The basic tenet of any business is staying as close to the customers as possible, understand how they behave, buying patterns, and preferences, etc. This, feel many business heads, should be the chief driver towards growth and innovation in a business of any kind of size and type. Yes, customer feedback should be the driving point for all businesses as the popular adage that goes is – ‘customer is the king’.
Customer feedback is among the most significant and valued resources for information that improves retention rates, outlines sales and marketing strategies, directs product development, and best of all accelerates business enhancement. Leverage the power of the customer feedback app to create the kind of business that can receive the best of said attributes.
Since, there are several customer feedback methods, it gets difficult to guess which to use and when. Once you have collected the feedback, you don’t immediately come with the obvious method of responding to it. There are some customer feedbacks coming in the form of a number or a score, like that of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. There are others that come in detailed and lengthy reviews.
So, the million-dollar question is – how would you aggregate the complete set of information and convert it into some kind of tangible action plan to improve your business?
How would you translate the Customer Feedback to tangible action?
Create a mental goal
As with any kind of business practice, you should not just get into throwing thoughts at random and hoping everything works. There has to be an intentional process through which customer feedback is collected, which is essentially driven by SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and timely goals).
For instance, in your business’ early stages where product development is nascent and you are attempting at creating a minimum value product (MVP), it will be essential for to receive customer feedback to understand how you should build a product that will be loved by customers. Gradually when you enter the growth stage and begin competing with others, you would begin to refine and widen your feature.
On the flip side, you may have a product/service that has been found fit for the market and is growing rather quickly. In case of such, your goal from customer feedback apps and the process could be of finding ways that ensures customers are receiving as much value from your service/product as possible. Feedback this stage has to be focussed on gathering knowledge about the complete customer experience that includes the process of onboarding and the relationship ongoing. Staying at the helm of this may ensure that the happiness of your customer does not go down with the growth of your company.
At each stage of your business growth, you need to solicit customer feedback on the basis of existing service and product and that vision you have for your product in its growth. Ideally, you would have the next set of evolution for your offers in planning, by asking your customers what their opinion is about it. You can use the customer feedback software to figure out if that would be a profitable mode to work on.
Look for different kinds of feedback
Good customer feedback that is actionable has to go beyond NPS. Although this mode of recording is a great method of benchmarking how you performed against your competitors in the said industry, the score isn’t enough to really inform you of the process you must take up to create a better product.
Feedback can be anything ranging from scores to smiley faces to detailed surveys plus behavioral data. By asking the mix of all these, you will receive a comprehensive, feedback that is quantitative on both common customer sentiment and the probable reasons behind the sentiment.
For instance, some of the renowned businesses whenever they release new features or launch a product in the market, they send a survey to customers where there are these smiley faces in red, yellow, or green – indicating dissatisfaction, confusion, and happiness index respectively. Whenever the customers respond, they generally ask a follow-up set of questions to give their customers an opportunity to provide feedback in their comment box. Based on the kind of feedback received, a representative would reach out to the customers to collect further information. Customer feedback apps are the best to find out more about what exactly the customers feel about their products/services.
This is a wonderful instance that demonstrates different layers in customer satisfaction reviews. There is availability of both contextual data in the form of comments and quantifiable data in the form of surveys. These customer feedback surveys and the apps actually help identify the commonalities in the comments and utilize them as a strategy towards the improvement of their product.
Ask for feedback in each and every stage of customer lifecycle
Your business may not restrict collecting feedback only to customers also it may not merely deal with the product. You could look out for feedback from every stage of the lifecycle of your customer regarding every aspect of your business, right from your service/product to the marketing content.
For instance, when you close a sale, you could ask for feedback from your new customer about specific pieces of the content they could engage with, how it helped them in making informed decision while on the sales module and how was their overall feeling of the sales process. Once they are regular with using your product/service for some time, ask if their expectations were met during the process of sales. This would help you align the sales, marketing, and service departments within your business so that the smoothest possible customer experience can be felt.
Some of the well-known digital brands solicit customer feedback at each stage of the process of web development. They break it down to stages and track customer sentiment in the process to understand exactly which of the pieces of the entire process need improvement.
Find out the “how” and “why”
An implicit amount of data can inform you that some 10 percent (let’s say) of your customers are using a specified feature with your service/product, but in case you want that data to be turned into actionable work, you would need to get deeper into what makes your customers behave that way and how possibly you could alter the product towards making it rather appealing to your customers.
When you receive answers to the two questions, you would be able to get a clear picture of the issue and that would help you understand how best you can solve them. For instance, the three smiley can be a wonderful illustration of taking the what plus the why to the point of how:
- The smiley reveals exactly what the customers feel
- The comments tell you why they feel that way
- The follow-up on the reviews tell you how you could improve on that feeling
To conclude:
Let’s leave you with the following statistic: 70 percent of the unhappy customers whose problems get resolved are ready to shop with your business again.
That signifies you could prevent almost 70 percent customer churn through the simple translation of their negative feedback to action so that their problems are solved. As the end-users of your service/product, customers have unique perspectives on your service, product and complete business, and they would be able to tell you exactly what you should be doing to make their experiences better.
If you aren’t soliciting customer feedback plus utilizing the power of customer feedback software to actively shape your business strategy surrounding the feedback, you are missing out on a tremendous opportunity to change your business, provide customer delight and bring down the churn.
