With the emergence of digital marketing tools, there are now plenty of ways customers can reach out to brands. These tools became a direct avenue to talk about their experience and what they feel about the brand, company, products, and services. In this regard, customers’ opinions have never been more important in meeting the needs of the business and its future success.
Customer feedback is an essential concept in the world of commerce. It is one of the fastest and most efficient techniques to help a business succeed. Years ago, customers have to write a letter or contact a hotline to reach out to the company. While many still rely on this channel, technology has now offered a range of tools to help marketers and business owners obtain immediate and detailed feedback from their customers. These include online survey tools, live chat transcripts, and transactional emails.
Each customer feedback tool has its own ways of gathering and measuring existing customer data. But the question is, what have you done to utilize customer data? More importantly, are you using it to strengthen your brand image and customer experience? This article will cite ways to use customer feedback to your advantage and boost business performance.
Establish social influence
Also called social proof, social influence happens when customers feel compelled to avail of a product or service if they observe people are using and buying it from a certain brand. Customer feedback is a great tool to establish social influence, and one of them is through testimonial pages. They are incredibly helpful in attracting customers by demonstrating why others feel satisfied with your brand. The customer data acquired from contact forms help in building testimonial pages for a business website.
Feedback contains what previous customers write in the contact forms, as well as the direct and indirect opinions they share on social media. By simply tagging your brand, sending a message, and commenting on your posts are forms of customer feedback you can maximize by building social influence and improving your business. After all, customer feedback is all about understanding your target consumers, including their opinion about your brand, product, or service.
Whatever form of feedback customers share about your brand, it’s important to respond to them whether they’re constructive or not. Customers who share their feelings and thoughts deserve to be valued since they take the time to commend your performance and help your brand towards improvement. Responding to feedback will also boost customer engagement, which encourages customers to provide more constructive feedback.
Improve product line
Product development is vital to business growth. Whether you want to expand the product line or improve its features, it’s necessary to learn about what customers expect and say about your brand to retain their trust and improve customer loyalty.
For instance, if customers are asking when are you planning to restock your products is already a form of feedback cue. Running out of stocks means customers are satisfied with your product offerings, but you should also have enough supplies to meet their growing demand.
Before applying product developments, take time to gather and evaluate customer feedback. You’ll never know if they have suggestions to improve the quality of your products as you grow your product line. Whatever product niche you’re in, using customer feedback is an effective growth tool to expand your product line. Using it to your advantage by creating an in-demand feature or product will not only enhance the retention rate but also the conversion rates and customer sales.
Enhance user experience
Here’s a fact: your business website is the foundation of all your marketing efforts. That’s why it makes sense to pour all your efforts to make it look good and easy to use. User experience helps improve brand image online. Not only is it concerned with website aesthetics, but also how each component blends together.
Regardless of how many website testings you perform, there will always be a glitch or bug that passes through. You’re lucky if the website visitor takes the time to reach out and raise the issue on the website team. Bugs happen, but it’s also important to take immediate action before visitors start walking out of your virtual storefront.
When sending out contact forms, make sure to include a part where customers can share about their website experience. You’ll find this useful in enhancing the user experience and the online presence of your business.
The secret to making good use of customer feedback is identifying patterns. Marketers and entrepreneurs have a habit of wasting their time focusing on trends in conversions and sales. In reality, customers are key to business growth. Therefore, it is important to be aware of how customers view our brands and how we use them for our business to exist and survive.
