The importance of customer feedback

If you are a business owner, it is vital to ensure that you do your strongest to satisfy customer needs, please them, and eventually maintain loyalty to your brand. However, how can a business be sure that the efforts produce the results desired?

If you aren’t looking to discover what your clients and customers truly think about your product or service, you won’t be able to provide the strongest customer experience. The customer’s experience with your brand is highly beneficial information, used to adjust a business to fit their needs, wants, and demands more accurately.

There is an abundance of methods to leverage feedback from customers, and profit from it. Collecting customer feedback, whether unprompted or prompted, is vital:

• To manage the loyalty and satisfaction of the customer
• In ensuring advanced customer retention
• For improving both services and products
• ...and in many more aspects of a business

But what exactly is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is information that is provided by customers regarding their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a business’ products or services. Feedback is also provided on general experiences had with companies. The consumer’s opinion is a resource for the improvement of the customer experience, and adjusts corporate actions based on the needs of the customer.

This information is collected with varying types of surveys (which is prompted feedback). However, it can also be discovered through the reviews and opinions of customers and clients that are posted on the internet (which is unprompted feedback). These can be collected using monitoring and feedback collection tools such as Suggested. Both prompted and unprompted feedback is vital to ensure a company receives a full image of how clients are perceiving a brand.

Top performing businesses understand the important role that customer feedback will play in a business. These businesses consistently listen to the voices of their customers and clients. Not only do these services search for opinions clients publish on review sites and social media prospects that are specifically designed for the gathering of feedback, but also deliberately request feedback through distinct types of surveys that come immediately after a purchase or interaction is made.

If a company is truly looking to maintain their advantage over their competition, it is vital to continue putting customer feedback at the forefront of their change controls. This should be the case regardless of if the feedback is negative or positive, unprompted or prompted.

But what reasons exist for why customer feedback is truly vital to the management of a business? Here are seven:

• Customer feedback assists in improving both services and products
• This feedback will assist in measuring customer satisfaction and results
• Collecting customer feedback shows the consumers that you value their opinions
• Customer feedback helps businesses to create the strongest customer experience
• This feedback will greatly assist in improving retention of customers
• Customer feedback is a reliable source for information to other consumers
• Collecting customer feedback provides the company with data to help make decisions