The Value of Customer Feedback

You can improve your business by doing something as straight forward as listening to your customers. Although you likely believe that all your products are perfect for your target audience, it is easy to become blinded with your own bias. Customer reviews are a helpful way for brands to identify areas of weakness and turn it into an opportunity. By accepting customer feedback and taking it on board, you could see your business drastically transform for the better. Here, we’ll take a look at the value of customer feedback.

Always listening means always improving

As mentioned, brands can often fall out of monitoring the performance of products’ sales. As a nation, we are currently experiencing a stark demographic shift in the market, with millennial and generation Z shoppers acting as turning points in terms of what the customer wants from a purchase. If a product or service goes unchanged for a prolonged period, then it cannot meet these ever-changing needs and their offering is not up to scratch with the new customer requirements. Not all brands are clued up on the ways that this can be achieved and taking your market research to the next level is always a good place to start.

Regardless of if you’re in the early stages of developing a new design for a suit or looking for ways to rejuvenate your current offerings, you should take customers’ thoughts into account. By pursuing these lines of inquiry, you can identify any flaws, experiences, and preferences which could prove fundamental for distinguishing your business and product in a congested market. These kind of insights are such a valuable tool for brands nowadays who are aiming to improve their products, but if they are not applying the findings in the right way then they become pointless. The thriving beauty and skincare business Glossier is a great example of this, as the team includes dedicated customer service agents who work closely with the marketing department and listen to customer experiences. By listening to customer feedback, you are essentially promoting a culture of improvement.

A satisfied customer is a happy customer

An element often underestimated is customer satisfaction. If you are smart with your approach to customer feedback, then you can boost your satisfaction rates as well as develop consumer loyalty. Every home will have its own stock of ‘household name’ type products that are absolute essentials on every shopping trip, and the reason that these products have achieved such status is by sustaining a consistently high level of customer satisfaction.

Evaluating customer satisfaction is as easy as asking questions — and there are several smart metric strategies to help you do just this. One example is the Net Promoter Score known as NPS, which allows your business to uncover target responses from your customers relating to your product or service. Through a series of simple questions with answers based on a 0-10 rating scale, with 0 being most negative and 10 being most positive, you can develop an understanding of how satisfied your customers feel towards your brand. The UK cosmetics experts Lush have topped a plethora of polls based on customer satisfaction and experience. From their revolutionised tablet-based till payments to the ethical, transparent brand character, the business has become customer satisfaction force to be reckoned with. Many of the stores’ branches are experimenting with both visual search technologies and voice activated assistants, showing just how much they value investing in their customer satisfaction rates.

More than just a target audience

Creating a sense of community is important in placing value in the people buying your products. Personalisation has taken many businesses by storm, and for a brand to succeed they need to capture engaging elements in their market strategies, while also accounting for the human element that customers look for in an ever-automated world. Building strong customer relationships is more important than ever and listening to feedback from your audience is inherent to this. A recent survey from Infosys found that 31% of respondents said that they want their shopping experience to be far more personalised than it currently is.

Using different marketing communications can be helpful in targeting your target audience, as well as improving perceptions of your brand — the retail industry is leading the way in this demonstration. As brick and mortar stores become gradually left behind in the fast-moving digital age, businesses are constantly under pressure to evolve and nurture the data that they have on customers which means that retail performance is key. Convenience is a sought-after aspect amongst the new, younger market demographic, and by listening to customer feedback you can devise ways to make your brand appeal to a potentially larger audience. Coffee giant Starbucks made their digital app ultra-convenient by using locational data as well as previous orders to make getting that essential caffeine hit a streamlined service. Introduced as part of their rewards system, the customisable options helped revenue to soar to $2.56 billion.

Taking customer feedback on board will undoubtedly improve your business, especially with how often people leave customer reviews — so boost your brand’s reputation by listening to your customers!