If you want to grow your business, you should start listening to what your customers have to say. Customer feedback can help you make intelligent decisions about creating content, promoting products, and growing your offerings. It helps you identify your business’s strengths and weaknesses.
- 89% of respondents of a Microsoft survey say that they want to provide feedback.
- In the same survey, on being asked if they believe that brands take action on feedback provided—53% of respondents answered no.
But, you already know all this — the primary benefit of customer feedback, why you must collect it, etc. Then how is this article any different?
Because we do not want to bore you with the things you already know. We are straight-up going to talk about how you can take advantage of customer feedback and implement it in your business plans. Let’s jump right into it.
7 Ways to use Customer Feedback Forms to Your Advantage
1. Understand Your Customers Better
Communication is a key to building and maintaining customer relationships. And the most evident way to build trust with your customers is to collect feedback regularly.
Listen to what customers say, understand their pain points, act on reducing them, and repeat this process. Constant feedback will only help you understand what your customers need.
For example, say if multiple customers complain about a distressing experience while scrolling through your website. They find it difficult to reach their desired products. This is an indicator that you must tweak your overall design process or take help from web design experts for the same.
Once done with the changes, you can send a short follow-up message along with a survey asking them how they feel about the changes.
2. Improve User Experience
User experience is not just about how your website looks. It is more than that. It is about finding out how all the components of your website function together.
Sometimes, even after vigorous testing, there are chances that you missed a bug or a glitch. The odds are that the customers will identify this issue and want to bring it to your attention.
You can add an easy-to-use contact form to the sidebar of your website. It will help your business grow and find ways to improve your UX.
You can take a step further and send periodic emails to your subscribers asking about their experience. Ensure that you include questions like—what would they change about their experience if they could?
3. Share the Feedback with your Functional Teams
The key to refurbishing the customer experience is to share it with the correct teams at intervals they prefer. It should be regardless of whether it is a new product or an existing product. Share the collected feedback with these three teams:
- Product and testing team
- Sales/ marketing executives
- Customer support teams
Share the feedback at set intervals—daily, weekly, or monthly. Sharing it with your functional teams ensures that they can study it and come up with strategies to work on it. Your customer support teams can inculcate the feedback to offer proactive customer support.
Here’s what a Sr. customer success manager at Moz says about implementing customer feedback:
“Survey data is an invaluable source of new ideas and is a great gauge of how to prioritize improvements. Having this kind of data helps get into customers’ minds, make a case and try something new that works for them. With the help of data, you can also estimate the impact — the improvement it will have on user experience.”
Interesting Thought
It is crucial to know your exact demographic and find who is making decisions from the customer’s end. All too often, companies end up surveying people who do not hold decision-making power. This may give a skewed view of your data and what you can do about it.
4. Gain Insights that Your Data does not Offer
Your customer data will always get you information that your existing database might not offer. Sales and marketing performance metrics can fill in plenty of information about a customer’s experience with your business. But this information won’t necessarily tell the full story.
Feedback forms, on the other hand, offer an outlet for gathering information that would otherwise fall through the cracks. It is because you can ask direct and open-ended questions to your customers. It also opens up a pile of information on the latest industry trends and customer expectations.
5. Build Social Influence Around Positive Reviews
Social proof is something because of which customers are more likely to make purchases just by seeing other people buying or using the same thing. You can use your consumer feedback in several ways and build social influence around it.
One of the best ways is to create testimonials pages. They are helpful at showing the audience why your brand is worth the hype. Mind you the feedback is not essentially limited to the forms that customers fill. It could also be a comment on your posts, a message on your social media profiles, etc.
Besides, feedback received on social media also offer you higher engagement. People leave positive reviews because they want to praise your offerings. By responding to them, you will improve your overall engagement, which can lead to more beneficial feedback.
6. Diversify Your Offerings
As your brand continues to grow, you will want to think about adding new products and services or tweaking the ones that you are already offering. It only makes sense to listen to what customers expect from your business. This way you can gain their trust and turn them into lifelong customers.
For example, say you are an online pet merchandise store, and customers keep asking you when you will add pet treats to your product listings.
It is a great feedback queue! You already have customers ready to purchase a product you are not offering yet. Make sure you do not miss such opportunities and evaluate your feedback thoroughly.
7. Drive Your Business Development’s Roadmap
Before every development roadmap, you should take customer feedback into consideration. It allows you to trust the direction you are going in.
You can get the exact information about what customers want instead of just speculating. It can help you confidently move your business forward in the right direction.
This will help you use feedback as a growth tool regardless of the niche you are working on. It may also help you improve retention rates and boost your sales and conversion rates.
Final Thoughts
“To fully understand the customer demands is to understand the patterns you derive from the feedback.”
Customer feedback allows brands to thrive and exist in a competitive environment. You have to be mindful of how your customers or potential customers perceive your brand and look for patterns in the feedback you receive from them.
As customer count rises, you will have a higher chance of identifying trends and tweaking your processes based on the patterns. UX, unique insights, diversification, social proof, development roadmaps, and customer support all pivot on how customers interact with your offerings.
When you have data from your customers in front of you, there is a clear advantage to obtaining and using this feedback during every step of the development, marketing, and customer support processes.
About the Guest Blog Author: Lucy Manole is a creative content writer and strategist at Marketing Digest. She specializes in writing about digital marketing, technology, entrepreneurship and education. When she is not writing or editing, she spends time reading books, cooking and traveling.