How to Use Customer Feedback to Your Advantage

How to use customer feedback

Your customers’ insights are invaluable market intelligence. Here’s how to apply customer feedback directly and indirectly to enact changes that can help you achieve profitable growth. 

1. Use customer feedback to improve the online user experience.

User experience (UX) is about more than website design; it’s how all your site’s components function together. Business owners and website designers often miss a bug or glitch — even after vigorous testing. However, consumers will likely find website issues your testing team didn’t identify. Additionally, something a more tech-savvy tester might not see as a problem may pose issues for customers visiting your website.

When consumers discover a bug or glitch, they need a quick way to reach your support team. There are a few ways to make reporting problems easy for customers: 

• Create automatic error notifications: Automatic error notifications are a common tactic for collecting UX feedback. If you’ve ever started scrolling through a program only to have it crash, you likely received a notification that there was an error. Typically, this notification gives you the option of sending your data to the team for review. 
• Add a contact form: An easy-to-use online contact form on the sidebar of your website is an effective way to ask your audience if they have constructive feedback on their experience with your business. 
• Send follow-up emails: Use email automation to send follow-up emails to your subscribers to solicit feedback about their experiences. Ask what they would change about their experience if they could. This data is helpful for growing your business and providing value to your customers.

2. Use customer feedback to build social influence. 

Social influence, or social proof, is the phenomenon that people are more likely to buy something if they see other people buying and using products from the same brand. You can build social proof with consumer feedback in several ways, including the following:

• Create testimonial pages: Testimonial pages show potential customers why your brand is worth their time. Use the feedback you receive via contact forms to build testimonial pages for your website.
• Examine your social media platforms: When consumers mention your brand, comment on your posts or send you a message, they provide valuable feedback you can use to build social proof or enhance your business. Part of connecting with your target audience is seeing how they view your brand and products. 
• Respond to online reviews: Like social media mentions and comments, online reviews are a public-facing conversation about your brand. It’s crucial to respond to online reviews — good and bad — to show everyone how you react to positive and negative feedback. 

Regardless of the feedback your customers leave, it’s crucial to respond to as many people as possible and take their opinions seriously. People who leave feedback either had a great customer experience or want to share how you can improve.

3. Use customer feedback to evolve your product line. 

As your business grows, you may want to add new products or services. To avoid a product failure, listen to your customer feedback before investing in product creation. 

For example, if an online pet store has many customers asking when it will add dog and cat treats, this is a great feedback cue. Current customers are happy with your products but wish you could meet their additional needs. In this instance, you’d find ways to include high-quality pet treats on your growing product list. 

Feedback can be a growth tool, no matter your industry or niche. Listening to your customers and adding an in-demand product or feature will increase customer retention rates, sales and conversions. 

4. Use customer feedback to improve customer service.

Christina Garnett, chief customer officer at neuemotion, stressed that using feedback to improve customer service is critical to customer retention. “While your customer retention rate is important to pay attention to, you need to look at the qualitative data and feedback to understand why they would want to leave in the first place,” Garnett explained. “Then and only then do you have the information you need to solve the problem and try to save the customer relationship.”

Here are some tips for using customer feedback to improve how you support and retain customers: 

• Use contact form feedback to educate your support team: Educate your employees on the typical issues customers mention when they submit contact forms. If half of your contact forms contain the same question or complaint, you’ll know many consumers experience the same problem. Help your team create a fast, helpful answer for this problem or post the answer in your instructions or on your frequently asked questions or self-help page. 
• Proactively seek post-sale feedback: Ask for feedback soon after a sale. This lets you address problems head-on before the customer gets frustrated and leaves a negative review — or decides not to do business with you anymore.
• Refine your chatbot with customer feedback: If you use website chatbots, feedback can help you program and refine your bot to help customers with common questions or concerns. The best live chat software offers extensive customization options to personalize your support experience. 

5. Use customer feedback to identify new markets. 

If you’re considering expanding your product line or opening another location, ask your customers for their opinions. You’ll see how strong the demand is for a new product or how well-received your business might be in a particular area. 

For example, Trader Joe’s grocery store has a web form where customers can request a Trader Joe’s location. If they get many requests for a particular city or area, the company will conduct additional research to see if building a new store there makes sense.

6. Use customer feedback to make customers feel valued. 

When you ask customers to share their feedback, they know you value their opinions and care about their happiness. Build on this relationship by sharing changes that came from customer feedback. Closing the feedback loop and thanking customers for their contributions increases their engagement with your company, leading to more sales, positive reviews and recommendations.

How to gather customer feedback

Jared Norris, chief customer officer at Chatmeter, emphasized that creating a feedback program to amass customer insights is crucial. “A well-planned feedback program allows you to see your brand through the eyes of the customer and remove any biases or preconceived notions,” Norris explained. “Competition is fierce and most brands are competing on price, product and differentiation. Leveraging your customers’ feedback to stand out is a low-cost strategy.”

Consider implementing the following methods in your feedback program to help you improve your business and sustain and grow customer relationships. 

1. Gather customer feedback with surveys. 

Survey data is crucial in marketing. To create customer feedback surveys, decide on a small set of questions to ask customers about their experiences. Next, deliver the surveys to your customers via website pop-ups, text or email. 

Shorter-form surveys typically generate the most feedback, but you could test longer-form types. Surveys may follow a rating system and provide boxes for additional comments. Questions should be open-ended. Most companies aim for surveys that take under two minutes to complete.

Email works well for quick customer responses about their experiences; most businesses only send a few short questions to be answered. The best email marketing software can help you schedule, personalize and structure emails to get the best response rates. Auto-response emails are helpful when sending out customer feedback questions after any interactions. 

2. Gather customer feedback with phone calls and live chat. 

If you want more in-depth information, collect feedback via phone calls. You may ask similar open-ended questions as those posed in the surveys. Although this method of customer feedback collection takes longer, you gain better insights. You can judge people’s tones and decide to ask follow-up questions if needed.

You can also gather feedback by engaging customers in real time with a live chat feature on your website. Representatives can collect data and ask follow-up questions based on customers’ answers. 

3. Gather feedback with artificial intelligence (AI) and tech tools like customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. 

Dav Neg, CEO of QueryPal, advises businesses to use the advanced analytics and AI tools in their software platforms to gather customer feedback. “These systems continuously monitor all customer touchpoints, instantly categorizing and prioritizing feedback across bug reports, feature requests, sentiment and usage patterns,” Neg explained. 

This real-time analysis can help businesses respond quickly to problems flagged by customers and route critical issues to the relevant teams. “The result is a dramatic reduction in response times and a more agile, customer-centric organization,” Neg said.

For example, the best CRM software records data about each client interaction and generates analytics for your review. Representatives using the CRM program can enter feedback gathered during client interactions for later review. Many even include built-in AI insights and sentiment analysis to gauge customers’ attitudes and feelings. 

4. Gather customer feedback with case studies. 

Case studies help companies elicit feedback on their products and services. They involve taking a small group of participants and collecting their feedback after using your brand’s product or service. Many case studies involve bringing together customers with similar backgrounds to gain valuable insights. 

5. Gather customer feedback on social media.

Analysts can monitor social media to determine what’s being said — good and bad — about a company and help manage your online reputation. For example, if you post about a product and find negative comments, you may want to investigate the issue further. 

Customer feedback is vital

The key to using customer feedback to your advantage is recognizing patterns. Business owners spend almost every waking minute thinking about sales and conversion trends. However, customers allow businesses to exist and thrive. You must be mindful of how they perceive your brand and look for patterns in the feedback you receive. 

As your customer count rises, you’ll have more chances to identify trends and make changes based on feedback. UX, social proof, new markets, product development roadmaps and customer support all pivot on how customers interact with and use your products and services. 

Customer data presents a clear advantage to guide each step of your product development, marketing and sales.