Why Customer Feedback is Vital to Your Business

Everyone can remember a time they’ve either hung up the phone or left a store unhappy after having a bad interaction with a sales associate. That experience may have even stuck with you so much that it just popped into your head. Now try and think about a great experience you've had... was remembering that as easy as your negative one? Positive experiences are less talked about because customers expect them - and this expectation makes customers less likely to provide your brand with good feedback.

In some cases, businesses don't invest or see the value in soliciting customer feedback, and only provide a general contact us number/email, or receive unsolicited feedback through outlets like social media. But, in today’s consumer-driven world, it’s more important than ever for brands to go out of their way to engage with their customers and collect feedback (both the good and the bad!) in order to better understand and serve them.

Customer feedback is so important because it gives businesses information they need to improve customer experience in the following ways:

1. Improve products or services
2. Show customers that their opinions are valued
3. Measure customer satisfaction

Improve products or services

In order to always keep your products or services at their best, it’s important to understand what that means to your customers. Collecting solicited customer feedback about your products provides you with the information you need to understand what’s working for your customers and what isn’t. With this information, you know when to make the appropriate changes, and why.

Gathering customer feedback is the only way to ensure you’re creating something that your customers actually want to purchase. It tells you what’s important to your customers and provides you with the knowledge to guarantee that you’re providing products and services that solve their problems, and meet - or exceed - their needs and expectations.

Show customers that their opinions are valued

The reason people complain or provide bad (and good) feedback is because they want to be heard. Asking your customers for feedback shows them that you care about what they have to say and value their opinions. Customers feel like they’re a part of the decision process and they’ll become more involved with your brand and shaping your products or services.

Even if customers are providing negative feedback, they’ll still be left with a positive feeling as they’ll see that their opinion is being heard and their voice matters (don't forget about the importance of actioning that feedback). This leads them to feel appreciated, which help your customer’s relationship with your brand and leads to better customer retention over time.

Measure customer satisfaction

Customer feedback helps you measure customer satisfaction by asking the right questions to determine if your customers are pleased with your business or services. Having an understanding of your customer satisfaction allows you to make better decisions for your business based on actual data and feedback from your customers.

Knowing what’s important to your customers helps you plan so that your brand can keep up accordingly. One of the most common ways to measure customer satisfaction is by eliciting customer feedback through customer satisfaction surveys. This is the perfect way to establish how satisfied your customers are.

Conclusion

It’s essential for companies to receive customer feedback and use it to their advantage, as there are always more and more options for the consumer and other brands vying for their business. Customer feedback allows businesses to improve their products based on facts, show customers that their opinion matters and measure their customer satisfaction.