Did you know that 66% of customers expect companies to understand their personal needs and expectations? That is why a proper voice of the customer strategy can help with everything from customer satisfaction and brand loyalty to increased revenue and a smoother overall experience. All of this builds your brand’s success and feedback is an important puzzle piece in achieving it. That’s why this article will dig deeper into the question ‘Why is customer feedback important’. We’ll even give you some tips on how to get started!
If you’ve found yourself at this blog in the vast information pool that is the internet, I dare to make an educated guess: You are a beginner when it comes to digital feedback. Or you are building a case of why your business should invest more in customer feedback and are researching your arguments. Either way, you’ve come to the right place.
In this blog, we will cover:
- How does getting feedback help businesses? – 4 examples
- Optimise your business and increase your sales
- Improve the user experience (and the customer experience)
- Identify your detractors – and win them over
- Increase visibility with better and more relevant content
- How to collect feedback from customers
Customer feedback is, as the term suggests, feedback that has been collected from your customers about some part of your business. This can be done both physically and on your digital channels.
As we specialise in digital feedback, this is what this article will focus on in particular. However, the reasons for collecting feedback carry over to all aspects of your business.
How does getting feedback help businesses? – 4 examples
The short answer to the question “Why is customer feedback important?” is that it indicates what your customers want and need. When feedback is analysed properly, the correct actions have been taken and the right changes are implemented, it can work wonders on your conversion.
Customer feedback can be quantitative, in the form of ratings or categories, or qualitative, in written answers to open questions. When analysing the combination of this data, you get actionable insights that can improve several aspects of your business.
Let’s look a little closer at some examples of how customer feedback can benefit your business.
Optimise your business and increase your sales
Starting with what often is the biggest motivator in collecting digital feedback: increased conversion. And as you will notice, we will come back to this point later. It’s because most feedback efforts can, by extension, improve your sales performance.
It might be quite obvious that identifying customer needs and meeting them will help with conversion. But improving things like the user experience, the content on your website and apps, email communications and the products/services you provide can all increase your sales numbers.
Interesting, right? We’ll get into the specifics of ‘how’ later in the blog.
Improve the user experience (and the customer experience)
User experience, or UX as it’s commonly called, refers to how users perceive a product or channel. For businesses with digital channels, UX is often discussed around webshops, websites or apps and includes topics like user-friendliness and design.
Customer experience, or CX, instead refers to how customers perceive your brand as a whole. As you can imagine, UX is therefore a big component of CX. According to Martechcube, you can’t build a positive customer experience without a good user experience.
Listening to your customers is a great puzzle piece in improving your UX – and by extension, your CX. By implementing customer feedback forms on your websites or in your apps, you can easily identify improvement points, that will result in a better user experience. This can for example be done by:
- Asking your customers to report any bugs they come across
- Conducting a Goal Completion Rate survey to measure at what rate your customers managed to achieve their goals by coming to your website/app
- Conducting a Customer Effort Score survey for an indication of how smooth your customer journey is and identify hindrances to conversion
An example of a CES survey from insurance company, Allianz.
Enhancing your UX can increase conversions, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, retention rates, word-of-mouth marketing, visibility (as it is an SEO indicator) and much more. It really is a base building block for your business to rest on.
Identify your detractors – and win them over
There are several popular metrics to use when it comes to digital feedback. We’ve already mentioned Goal Completion Rate (GCR) and Customer Effort Score (CES). But by far the most used metric is the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Example of an NPS survey from Dutch supermarket chain, Albert Heijn. Translation: How likely are you to recomment ah.nl to a friend or a colleague after receiving your last order?
NPS measures customer loyalty by identifying your:
- Promoters: The people who love your brand and actively promote it to friends, family and colleagues.
- Passives: Customers who have had positive experiences with your brand but wouldn’t go out of their way to promote it. But they wouldn’t necessarily speak badly about it either.
- Detractors: Customers with bad experiences who actively dislike your brand and would tell other people in their circle about it – or leave bad reviews.
Measuring your NPS gives you a good indicator of how liked your business is and what issues your customers are having. And, did you know that most bad experiences can be turned into positive ones with the right response?
By identifying your detractors and rectifying why they had a bad experience, it’s even possible to turn them into promoters. Conducting NPS surveys can therefore help you increase your word-of-mouth marketing, improve your customer loyalty and satisfaction as well as (you guessed it) your conversion rate.
Increase visibility with better and more relevant content
Nowadays, we are used to being able to do nearly anything online. Booking services, doing our shopping, finding information, etc, etc. That’s why search engine optimisation (SEO) is becoming an increasingly important way of marketing your business.
If you are unfamiliar with the term, SEO is about creating content that helps search engines (like Google) understand what your business does. By investing in SEO, you can make your website appear in search results, which in turn increases visibility and traffic.
SEO leans heavily on creating relevant content – texts and images that:
- Contribute to the topic you are writing about
- Are unique and well-written
- Answers your customers’ questions
By implementing feedback forms in your content, you will get an indication of how well your visitors receive it. This, in turn, contributes to creating content relevant to your target audience which is good for conversion as well as your SEO strategy.
You can get this kind of feedback by including an embedded form at the end of blogs, or any other content like videos and newsletters. Don’t forget to include an open question to learn what your customers liked/didn’t like about your content.
A customer feedback form example at the end of a blog post.
Aside from contributing to visibility and SEO, reviewing content this way can also have a positive effect on brand loyalty, positioning your brand as a thought leader and conversion. The latter one is especially prominent in B2C newsletters, for example.
How to collect feedback from customers
Collecting customer feedback can be done in several different ways. As we mentioned at the start, you can do it physically via focus groups, phone interviews or in-store surveys.
When it comes to digital feedback, the most common way of gaining insights is by placing feedback forms on your websites, in your apps and your email campaigns. To get started, you need a customer feedback tool or software, like Mopinion. These help you create feedback forms as well as collect and analyse the responses.
The first step in gathering customer feedback is typically to set up clear goals. When this is done, you can start creating your forms and wait for the responses to start coming in.
There are tons of ways to gain feedback. Make sure to check out our blog on ‘How to collect customer feedback’ for a more detailed guide on how to get started.
Start collecting customer feedback!
Mopinion is the #1 feedback software for web, app and email. We offer everything you need for creating feedback forms, gathering responses and analysing them for actionable insights. Complete with advanced question routing, a rich supply of options to display your surveys on your website/apps, highly customisable forms and much more.
Ready to see Mopinion in action?
Want to learn more about Mopinion’s all-in-1 user feedback platform? Don’t be shy and take our software for a spin! Do you prefer it a bit more personal? Just book a demo. One of our feedback pro’s will guide you through the software and answer any questions you may have.