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!
TL;DR – Article Summary
- Customer feedback is important because it helps businesses understand what customers need, expect and experience.
- It shows where customers are getting stuck across your website, app, emails or customer journey.
- Feedback can help improve conversion rates by revealing why visitors do not complete key actions.
- It supports better UX and CX by helping teams fix bugs, remove friction and improve digital touchpoints.
- Metrics like NPS, CES and GCR help you measure loyalty, effort and goal completion in a structured way.
- Customer feedback also helps you create more relevant content, improve customer satisfaction and make better business decisions.
Customer feedback is, as the term suggests, feedback collected from your customers about some part of your business. This could be feedback about your website, app, product, service, support experience, checkout flow, email campaigns or even your content.
Customer feedback can be collected both physically and digitally. For example, businesses can gather feedback through focus groups, interviews, in-store surveys, website feedback forms, in-app surveys and email feedback forms.
As we specialise in digital feedback, this article will focus mainly on feedback collected across digital channels. However, the reasons for collecting feedback apply to almost every part of your business.
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
How does getting feedback help businesses? – 4 examples
The short answer to the question “Why is customer feedback important?” is simple: it tells you what your customers want, need and expect from your business.
But the real value comes from what you do with that information.
When feedback is analysed properly, shared with the right teams and turned into concrete actions, it can help you improve conversion, reduce friction and create better customer experiences.
Customer feedback can be quantitative, such as ratings, scores or categories. It can also be qualitative, such as written answers to open questions. The strongest insights often come from combining both.
A score tells you what is happening. An open comment can help explain why it is happening.
For example, a low Customer Effort Score can show that customers are struggling. But an open answer might reveal that the issue is unclear delivery information, a confusing button, a technical bug or a missing payment option.
That is when feedback becomes truly actionable.
Let’s look a little closer at some examples of how customer feedback can benefit your business.
Optimise your business and increase your sales
Let’s start with one of the biggest motivators for collecting digital feedback: improving conversion.
If customers are leaving your website, abandoning their cart or failing to complete an important action, feedback can help you understand why. Analytics can show you where people drop off, but feedback can tell you what stopped them.
For example, customers might tell you that:
- Shipping costs were unclear
- A form was too long
- A payment method was missing
- Product information was incomplete
- A page was loading too slowly
- They could not find the information they needed
These insights give your teams something practical to work with. Instead of guessing what needs to be improved, you can prioritise changes based on real customer input.
And this is where customer feedback becomes commercially valuable. Improving things like the user experience, website content, product pages, app flows, email communications and support journeys can all contribute to better sales performance.
Of course, feedback alone does not magically increase revenue. The impact comes from collecting the right feedback, analysing it properly and acting on it. But when done well, customer feedback can help you identify the improvements most likely to move the needle.
Interesting, right? We’ll get into more specific examples below.
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 one of the most effective ways to improve both UX and CX. By implementing customer feedback forms on your website or in your app, you can identify friction points that might otherwise go unnoticed.
- 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
- Ask customers what stopped them from completing a purchase
- Collect feedback on specific pages, such as product pages, help pages or checkout pages
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, part of Netigate, is the #1 feedback software for web, app and email. It gives you everything you need to create feedback forms, collect responses and analyse them for actionable insights.
With Mopinion, you can build highly customisable feedback forms, use advanced question routing, choose from a wide range of survey display options and collect feedback across your digital channels.
And as part of Netigate, Mopinion helps businesses go beyond collecting feedback alone. Together, Mopinion and Netigate support a broader approach to customer experience, making it easier to listen to customers, understand their needs and turn feedback into meaningful action across the entire customer journey.
Whether you want to improve your website, optimise your app, measure customer satisfaction or understand why customers are not converting, Mopinion helps you listen to your customers and make better, more customer-focused decisions.
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.