To remain ahead of your competition, you have to keep your customers happy and loyal to your brand. But, how can you be sure that your efforts are hitting the mark? If you don’t try to figure out what your customers think of your product or services, you’ll struggle to provide them with the best possible experience.
The best way to accomplish this is simple. Ask them! This article will discuss why customer feedback is so important and how you can most easily gather feedback.
3 Reasons Why Customer Feedback is So Important
Customer feedback is everywhere. You can search for comments and reviews on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and Google. Don’t ignore any comment about your product or service, and always be responsive! You can send follow-up surveys after every purchase asking for feedback.
Feedback provides valuable insight about your audience that you can, in turn, use to benefit both you and them!
1. Customer feedback improves your products and services.
When you first develop a product or service, you may generally know what your potential buyer needs. Often, you will conduct market research to get an idea of whether your buyer will purchase what you have to offer. However, after a customer uses your product or service, will you be able to learn your product’s advantages or drawbacks and what you need to do to improve it?
Feedback is important because it serves as a beacon for the growth of your business. It allows you to trust or divert the direction you’re going in, making improvements along the way. Instead of guessing what your customers think about your product or what they want out of your product, you’ll give them exactly what they asked for.
For example, your customer may have responded that they would have liked more training on your product. You are then able to take that feedback and add it to your future processes.
2. Customer feedback helps you create the best customer experience.
In today’s market, where options are literally endless, customer experience and personalization are more critical than ever. The more you know about your customer, the easier it will be to serve them a personal experience. The opportunities to improve a customer’s experience are endless, and the only way to know if you’re headed in the right direction is through direct feedback. Improvement can come by directing clients to other services or resources they may enjoy and using the language that resonates with them best.
By creating an approach to collecting feedback from your buyers, you can listen and learn from them. Knowing what they think of your offers, how they’re using them, and what they benefit from most really can mean the success or the downfall of your business.
3. Customer feedback helps increase customer retention.
A satisfied customer will stay with you. On average, loyal customers are worth up to 10x as much as their first purchase. [Marketing Tech Blog] Knowing this, it makes sense to learn what makes your customers devoted to you.
Collecting customer feedback will help you determine what’s working with your product and what’s not. Keeping your finger on your customer’s experience will help you choose the areas you need to improve. Each time you have an unhappy customer, you can immediately respond and fix the issue.
Best Tools for Gathering Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is the information you gather when you are looking for input from your current buyers. It plays an essential role in improving your products and services and increasing growth in your business.
Feedback can come in a wide variety of ways, including video, images, surveys, and scores.
The best (and easiest) way to collect and analyze this data is using customer feedback software. Below, we will look at some of our favorite ways to collect feedback, ranging from the manual and straightforward to the more complex software available.
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a contact form plugin you can install directly on your WordPress website.
Using the Gravity Forms Survey Add-On, you can create quick and easy surveys directly from your website. The add-on easily integrates and enables you to collect data from your customers.
Typeform
Best for user surveys, Typeform is a data collection tool that makes it easy to create accessible, intuitive forms, surveys, and questionnaires that present questions one and a time. This platform includes pre-built templates including conditional logic that allows for you to serve the right follow-up questions to the user creating the proper conversation.
OptinMonster
In addition to being a leader in collecting emails through pop-ups and landing pages, OptinMonster also allows you to create user surveys to find out what your visitors think about your website, products, and services.
Using this tool, you can create a survey for your WordPress site that allows you to collect this data and control when the user sees it. These two features will enable you to create a seamless customer experience while gathering this priceless data for your company.
TrustPilot
TrustPilot is mainly for reviews; it also has a service that helps companies use customer feedback to learn about their audience and ultimately increase conversions and improve brand reputation.
The tool includes embeddable widgets that provide high visibility for a website by capturing reviews and helping send customer responses to Google and social media to help boost your organic search.
Hubspot
Hubspot has features and tools that come with the software to make it easy to capture feedback and understand your customers better. Using Hubspot, you can send surveys using both your website and by sending emails. The tools will help you choose the correct format for your surveys and help you track your responses to improve your customer experience over time.
Hubspot also provides an easy, single dashboard so that an entire team can monitor changes in your customer satisfaction.
Google Forms
Are you still running a bootstrap business? No problem! Google Forms is a free tool that allows you to create surveys that gather feedback about your business.
Ask questions by choosing from a range of options, including free text to multiple choice. Google forms also allow you to add images and YouTube links to your questions.
Forms automatically collect responses, with real-time responses. It also includes charts and the ability to view your data in Google Sheets.
Social Listening
Finally, put your social media channels to work! Social listening is the process of monitoring your social media channels for mentions of your company, brand, competitors, products, and more.
For example, you can easily spot a user tagging your profile with their results from your product or service and use it for further promotion.
Understanding your business’ online mood means understanding how people feel about you and your competitors. You want to know what people say about you to engage with customers, manage crises, find pain points, and track competitors.
Using Your Customer Feedback
While it’s helpful to capture and analyze your customer feedback so you can make improvements to the products, services, and customer experiences you deliver, you still want to consolidate your feedback overall to create a tool for making future decisions.
By bringing all of your responses into one place, you’ll be able to better respond to both one-off comments and complaints from your customer to address and prioritize future updates to your offerings.
If you’re looking to create or improve customer loyalty in your business, get in touch to see how we can help make it happen!
