September 5, 2024

Customer feedback: a huge power for business success

If a business aims to succeed, boost the sales and stand out in the range of competitors it should be sure that the clients are satisfied with the products and services it provides. To achieve — request for customer feedback. Your consumers can tell you what went wrong and suggest a solution or highlight what they loved. However, collecting, analyzing and managing feedback can be a complicated task, especially if you do not have an exact interaction strategy.

Today we will share with you the latest insights on how to properly organize feedback collection and get maximum benefits from the knowledge obtained.

What value does customers’ feedback bring to brands?

• Having obtained and in case analyzed properly, customers’ feedback supports your business a lot. Major benefits:
  Identify customers’ preferences. Their opinions help you ensure that your offer meets their interests, expectations and fulfill their needs. This is a great power for businesses especially while launching new products.
• Conduct competition comparison. Competitors’ insights is the most valuable information in the business world. And customers’ feedback is a great support here — you will understand how people interact with other brands and evaluate them. It helps companies to identify what the competitors are doing well or not well and take it into consideration in the business strategy.
• Promote customers’ satisfaction and loyalty. One of the most obvious benefits of collecting shoppers’ opinions is the improvement of clients’ satisfaction and loyalty. By eliminating dissatisfaction, you will improve customer experience.
• Enhance product and service quality. Customers’ feedback can highlight your strong sides. And, as we know there is no limit to perfection — let the buyers’ satisfaction encourage you to improve more and more.
• Assist to fix gaps and introduce necessary changes. Clients’ reviews allow businesses to identify problems with products, services and communication. Once the problem is revealed the business can improve its offers to better meet customers’ needs.
• Determine market trends. From consumers’ opinions you may catch what they are waiting for not only from your brand, but from the industry as a whole.
• Boost brand recognition. How you handle the communication and gather feedback is an essential issue for your customer experience, which in turn builds your audience loyalty and boosts your brand value

How to collect customers’ feedback

You may be surprised, but your customers are ready and happy to share their opinion regarding your offers, products and services, — being asked for their advice, people feel the value for your brand. But one of the main issues is to choose a proper method for feedback collection. Let’s look at the most customer feedback techniques to collect:

1. Questionnaire. These are specific questions to your target audience. To avoid refusals, make the survey quick and convenient, to motivate customers, offer something in return: discounts, bonuses, certificates and thank you messages for participation.
2. Voting. You can find out the opinion of customers through special voting systems built into the website or social network. You can customize the form according to your needs and arrange when faced with a specific problem. A short vote is usually treated friendly by clients.
3. Website feedback section. Modern buyers usually first study opinions and only after make a decision to purchase. From the reviews section on your website, you can find out the real point of view of the customer about your product and service. Study not only your site, but also the sites of competitors, relative sites. Pay attention also to users behavior on your site.
4. Social networks. People frequently share their opinions about products or companies on their social media profiles. Such reviews are very useful, because they are the maximum objective. You will see which is your most active network, frequency of brand mentions, how the number of such mentions changes over time, etc.
5. Personal interview. It is the most time-consuming and complicated method both for you and the customer, but one of the most valuable as well. In case you organize properly, you may get treasured results. Prepare in advance, check with the client which communication option is most comfortable for him, highlight the value of his opinion and advice and motivate with a special offer.

Modern communication world suggests a wide variety of digital channels you can implement to organize questionnaire, voting or interviews with your audience:

• Chatbots — most customers prefer to leave their ratings or comments in the chat rather than follow links to external surveys, as this may seem insecure.
• SMS — it can be as simple as a message with one multiple-choice question or as complex as an extended survey.
• Messengers — direct WhatsApp or Viber messaging it is simple to encourage feedback due to their popularity, high open rate and high rate of engagement.
• Email — create an email where your clients can leave a review and send it to you by responding to your letter. However, note that emails are usually being read with a certain time delay.
• Phone calls — an ambiguous way to collect feedback. It’s worth finding out if the client has time to talk. If he is busy, schedule the call for the convenient time.

Important: To turn your customers’ feedback collection strategy a success: fix exact goals, choose channels convenient and preferred by your audience, make the survey easy for users, save all collected data in one resource and share internally.

The feedback you get from customers is of no value if not managed and implemented properly. So let’s see how to manage the data users share and drive benefits for your business.

Smart managing of customers’ feedback with AAA strategy

Ask
You may get the feedback implementing five stars rating or deriving the info from complaints, but your customers may want to tell more, so, in order to get constructive customers’ advice — ask. But avoid too many questions, too complicated language and lack of logic.

Examples of FAQ the brands address to their audience:
1. How did you find out about our company?
2. Are there any other comments you would like to share?
3. What additional features or services would you like to see?
4. What do you dislike in our product/service?
5. What did you like most about our product/service?
6. What keeps you from switching to competitors?
7. What functionality do you lack in our product?
8. What do you think about the cost of our products/services?
9. What is the probability that you will recommend our brand to friends or colleagues?
10. What would you like to improve or change in our company?

Analyze

• May seem a simple task — calculate the average score from all the ratings or read and get the overall impression of what your customers think. But it is far more complicated than may seem. Customer feedback analysis includes considering each part of the reviews separately, classifying them based on the topic, product, service, etc. There are:
• Quality analysis — answers from questionnaires, reviews and comments. Customer support departments or quality departments work with this information directly: answer questions and help to solve the problem.
• Quantity analysis — ratings that customers put in surveys. Based on these NPS (net promoter score), CSI ( customer satisfaction index) and CSAT (customer satisfaction score) indicators are calculated.

Act

• As soon as you get the data and analyze it, it is time to make it work — implement it into your business strategy. Some examples how:
• Received negative reviews — understand what to improve in the product and service (improve delivery, change working hours, change messaging tools, etc.).
• Got positive reviews — attract new audiences and increase repeat sales (implement more loyalty programs, actions, bonuses, enrich the tools for communication with customers and social presence, etc.).
• Being compared with others — figure out how to set yourself apart from the competition (exclusive packaging, gifts, special service, etc).

Easier to say than organize, so note the following general plan: develop the roadmap and identify improvement steps, engage your team and allocate responsibilities, resources and exact actions, monitor changes and re-collect feedback.

Contact ImLink and establish proper business communication with customers, which will lead to real and useful feedback that will help you improve your processes and make appropriate decisions in your company.