3 Vital Reasons Your Business Needs Customer Feedback

3 Vital Reasons Your Business Needs Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is one of the best ways to get your business moving in the right direction.  When our business isn't moving as quickly in the direction we want it to, it's best to start back to the roots of our business, the customer!  With their feedback, we can develop a virtuous cycle, create a fantastic user experience, but only if we listen to them the correct way!

Developing a Virtuous Cycle

We first create a minimal viable product to get users on board.  We then use this time as an opportunity to get their feedback on how to improve the product.  By improving the product, we can then make our customers happy, which tends to lead to longer customer lifetime value and more referrals.  As people send out more referrals, our business acquires more customers, which leads to more feedback, higher customer satisfaction and more referrals! 

Do you see how this virtuous cycle of feedback can have an exponential growth effect on our business?  This is why customer feedback is critical and should be foundational to what you do as a company.  It creates a win-win situation for everyone including the customer, employees, and the business owner.

Use Customer Feedback to Create an Amazing User Experience

One of the most basic forms of customer feedback comes in the form of allowing customers to leave reviews.  If these reviews are genuine and overwhelmingly positive, this will establish the strongest kind of persuasion out there – social proof.  This takes a tremendous burden off of the sales team in terms of keeping the company afloat.  Also, by collecting reviews, or sending out emails asking for feedback, it will show that your proactive and responsive, as opposed to some hollowed out passive income stream that just collects money and sees people as numbers.  This helps to earn more trust with your users and gives them long-term confidence in your business.

Collecting data such as net promoter score will show you where you stand with the customer and give insight on how likely they are to recommend your product to a colleague.

Also, by collecting customer feedback, it can help your business evolve in the right direction. The thing that it can impact the most is the employee training process because you will have excellent insight on how to serve and please customers the best!

Reliable Source of Information, IF You Know How to Listen

Henry Ford is famous for saying: “If I had to ask people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”  The truth is, the customer doesn’t always know what they want.  When one listens to their feedback, they have to understand the bigger picture of what the customer truly wants. Henry Ford observed his potential customers and realized that they wanted to move faster. Therefore, he finished up the development of his Model T after over a decade of research.

One way of listening to your customers is by collecting feedback directly through surveys, customer service interactions, and email.  However, one of the most overlooked methods of learning from the customer is through observations.  Listening to the things they're saying on forums, seeing how they interact with your service or product.  There are many ways to listen to your customer without asking them directly, and by understanding this simple principle, we can learn to serve them better.

By utilizing live chat tools, website analytics, customer feedback forms, net promoter feedback, and even online support communities, we can collect valuable insights into our customers’ needs and develop procedures and products that fulfill these needs!