What is a customer feedback tool?

Customer feedback is an essential part of growing a business. Not only does it enable businesses to uncover areas for improvement, but also quickly reveals what they’re doing well. While the former gives businesses areas to focus on improving, the latter provides great sales and marketing tools to help a business grow. But what tools exist to help you uncover these insights, and what do they do exactly?

It may be interesting to know that 90% of customers are influenced by positive reviews when buying a product. And while there is a difference between customer feedback and customer reviews both are very important in their own ways. In case you don’t have time to check out our other blog explaining the difference, the key distinction between the two is:

• Customer feedback - feedback from customers handled internally.
• Customer reviews - public opinions of your business from customers.

Businesses need both in order to grow. While external reviews influence another customer’s buying habits more directly an internal customer feedback programme enables you to catch any potential issues before they go public. While positive customer reviews are great for business, a bad customer review can be terrible. 86% of customers hesitate to purchase from companies with negative reviews.

A customer feedback tool enables you to gather feedback, analyse the comments and manage your response from within the business.

Benefits of a customer feedback tool

As you may have guessed from the above figures, one of the great benefits of a customer feedback tool is that you can internally gather and process feedback before it becomes public. By systematically asking your customers for feedback you can determine patterns, common themes, and recurring issues that customers face.

The results can often be surprising. Business leaders often have an idea of what they do well, and this is typically compared with direct competitors. It can often surprise them to discover what their customers value!

A customer feedback tool makes it easy to gather, collect, and assess the feedback, which is a must if there’s the potential for you to get quite a lot of it. A customer feedback tool will make it easy for you to store and view feedback going back years, which can be great if you want to compare and contrast the types of feedback you’ve received over time.

Key features of a customer feedback tool

If you only expect to receive a handful of comments from customers then you might not see the value in a customer feedback tool. The main value in using a customer feedback platform is the long-term management and analysis of feedback, which is best done with a tool that has some form of analytics attached. Therefore, you want to ensure your customer feedback tool has at least the following features:

• Ability to create and manage surveys (to gather feedback)
• Feedback alerts
• A dashboard to analyse results
• Some form of scoring

There are a few things that some customer feedback tools have that aren’t essential, this includes survey delivery methods. Some customer feedback tools enable you to send surveys from within their platform and while this may seem like a great convenience, it has its drawbacks. For example, if you already have an email sending tool, whether that be Mailchimp or a marketing platform like HubSpot, the customer feedback platform becomes another place where you have to manage lists and customer details.

It’s often better to intertwine your customer feedback tool with your existing CRM and client communications tools, to reduce tech stack overlap.

Another feature that many customer feedback tools will promote is the use of NPS®. NPS® is a customer sentiment scoring tool, but it isn’t without its flaws. While it’s important that your customer feedback tool has some form of scoring, so you can track your progress over time, NPS® isn’t necessarily the best for you.

How can customer feedback grow my business?

Aside from using customer feedback to steer business decisions you can also use it in your sales and marketing strategies to grow your business. In fact, there are multiple ways you can use customer feedback to grow. Here are a few ways it can be used:

Iron out issues in your business

The primary benefit to customer feedback is that you can find the friction points in a customer’s experience and work to iron them out. From a clunky website experience to inconsistent service and a faulty product you can easily find the issues within your organisation and fix them for other customers.

Find out what you do well

On the flip side customer feedback also highlights the areas where you exceeded customer expectations. They will tell you, in their own words, what you did well and where you outshone the competition. You can use these as selling points in your marketing and sales literature to emphasise the features of choosing your business.

Testimonials

You can use the words these customers provide as testimonials on your website, social media, or in advertising. Testimonials are a great tool for using the words of happy customers to convince prospects that your business is trustworthy and good to work with. Review Tui includes a feature to ask users for permission to use their feedback in marketing to make this easy.

Direct people to leave public reviews

If someone provides a rave review in their customer feedback then why not ask them if they’d be comfortable leaving a public review? Customer feedback is great for internalising customer opinions but at some stage, you’ll want to use happy customers as promoters. Review Tui makes this easy by including alternative endings to surveys so you can either process the feedback internally, or encourage the respondent to leave feedback on one of your public platforms, like Facebook or Google.

So there we have it. A customer feedback tool is a platform for you to gather customer feedback, manage it, analyse it, and store it for future reference. It can open the doors to customer thoughts and enable your business to make informed and guided decisions on where to invest its efforts.

If you’re looking for a customer feedback tool then why not try Review Tui? It’s a new customer feedback platform designed for medium and small businesses set to launch in 2022 and will include a free version for those looking to get started on their customer feedback journey. Simply click the button below to register your interest and be notified of updates.