Importance of Customer Feedback and Strategies For Collecting Them

The current state of the industry is changing. There’s a ton that is governing the success of your startup. One thing that is constant amidst all this is reliance on customer feedback. Adapting to changes and keeping up with competition will make so much sense when your customers are happy with your product or service.

If you want to control factors that actually make a difference, focusing on the customer feedback loop is one of those factors.

Key takeaways

• Customer feedback is one of most important action items for your business
• Brands with better customer experience earn 5.7x more than competitors
• 90% of brands use feedback related tools for analysis & reports

What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is a crucial pillar of success for any business, providing insights that can drive business growth. It helps understand customer needs, resolve issues, and deliver better experiences. Effective strategies for collecting and acting on customer feedback can lead to increased customer loyalty and retention.

Companies can rely on various channels to get your customers to share feedback with you. Feedback in the form of experience, concerns and preferences, provides a window of improvement for your startup.

The importance of customer feedback

Customer experience is important for businesses, big and small. So much so that brands with better customer experience have 5.7x more revenue than competitors. On the flip side, 90% of brands that use customer feedback related data analytics & reports improved their ability to deliver a great customer experience.

If you want to grow your business ahead of competition, use customer insights as the primary source. Any growing business relies on real world experience to improve their product or services. Furthermore, when existing customers see their feedback being implemented, it strengthens their relationship with your business. Something similar to what Apple has faced upon implementing the Type-C charging module in the iPhone 15 series.

As a smart business owner, focus on the feedback from customers that aligns with the touchpoints you want your customers to have. For example, as an ecommerce startup, you can ask for feedback from customers right after they complete a purchase. There is a very high chance that they'll share the feedback.

Speaking of brand reputation, the feedback your customers have helps you get more customers at almost zero cost of acquisition. How good is that for a startup, especially if you’ve just started out?

The best ways to collect customer feedback

Most businesses wouldn’t be open to spending time and money on getting to know what their customers are saying. Knowing customer’s preferences is as important as your business itself. It’s not something you should take lightly, see what the former CEO of Zappos has to say.

With that said, here are a few ways you can collect customer feedback to grow.

#1 Tap into Social Media

Social media is a great way to connect with your customers. You can look at the brand mentions, respond to comments, and promote your brand voice. Depending on the platform your customers spend most of their time, you can use the features to your advantage. Instagram stories, Linkedin & Twitter polls, or YouTube community posts are a few of several ways you can create engaging channels to collect customer feedback.

#2 Create community for existing customers

Tracking brand mentions and queries on social media can be hectic and time consuming. If you can have a community for your customers to engage with & help each other, this will not create trust among themselves, it will also act as social proof. The feedback, preferences and insights are a bonus that you will get out of it. Focus groups can be another great way to create micro-niche focused groups within the community. You can incentivize participation for more engagement.

#3 Automated Emails

Emails are the closest you can get to your customers. Use that to collect feedback from them. Here are some ways you can put automated emails to good use.

1. Post-purchase survey: Send personalized emails based on the purchase made by your customers. Encourage them to share their purchase experience with tailored questions related to the product or service they’ve purchased.
2. Journey-specific feedback emails: If you have tracking systems in place, you can send personalized emails based on the stage your audience is in their journey. Duolingo is a classic example of this. Instead of emails, the multilingual learning app uses push notifications. Another example would be to send personalized email after a user signs up for your Newsletter. Since they’ve shown intent by signing up, it’s highly likely that they will respond.

You can also use email templates to make this process easier.

Check out our article on how to ask your customers for testimonials. The tips in this article will also help, for sure.

How to develop a customer feedback strategy?

If you’ve never done this before or if the one you’re utilizing right now isn’t working, I have 3 strategies for you that could help you develop a customer feedback strategy.

#1 Identify clear objectives 

When you’re taking care of growing your startup using the feedback shared by your users, it’s important to have a predefined objective clear & handy. Do you want to increase the engagement, improve the product quality or the satisfactions users have while using your product. 

Although each of these will help you grow, the course of actions varies. Define KPIs and align the feedback with business goals to get the most out of it.

#2 Choose the right channel

Just like you, your customers are busy. They won’t engage with your survey or any such channels for feedback. There’s nothing in it for them - it’s you who’ll be on the better side of the deal. 

Evaluate the channel your customers prefer, if your customer base is small, ask them directly. If you’re a medium sized business, you should rely on a multi-channel approach to get people to speak their minds. 

Social media listening, survey emails, website popups are few of the most effective ways to get feedback from customers. You can also analyze the demographics and behaviors of your customers to dig into their preference based on their engagement.

#3 Create surveys with a clear intent

Surveys are the most common, convenient and effective way to get feedback from your customers. Yet, there’s a high chance that you might get it wrong, especially if you’ve never done this before.

Use concise, clear and top the point questions that actually mean something to your business. Questions where they can share their objective behind using your product or service should be prioritized. Avoid vague questions that might result in biased responses. Consider mobile friendly designs of your survey form. Most users would see your survey on their smartphones.

When preparing questions for the survey, keep in mind to include open-ended questions. This will invite users to share the best feedback without any constraints. You can also implement rating scales for quantitative data and for internal training. The next time when you have to evaluate a new set of responses, you’d have a benchmark to compare it with.

Best practices to get & manage customer feedback

Once you have your customers sharing their preferences and insights with you, & now it’s time to take action. With action, comes questions. To save you some time, we have gathered some best practices to get & manage your customer’s feedback.

#1 Train your customer support team

Train your customer support team in a way that they keep looking for constructive feedback. This way, they not only will handle the queries, they will also capture feedback that will help grow your business. You can implement redundant tasks to AI powered chatbots and leave the customer support team for more delicate & specific queries only.

#2 Feedback analysis and sentiment tracking

Use AI tools to train on the feedback data to analyze emotional context & sentiments of your customers. Use the data to identify trends, positive and negative sentiments and areas of improvement in real-time. Use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to categorize comments & feedback.

#3 Monitor feedback closely

Setup SOPs and systems to monitor the feedback shared by your customers. Look for recurring issues mentioned by your customers. The systems in place should enable you to review feedback data and identify evolving preferences of your customers.

One form of customer feedback is a testimonial, which is usually a a statement or endorsement provided by a customer that reflects their positive experience, satisfaction, or opinion about a product, service, or brand. It often highlights specific aspects of the experience that others might find helpful or persuasive when making decisions. Testimonials serve as a way for customers to share their experiences and for businesses to showcase positive feedback to potential customers or clients.

We, at Testimonial Donut, make collecting testimonials from your customers or employees easer for you. We have the entire workflow sorted out with templates, guidance, interface for testimonial submission, and more. Do consider our services if you're keen on collecting testimonials.