If you run a business that offers products or services to customers, it’s normal that customers will talk about your brand and company. It’s a logical procedure once they make a purchase, they’ll have a view regarding the deal whether it was a good or bad experience and if there is room for betterment.
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Therefore, listening to your customers is the most significant thing you can ever do. In the end, a case study has shown that it can cost you around 5 to 25 times more to gain new customers than it costs to keep existing ones.
This should remind you that customer loyalty is crucial. The right way to achieve it is by taking customer feedback to ensure the customer experience your company offers meets (and exceeds) customers’ expectations.
If you are curious about how you can utilize customer feedback to gain an edge over your competition, keep reading our ultimate guide below. It’s full of actionable advice that you can apply immediately to start achieving results.
The Importance of Customer Feedback
Customer feedback comprises all the information and issues your customers give about their experience with your products and services following a deal. Customer feedback helps businesses boost their customer experience and generates positive transformation and growth.
Consequently, it’s important for you to implement a proper customer experience strategy for collecting and analyzing customer feedback. By doing so, you will enhance your service or product, customer support, customer success, and also your marketing teams will be able to identify areas that need to be improved.
By ensuring you reach out to your customers often to collect their feedback and make the required changes, you’ll offer them a greater customer experience, which is crucial to your brand and your final result.
Collecting Customer Feedback
An essential point to bear in mind is that gathering customer feedback should be a proactive undertaking. Even though you should always listen to what customers say about your brand, service, or product online, it won’t help you to just sit back and listen without taking any proactive measures. That’s why it’s so important to communicate with them and ask particular questions.
To make sure that you’re using the customer feedback effectively to improve the overall experience, you must take some active measures to evoke feedback from customers. You may for example use a user insights platform and have your customers provide feedback on your ideas and concepts or engage with your prototypes or websites.
That way you will become aware of all the customer issues and difficulties, and also the positive aspects. The information you’ll uncover from the user insight platform will offer you the needed information to pilot your business and customer service in the right way.
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Efficient Ways to Collect Customer Feedback
There are a lot of efficient ways nowadays to collect customer feedback. However, below are some of the most implemented ones this year.
1. Email and Customer Contact Forms
Customers are already accustomed to contact companies via email, and that’s why this is already an intuitive channel to utilize. You can make the most of it by asking your customers to give feedback during or after the process of support.
By using email to ask about their customer support experience following problem resolution, you can also assess the effectiveness of your customer support in a broader sense.
2. Customer Interviews
Another way for direct customer outreach is through customer interviews. It’s a great way to add qualitative feedback to the quantitative feedback you gather.
You can do them in person, via the telephone, or via video chat. No matter the format you chose, customer interviews are a good method to get directly to the source.
If you decide to go with this approach, ensure you go in with particular questions and commit to active listening. That’s a must in order not to miss any valuable information that your customers convey throughout the process of the interview.
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3. Social Listening
Among the main spaces where customers talk openly about their encounters with brands is on social media. So, it’s crucial to pay attention to what’s being said about your brand across social media channels.
Luckily, it doesn’t mean your team has to spend hours searching the web for brand mentions each day. There are many all-inclusive tools available on the market which offer refined social listening services.
In addition, most of the social media platforms today have voting tools. That means you can utilize your company’s social accounts to convey voting polls asking your followers for feedback.
4. Web Analytics
Web analytics can show the stuff about your customers that they else may not communicate to you in a survey. For instance, web analytics can show you when your customers are most active, the keywords steering them toward your website, what they’re looking for, and how many times they’ve visited your page before purchasing something.
All of that information will help you realize what your customers resonate with and whatnot. By using web analytics to understand all that about your customer’s activity on your webpage will enable you to enhance their experience.
Final Words
Gaining customer feedback is a winning plan. It’s the basis of growth. The more you understand your customers, the more you can improve and achieve new heights with your brand and maintain your customers’ satisfaction.
