Posted by Feedback from customers is critical to the success of your business. If you want your business to grow, you need to know how to listen to your customers and apply what you learn. Remember, you’re selling to them. If your products or services don’t meet their standards, you will lose sales.
In other words, as a business, you need to know how to use customer feedback to your advantage. There are many ways you can do this. Here are six:
1. Improve customer experience
Customer feedback may reveal which aspects of your product or service are working well. It also enables you to spot flaws in your company process, product, or customer service workflows.
Once you have that customer feedback, you can make the necessary changes to improve your customer experience. Good customer experience is critical to customer retention. Every improvement you make to the customer experience will also build brand loyalty.
The most successful companies use customer feedback this way. Apple, for instance, has managed to stay in the game for such a long time because it has made product feedback a primary focus.
Apple collects customer feedback using several methods, including the Net Promoter Score (NPS) system. Customers are asked a simple question by the NPS: “How likely are you to suggest this business to a friend or colleague?”
A good NPS indicates that most consumers are satisfied with their purchases. On the other hand, a negative score forces Apple to dig deep and figure out how to improve customer happiness.
You can collect that customer feedback yourself, too. You can, for instance, reach out to your customers via email. Get your marketing team to contact previous clients and ask for their comments. Check out this example:
Use this feedback alongside relevant customer experience metrics to see how well (or poorly) you’re doing.
You should always monitor the impact of your efforts. Data from your analytics platform, for example, can reveal how the changes you are implementing impact your customer base. Other possible sources of data include your Customer Relationship Management platform.
Use the data you gather to influence your approach. If your efforts generate a positive impact, double down on what you’re doing.
2. Turn happy consumers into brand advocates.
Customers who are happy with your brand are, by nature, more inclined to recommend your business and promote it. They will spread their positive experience via word-of-mouth on various channels.
Word-of-mouth referrals are powerful. It shows that your customers trust your brand because of the quality of the products or services you provide. So, if you see people who consistently leave good reviews about your company, reach out to them and turn them into promoters.
There are several ways you can do this. For instance, you can offer a thank you gift to encourage them to stick with your brand. You could also offer unique rewards and privileges such as free items or a commission for referring customers to your business.
3.Use as social proof
You can use customer feedback as social proof. According to research by Rosie Murphy, 91% of buyers check online reviews regularly. Furthermore, 84% believe blog posts are just as trustworthy as personal recommendations from friends or family.
Since social proof comes from consumers — and because conventional advertising has lost its credibility, customers’ voices tend to carry more weight than branded messages from companies — the mere presence of social proof makes a company more trustworthy.
By displaying testimonials on your website, you can demonstrate the high level of service you provide your customers. Social proof from well-known firms or niche influencers helps you be more persuasive. Here’s an example from Fender, which follows B2B web design best practice:
Here’s another Fender post-click landing page that uses social proof. This website relies on data and statistics to compel visitors to act.
The large number of courses taken, 5-star ratings given, hours spent studying, and amount of lessons taught indicate to visitors that the product must be effective.
You can also make reviews visible on product or service pages.
Notice that a large part of the Amazon product page is allocated to product reviews. Consumers are increasingly relying on the opinions and experiences of other customers in reviews when making purchasing selections, as they have become more reliant on self-guided research. Make it easy for them to access those.
4. Improve your sales and marketing material
Have you ever found yourself changing the way you speak or act around a group of people?
Imitating other people, both the way that they speak and mannerisms, in professional or social settings is something most of us do without even thinking. We do it because it helps us fit into the group.
Effective sales and marketing material needs to resonate with your target audience. Successful copywriters will try to adjust the content they create to the audience. That means using words or phrases that your audience would find familiar. It’s why many business to consumer brands create more informal copy, while business-to-business brands tend to write more formally.
Another way you can use customer feedback to improve your copy is by using the information to identify customer pain points and product or service benefits. You can use those insights to create copy that shows the biggest benefits or pain points your products or service address.
5. Expand your product range
You can also use customer feedback to expand your product range. If one of your products, for example, performs well and gets good reviews, you might want to expand into that niche and sell other products related to it.
Before expanding your product range, ask your customers what they’d like to see you sell again. Your existing customer feedback is just your starting point. Since expanding a product range is a business risk, you want to gather as much information as possible before taking such a risk.
One way you can gather data is by sending customers surveys. Other data collection methods include interviews or an analysis of your business data gathered through a CRM or other sources.
6. Set up a new business
You can utilize customer feedback to set up a business in a completely different niche or pivot business operations. Listening to and considering your consumers’ comments at every stage of the decision-making process can propel your company ahead and secure its success.
For instance, if you’re in the business of manufacturing hairbrushes and you find, according to customer reviews, that customers would love it if you sold combs for pets, you can do your research on that entirely different niche. If the data shows it may be profitable to venture into that, start planning how you can do just that.
Customer feedback provides you with all the data you need. Use it to your advantage.
In Closing
Feedback from customers can give you insights you can use to ensure your business’s success. You just need to know how to make the most of it.
You learned six ways you can use customer feedback. Use it to improve the customer experience, turn happy customers into brand advocates, and as social proof. You can also leverage customer feedback to expand your product range or identify new business opportunities.
You can improve customer retention and average customer lifetime value if you know how to listen to your customers and leverage that feedback. That’s important for any business that wants to scale its operations.