How can I turn my customer feedback into growth?
Are you looking for ways to grow your business? The first thing you should do is listen to what your customers have to say. When you create content, promote products, and grow your brand, you can use feedback from visitors to help you make more informed decisions.
By observing how people react to your business, you can identify your strengths and weaknesses. Focus on your strengths to keep customer satisfaction high, and work on your weaknesses to boost retention.
To help you get started, we’ve put together this list of ways to use customer feedback to encourage business growth. Keep reading to find out what you could be doing more to ensure your brand experiences positive results.
1. Customise your content
Whether it be email newsletters, blog posts, social media posts or otherwise, the content you share with your customers is important. With feedback, you can ensure what you send is suited to your audience and targeted to people who genuinely want to see it. That way engagement and customer retention will increase because it’s easier for them to find what they want without combing through spam or feeling overwhelmed.
Even better, you can use an integrated CRM and campaign links to segment customers into different groups so that they only receive content that is relevant to them.
2. Improve existing products
The best way to evolve your product to meet the market is to listen to what users have to say and make improvements based on their feedback. A user knows what they want from a product or service so if they make a request, it’s wise to act on it. After making the change, you're likely to see a surge in positive reviews and feedback.
3. Increase your retention rate
Acquiring new customers is 5-25 times more expensive than retaining existing ones, so it’s important to reduce abandonment rates as much as possible. By listening to customer feedback, you can ensure your service and processes are up to their standards so they have no reason to leave. It is a lot harder to know what customers want and need without talking to them directly, so by using feedback, you can eliminate the guesswork and make improvements much more efficiently.
4. Improve your overall reputation
Customers share their experiences with other prospective customers, so it’s important to know what they’re saying about your brand. In fact, 62% of buyers say they share their Customer Experience (CX) with other people, so it’s worth knowing if it was a positive experience or not. If the experience is good, you can continue doing the same thing but if it was bad, you need to make changes immediately to ensure the fallout doesn’t scare other buyers away.
If you can optimise your Customer Experience using feedback straight from the source, you’re more likely to cultivate a strong brand reputation. This will have a compounding effect and over time you’ll see more and more growth.
5. Help your staff understand your customers
Feedback is a great way to connect your employees with your customers which helps them to provide better customer service. If you can share what customers are saying with employees, they can recognise what the customers want and then be empowered to deliver it. Customer service has a huge impact on customer satisfaction and retention rates so it’s worth giving employees all the tools they need to do their jobs well.
Studies show that 95% of customers believe customer service is important for brand loyalty, so if your customer service isn’t up to scratch, they’re likely to turn elsewhere.
6. Increase employee morale
Another benefit of customer feedback is that it can have an amazing effect on employee morale. By showing employees how their work is making a difference, you can motivate them to keep improving their customer service. Some businesses shy away from giving staff feedback for fear of poor reception, so if you’re still in doubt, you can read this blog about the pros and cons of sharing customer feedback with your employees.
7. Nurture brand advocates
The best promoters of your brand are existing customers who have had a positive experience. That’s because prospective customers trust the reviews from existing customers more than the advertising from the business itself. On average, a consumer will read 10 online reviews before deciding to trust a business which means if your customers aren’t leaving reviews, you could be missing out on a lot of opportunities.
That’s why encouraging customers to leave reviews and share their feelings about your brand is well worth it. It’s much easier to get these positive reviews when you’re already asking customers for feedback because it means you can target the most satisfied customers and request reviews from them at a relevant time.
For example, if someone responds to a Customer Satisfaction survey with a 10 out of 10 rating, you could automatically send them a review link asking them to share their experience online. This way, most of your reviews come from your most satisfied customers who are eager to shout your praises.
8. Monitor changes in satisfaction over time
Not only does customer feedback help you to improve your business in the short term, but it also gives you something to measure and track as you continue to make improvements. By using automated surveys, analytics and real-time reporting, you can ensure feedback is reviewed and acted on regularly as well as track how successful the changes are. That way, before taking steps to improve your business, you will be informed by real-world statistics and data directly from your customers.
So there you have it, all the ways to use customer feedback to generate business growth. Whether you need to improve your processes, empower your employees, reduce abandonment, or improve online reviews, the benefits are undeniable.
For more information on customer feedback, you can sign up for the launch of the Review Tui software later this year. Using a specialised platform will help you to make the most of customer feedback and grow your business successfully.