Why Customer Feedback Is Important

Customer feedback is paramount. Larger companies with more resources often hire external companies to do the market research for them and then adjust their products, services, processes, etc. based on what customers tell them.

No doubt, if you are a business owner, you do your best at delivering the services or products you offer. Good products and services equal happy clients, and happy clients equal stable business or hopefully more business. This is common sense, right?

And yet, how do you know if you are indeed delivering the best product or service? There’s no doubt that you have the intention to, but whether you actually do or not, well this is something that your customers have the say on ultimately. And this is something that many business owners, and especially small business owners, tend to forget or neglect.

Thus, many businesses focus their efforts on doing what they do as best as they can, but fail to hear what their customers think about it, which defeats the purpose of their efforts in the first place.

Smaller companies unfortunately often don’t go about it. They think it’s too complex, too expensive or even fear customer feedback and simply avoid it. However, if you are running a small or medium-sized business, this is even more of a reason to start listening to your customers. It will help you in many ways not only to retain the customers you’ve gained but to innovate and attract even more.

There are many reasons why you should seek to hear what your clients think about you but here’s my top five, that I think are the most important and motivating reasons:

Customer feedback helps you to:

Improve your products and services

Your customers use your products and services and sometimes even you can’t think of all the ways that these are being utilised. If there are any issues, it is your customers that face these problems on a daily basis. It is they who suffer any pains because of these problems.  Similarly, if something can be improved in the way that your products or services work, there’s no one who would know better than your clients. Ask them and act on their feedback. The benefits of doing this are two-fold. Firstly, your customers will know that their opinion matters to you and secondly, your improved performance will help you retain customers and maybe even gain others.

Maintain a relationship with your clients

This one stems from the previous point. When you ask your clients about their experience with your products and services, or even when an unpleasant situation arises but you learn from it, people will feel that their opinion is appreciated. Consequently, this will increase their loyalty to you. When you’ve taken measures and done some improvements based on customer feedback, make sure to get back in touch with your clients (i.e. via email or newsletter) thanking them for their input and letting them know how it has helped or that it has been taken into account.

Innovate and come up with new products / services

Not only can you improve your existing products or services, often times customer feedback can inspire you to offer something additional related to your offering or even a completely new product or service. In many industries, such as marketing, advertising and event management the most sought after services were inspired by customer requests or complaints in the first place. Listen to your clients and think outside the box.

Stay up-to-date with the market trends

Many businesses, large and small alike, often focus so much on offering what they offer (especially if their products or services are successful) that they fail to notice new market trends or niche markets that they aren’t serving. If you listen to your customers you might notice how interest and trends change and you can adapt. Otherwise, you risk sleeping through those changes and falling behind your competition easily.

Identify the so-called advocates of your company

Who are you company’s advocates? They are those companies and individuals that give you the highest score when you gather feedback. They are your best marketing campaigns because they are the vehicles of the most effective marketing tool possible – word-of-mouth.

Make sure you take a note of these clients and seek to build even stronger relationships with them. Don’t shy away from asking them for testimonials and referrals. More often than not, these clients would be delighted to help you.

Customer feedback essentially measures the pulse of your business. The importance of it has long been realised by companies. And market researchers have designed various strategies to collect customers’ honest opinions and created ways to make the most of this valuable information.

Instead of fearing customer feedback or looking at it as another annoying side of business, try to shift your thinking towards the opportunities it presents. It can really provide brilliant insights into what you are doing right or wrong and give you ideas that will make you better and help your business grow. I know this could be difficult at first and many of the people I work with don’t even know where to start.

So here’s a few ideas that you might find useful for your own business:

How do you go about it?

There are many ways to collect customer feedback, insights and advice from clients. And they don’t need to be expensive either.

Email:

If you can’t afford to hire a company to do it for you, you could simply send out an email to your clients with a few simple questions. Make sure that it is not too long otherwise you might not get too many responses. Also, be careful about how you word your questions, always keeping in mind what you are trying to gain from it.

Online Survey:

If you want something a bit more professional, you could also use some free online platforms through which you can create and customise an online survey that you can send your customers a link to. There is for example a website called Qualtricks that allows you to do this.

Ask customers to rate you and share what they’re happy with. Also, include questions that allow them to express any struggles or areas for improvement. Look for the problems; they are more valuable and what you should focus on if you want to really improve your offerings. Separately, but again applies to both a simple email and an online survey, you could offer some incentives to get customers to answer your questions.

Phone Calls:

Alternatively, you could give your clients a call and ask them those questions in person. This method is preferred because people often provide more details over the phone. They tend to explain their needs better than in an email.

If you make calls, remember that people are more likely to share their thoughts with a third party. Like a market research company, rather than with the company itself.

Social Media:

Another way to get an idea of how your company and products / services are perceived is through Social Media. Many companies mistake social media as a one-way channel to speak to customers. They forget that communication is a two-way process.

Customers use Social Media to share their views, thoughts and experiences and this could be beneficial to your company. On Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, you can search for specific keywords or your company name. This helps you find posts related to your products or services.

On Twitter, you could narrow down your search to posts near you. On Twitter, you can create lists for your clients. This way, you can easily see their posts, even if your company name isn’t mentioned. You can use tools like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to track hashtags or searches. This saves you from frequently checking your social media channels.

Who do you ask for feedback?

Customers:

Well, the most obvious answer to this question is your customers. They use your products or services. They can provide valuable insights into areas for improvement.

However, people often neglect two other very important groups. One is your lost customers and the other is your employees.

Lost customers:

Feedback from lost customers is valuable. It helps you understand why clients switch to competitors and shows what you can do to prevent it. Most customers will normally be very honest and you have nothing to lose there. Quite on the contrary, it is a chance to win them back by offering something better. For example, if your company sells accounting software, some lost customers may have felt €150 per month was too much. This was especially true if they only used 5 of the 10 features. This could lead you to consider a pricing structure that better suits businesses with varying needs.

Employees:

I’ve talked about the importance of employees to business and how they are essentially the face of your company on various occasions. Employees represent your company and interact directly with customers. They are the ones who witness customer reactions and hear opinions about changes and new products firsthand. This being said, it might be a good idea to start discussion groups for those employees who interact directly with your customers. Ask your employees for feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Have them share how clients react and suggest ideas for improvement based on their insights.

This provides valuable feedback on your clients’ experience. It also helps engage employees by empowering them to make changes.

Don’t forget to give them certain freedom too when it comes to dealing with issues with clients. I’ve often seen situations where clients gave negative feedback, but the employee knew how to fix it. However, they didn’t have the authority to take action and turn the situation around.