening to your customers and applying those insights

is the best way to move a business forward”.

What is customer feedback?

The most important way of fully understanding a customer’s perception of your brand is by asking them directly, and the best way to simply hear the voice of your customer is through their own feedback.

So what exactly is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is information provided by clients about whether they’re satisfied or dissatisfied with a product or service. This also relates to any general experience they’ve had with a company.

Their opinion is a valuable resource for improving customer experience and adjusting your actions to their needs.

This information can be collected from different kinds of surveys. You’re also able to gather opinions and reviews your clients provide for you when asked to and collate them using apps such as our customer satisfaction module.

Both sources are important to get a full picture of how your clients perceive your brand.

”… the best way to simply hear the voice of your customer is through their own feedback”.

Finding out what your clients think is the only way that you can give them the best customer experience. You can use this information to adjust how you do business and satisfy your clients’ needs more effectively.

In turn, improving their loyalty and overall success with your company. Listening to your customers is the best way to propel your brand forward.

How do you collect customer feedback?

It doesn’t always have to be face to face questions. One guide on how well you’re doing is to take a macro view of all your customer interactions and conversations, along with analytics and reporting capabilities similar to those you can get with our reporting system – complete with its own dashboard for instant insights!

Call centers, being the focal point for customer interactions, hold a huge opportunity to gather customer feedback that can provide valuable insights to improve every aspect of your business.

Collecting and acting upon customer feedback is a must for any business looking to provide users with the products they need.

Customer feedback is essential to guide and inform your decision making and influence innovations and changes to your product or service. It’s also essential for measuring customer satisfaction among your current customers.

Getting a handle on how customers view your product, support, and the company is invaluable. So, let’s take a look below at some of the great ways you can gather insights from current and prospective customers who visit your site.

20 great ways of collecting important feedback from your customers.

• Regularly call your customers
• Provide live chat support
• Social media activity monitoring
• Collect feedback from your live chat sessions
• Provide feedback forms
• Customer service performance analytics
• Provide an active online community with support
• New and existing customer email surveys
• Use NPS to evaluate customer loyalty
• Create a feedback area on order confirmation page
• Online Polls
• Review feedback on your competitor’s sites
• Display any Positive Customer Feedback
• Facebook reactions
• Make your online store more ‘human’
• Offer a gift or prize in return for feedback
• Use negative feedback to showcase professionalism
• Create a feedback area for cart abandonment
• In-App feedback
• Ask for feedback at the point of service

“Collecting and acting upon customer feedback is a must for any business

looking to provide users with the products they need”.

Companies often ask for feedback, but don’t do anything with it. So how do you approach this? First of all, take a good look at the answers, categorize them, then share the feedback with others at your company who can implement those changes. This could be a member of your product team or your customer support team.

Those teams who have a better insight on the subject will be able to prioritize and decide how to put the new strategies in motion.

Also, it’s important to pay attention if customers appear to be unhappy about the same things. If many people agree on something, it gives you a good place upon which to start.

Let’s take a more in-depth look at 4 other ways you can get that all-important feedback from your customers.

Long form-based surveys

These most common way of collecting customer feedback are survey forms with a set of questions that are usually sent in an email. Here’s an example question sent as an email link from Wave online finance platform.

The one thing you have to always keep in mind is to not ask too many questions. The more questions your survey has, the less time your respondents spend, on an average, answering each.

In other words, the more questions you ask your respondents, the more likely they will hurtle through it, and the quality and reliability of your data will suffer as a consequence.

“The more questions your survey has, the less time your

respondents spend, on an average, answering each”.

Short in-app surveys

Customers are constantly thinking of ways your product can work better for them. Maybe parts of your app do not have what they are looking for, or maybe the design could look a little better, or maybe they found something that is broken.

Sometimes you will find they will reach out to you via your support team. This may happen more frequently of the issue they are experiencing is fairly large in scale.

Your users are in the app for a certain purpose, and it’s not a great idea to introduce a long survey to them. Keep it to two to three questions that are relevant to the page they are viewing at the time.

Phone calls

It’s often said that if you truly want to understand someone, you will have to talk to them.

The surveys and tests will give you a huge swathe of data, but they can never tell you what a person truly feels about your product. This is when you need to reach out to your users through the phone. It is a personalized and also proactive method that generates an extremely useful response.

Hearing a person’s voice and tone is the best way to sense what they actually feel about your product. A call will help you tell the features that get users are really excited about and also the features that make their product or service journey easier.

‘Hearing a person’s voice and tone is the best way to sense

what they actually feel about your product.’

Transactional emails

Transactional emails are sent to customers as soon as they sign up for a new service if they upgrade to a new plan etc. These are emails that are triggered by a certain interaction between the user and your app or website.

More often than not, transactional emails are not utilized fully in creating a dialogue with the customer. These emails often lack the aesthetic appeal of the website and newsletters but can be an important source of feedback.

Now that we’ve looked at a number of ways in which you can collate your customer’s journey, let’s take a look below how you can use that important information.

Learn more about CommBox customer satisfaction app

What do you do with the feedback?

If you make sure you correctly analyze the dialogue between you and your customers, it can become one of the biggest growth areas for your business.

The only way to reward your more vocal customers is to bring in actual changes. Let’s take a look below at some keys ways you can use the data to improve your product or service.

Identify product improvement areas

It may be that more often than not, your users may have developed a real understanding and a certain level of expertise of your product features.

It could be those loyal users to understand the product as much as your own product managers do. Product improvement meetings will only scratch the surface. However, the most telling insight will come from the customers who regularly use your product.

By beginning to use the information and following the advice your customers give you,  Not only will your customers appreciate your willingness to listen and implement their ideas, but you will set yourself apart from your competitors, as a business that genuinely cares.

Find your niche

Most companies are not a hundred percent sure about the verticals they should focus on. It is never an exact science and companies could be spending huge amounts of budget on trial and experimentation.

Customer feedback can be a good way to find out where you belong in the marketplace.

During the process of analyzing feedback from customers from a broad spectrum of verticals, you will begin to see the emergence of patterns that help you to understand where the majority of your happiest customers come from.

‘Customer feedback can be a good way to find

out where you belong in the marketplace.’

Motivate your team

Customer feedback can act as a driver to motivate employees.

If a particular feature has been praised within your customer feedback, make sure you pass the compliments directly to the person who built the feature and ensures the team knows about it too. Thus can be a great way to encourage healthy competition among your team members.

Share conversations that are interesting and come up with new ideas about product improvements with the whole team. This can help everyone understand the larger picture and your whole company ethos.

And finally…

In the very wise words of Paul Greenberg,

“If a customer likes you and continues to like you, they will do business with you. If they don’t, they won’t.”

Collecting all important data from your customers is possibly one of the first ways you need to make sure you are offering a service or product people want and need while offering you a myriad of ways of how to improve.

If you would like any more information on the article or above or would like to talk to one of our friendly team about using our specialist tools to capture your customer’s thoughts, feelings and insights on your offering and turn those findings into your next success.