“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.” – Bill Gates
In this world of so many choices, it’s hard to create a brand image in the mind of your customer. We see so many startups showing up with their products and services, but how many of them survive till the end, satisfying their target audience? Not many.
There are many reasons why companies don’t succeed, but one important reason is not analyzing customer feedback correctly, and hence making bad decisions. How do you know what your customers like or dislike about your product or service? Isn’t it valuable data for you? Of course it is.
As soon as your product is out in the market, you should watch its movement and listen to your customers carefully. Collect feedback from your customer wherever possible because this data is crucial for you and you know it. While some companies don’t take this seriously, others don’t know how to get customer feedback and how to analyze that data.
You can never gauge or estimate the acceptance and performance of your product or service in the market without customer feedback.
Why Do You Need Customer Feedback?
- It allows you to measure customer satisfaction
- It provides critical insights, allowing you to create a better customer experience
- It helps to make better business decisions
- It’s a great way to learn and correct
Once you know the importance of collecting customer feedback, it is important to know how to get it. So let’s take a glance at some of the common ways to get customer feedback.
- Live chat support
- Feedback forms on the website
- Email surveys
- Social media channels
- Polls
- Contests
It doesn’t end here, knowing the ways to get customer feedback is just one part. You must know how to leverage them to grow your company.
How to Leverage Customer Feedback and Grow Your Business
1. Testimonials Are Important for Lead Generation
Showcasing testimonials increases the trust factor and induces a positive thought in one’s mind to try out the product. Add simple tweets wherein your customers have said good things about you. Testimonials impact heavily and distinguish your business from competitors. Testimonials are critical to establishing credibility with customers and this, in turn, helps you get good leads. Try to ask for a testimonial from a famous personality in your industry. This will have much more impact, and since the personality has his follower base and can influence a larger enthusiastic group, many people would love to try your product out.
Co Schedule, the content marketing company, eagerly displays their customer’s tweets all the time, including a testimonial from Jay Baer, the world’s most inspirational marketing and customer service consultant.
2. Making the Customer the Hero of Your Story Increases Customer Retention
One stellar way to do it is through videos. Create customer videos. Make your client feel great and happy to be associated with you.
The growth marketing expert, Neil Patel, says, “Going above & beyond involves making customers feel special and helping them out even when it may not make sense.“
Create delightful customer videos and make your customer look like a hero. In the video, feature your client talking about your product and its amazing features. Videos can go viral when promoted well and are easily consumed anywhere. Share your customer videos across your social channels and embed them on your site. When you involve your client in such videos, he feels honored and will stay with you long term.
In this video, Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Slack, collaborating with Adam Lisagor, founder of Sandwich video produced a professionally made dual purpose video: it serves as a testimonial and also acts as a demo of Slack’s features.
3. Customer Success Stories Have a Quantifiable Impact on Revenue
Share customer success stories, case studies and real-life examples.
Show how companies used your product or service to overcome their problems. Write the case study in an organized way with a great headline and make sure it is shareable on different social media platforms. Follow this basic template:
Title
Industry of the client
Challenge
Solution
Results
Quote by your client
Writing original customer case studies not only helps others to use your product or service, it helps you identify and tackle any issues your potential customers may be facing. These success stories show your ability to address and produce great results, and this creates a good impact on other companies facing similar challenges who might need your help.
Shippable, a DevOps company, has done it well in a systematic manner where it shows how it helped its client Packet, a New York City-based infrastructure company increase its productivity by reducing their build time by 70% using the Shippable platform.
JJ George, a premium seller of outdoor grill and grill equipment knew it was paying too much for a particular part and contacted Sourcify, a startup helping entrepreneurs find the right manufacturers by removing the middleman. Experts from Sourcify were able to cut costs by 65% on an essential item by going directly to the manufacturer instead of having to go through two mediators.
4. Online Reviews Impact Consumer Buying Decisions
Ask for positive reviews from your existing customers. Submit your product to product review forums and ask your loyal customers to give positive feedback.
If anybody is searching for a product or service related to yours, they will probably end up on a product review forum. It is better if your product or service is listed on such forums and is not just listing your product; you should ask your loyal customers to share their positive feedback about the product.
Information search is one stage in the consumer buying cycle where your target audience is seeking solutions for their problem on the Internet, and once they know there is a solution available, they will seek the best one among the different solution providers. If you want to be a more appealing option, you should have more positive reviews on Internet forums for your product or service.
Amazon Customer Reviews is what you want when it comes to B2C, and for B2B, G2 Crowd is the best.
Shopify, an e-commerce platform, takes online reviews very seriously, and you can see this on G2 Crowd. Shopify encourages reviews from its loyal customers, and many Shopify’s customers have given a 5-star rating to this platform.
5. Customer Feedback Can Help Reduce Costs
Use customer feedback to improve existing products and streamline your processes. Through text analytics, you will know what your customers want from you. Listen to them to find out how you can make improvements to your product or service.
Using a live chat option can help companies watch immediate queries the customers have and resolve them quickly.
American Business & Technology University started using LiveChat and a help desk software as a centralized chat and ticketing system to help students get immediate answers to their inquiries about the school and courses.
Students started reaching out for help via chat instead of making a phone call. This resulted in a 50% decrease in the number of received phone calls, and it reduced costs associated with returned calls.
Ultimately, the customer is king, listen to them and try to mitigate the problems they are facing. Make them feel special and satisfied.
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