service crm

Customer Feedback: The Complete Guide on Why It is Important

Businesses are on a never-ending quest to find out what customers need and deliver it accurately to them in a quick turnaround time to enhance their customer experience. With the rapid inclination toward digitalization, most business environments have switched online. 

The one significant benefit of online businesses is their easy access to customer feedback. They can easily create and revamp their business strategies or marketing techniques by inculcating feedback given by the customers. 

According to a survey conducted by Deloitte, “ Customer-centric businesses are 60% more profitable than product-centric ones, owing much of their success to valuable customer feedback.”

What is Customer Feedback?

Customer feedback is a powerful guide that gives you crucial insights about every part of your business – from product UX to customer support. You can create a good customer feedback management strategy with various ways and methods to collect feedback from your customers. 

This can be through multiple platforms and ways including surveys, calls, social media posts, emails, etc. There is no better reliable source than direct customer feedback to measure the quality of your company’s service and products. 

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Why does customer feedback matter?

Why is Customer Feedback Important?

Taking a proactive approach toward collecting customer feedback ensures that you never go astray from the needs of your customers, even as those needs evolve with time. 

A report by Publicis Sapient says that highly-engaged customers buy 90% more often and spend 60% more per transaction.

When you ask your customers about their opinion related to a product or service, your customers feel that their needs and requirements are valued, boosting their CSAT score. Once your potential customers feel that they are listened to, they might promote your business through word-of-mouth advertising. 

Valuable feedback from your customers helps in bridging the gaps in both your service and products. Your brand may undergo many iterations to keep the services and products unique and up-to-date. It is important to keep up with the competition and that’s why customer feedback is important for enhancing customer experience. 

 

Benefits of Gathering Customer Feedback 

The importance of customer feedback for businesses is very crucial. It is one of the best ways to ensure that your business is providing seamless customer service that meets the needs of your customers. 

According to data collected by Invesp, 90% of customers read online reviews before visiting a business website and 88% of customers trust these opinions almost as if they were personal recommendations.

With each valuable feedback, businesses are enhancing their whole customer service strategy by incorporating what customers actually need.

Here are some of the major benefits of customer feedback that will help your business to improve customer service.  

  • Feedback may reflect on the factors that you did not take into account before, such as free shipping, safe packing, polite and available customer service consultants, and user-friendly websites.
  • Points out aspects of your products that need to be improved. 
  • Contributes to a better customer experience by keeping records of your customer requirements.
  • Helps you in taking effective business decisions by drawing conclusions from the feedback.
  • Responding to customer opinions helps you in building brand loyalty and creates a sort of relationship that makes the product purchase process more personal.

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Source

 

Best Practices For Collecting Customer Feedback

A survey by PWC mentions that “When products and services come with great experiences, consumers are willing to pay up to 16% more.”

Feedback on its own might be informative, but without the proper context surrounding it, you will never know how to use it for further customer success.

Mentioned below are a few practices which you should follow while collecting customer feedback to get complete information about customer preferences, behavior, and expectations. 

1. Define Your Goal

Never make the mistake of collecting feedback with no clear goal. The objectives you define at the beginning of your feedback process will help you narrow down your efforts. It will lead you to choose the right technique and tool. 

For instance, you can collect feedback for new product development or the entire customer experience. Limit your surveys to a certain number so you do not overdo it.

Ask for feedback only when it is necessary.

2. Set Clear Expectations

Sometimes customers do not give feedback because they do not think anyone cares. That’s why most brands do not hear from unhappy customers.

Many of those same customers may be willing to leave feedback if they knew they would hear back and exactly when to expect a response. Customers rely on the expectations you have set while collecting customer feedback

You should consider adding a short sentence while collecting feedback that tells customers how soon they can expect to hear back from you.

“We’ll get back to you within X hours/days” will go a long way to set expectations and build trust with your customers.

3. Email and Customer Contact Forms

Email is one of the easiest ways to collect valuable customer feedback. Since email enables you to send a one-to-one request, you can ask for more personal feedback than in a common survey.

For example, when customers sign up for more information about your services, you can send out an auto-responder email asking a single question. Inquire into the issues that customers are struggling with most, or what features they would love to see.

The trick is to make sure your team has a set process for replying to these emails otherwise, your customers will feel let down.

You can also use a help desk system to transform every email into an opportunity to tune into customer feedback. 

4. Exploratory Customer Interviews

Reaching out to customers directly opens up conversations that would not have been possible otherwise. Qualitative response from customers brings nuance to quantitative feedback. 

These personal experiences help you to understand the feeling behind customer decisions and the community response to your brand.

When you conduct customer interviews, you create an opportunity to challenge untrue assumptions that developed over time. 

5. Social Media Feedback 

Social media is one of the most valuable sources for collecting customer feedback. These platforms can give you access to an untapped reservoir of candid feedback from customers. 

Leveraging social monitoring helps you in keeping a close eye on comments on your social media posts. This will allow you to spot negative comments and feedback early on.

You can work on resolving those issues by having real-time conversations and publicly demonstrating your dedication to customer service.

 

Leap into Action with Kapture

Customers can positively transform every aspect of your business if you listen to them. and the customer support platform is the ideal choice, to begin with.

Kapture is way more than a help desk software that provides businesses with software that helps them in managing and creating an effective customer feedback strategy for better customer service. 

With an omnichannel presence collecting feedback and integrating them from multiple platforms into a unified location is just a cakewalk. 

You can also run surveys such as NPS, CSAT, or CES to gauge customers’ take on your service standards and to set a benchmark for improvement. 

To know more, get in touch with our product squad at Kapture and find out how our service CRM automation platform can transform your customer service processes.

 

About the Author

Shivika
Shivika
Shivika is a Content Writer at Kapture CRM, who enjoys using her creative skills to contribute to the exciting technological advances. She is passionate about cultural artifacts and culinary art.

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