Brand voice will always be in the spotlight of every modern business today. Marketers do their best to ensure consistency across all channels, sales crews try to use the language that best depicts your brand’s values, and customer support teams are always on the lookout for better ways to impress the consumer. However, in order to truly obtain that competitive edge, brands have started relying on one old, but a gold piece of the puzzle: customer feedback. While these comments and testimonials can be obtained through a range of different methods, the end goal should be the same – establishing trust and inspiring loyalty.
While many businesses still focus solely on their internal efforts, those that start including customer-centric strategies, including feedback solicitation can look forward to many perks associated with the practice. After all, if you exist to serve a need of your audience, knowing how well you’re fulfilling that purpose can make all the difference in how you present your brand and how you modify and innovate your services and products down the road. Here are the four key reasons you need to focus on collecting customer feedback and how to use them to benefit your business.
1. Measuring Customer Satisfaction
With so many moving parts, the idea of customer satisfaction is often an elusive one that too many businesses fail to measure properly. Without proper data to support future decisions that impact customer satisfaction, that means foregoing future improvements on a much grander scale that may make the difference between survival and failure. Since the end goal of any brand is to produce satisfied customers after every interaction, measuring their level of satisfaction becomes vital.
One of the easiest and most effective ways to ask for feedback is to integrate your surveys into your email marketing strategy. That way, you can time each survey and target very specific customer clusters, such as first-time buyers, repeat customers, and influencers alike. Email allows for longer forms of surveys to be delivered and gives your audience ample time to consider their answers with care. To make your email data relevant, make sure to create a schedule of repeat and refined surveys via email such as sending another one after six months.
2. Improving Customer Experience
The feedback that you receive from your customers is an invaluable source of information that you can use to improve your brand. That will in turn significantly boost the experience your brand provides to its customers. In fact, diversifying the channels through which you obtain feedback gives your customers a chance to respond to surveys in their own preferred manner, and to get an in-depth insight into their overall experience.
So, by sending out a customer satisfaction survey via a text message to someone who has just made a purchase at your store, you can use the derived responses to refine the overall customer experience. Even positive feedback can lead to insights that can help you perfect your digital and in-store presentation, while negative comments can give you an opportunity to respond, resolve an issue, and prevent the same problem from occurring to other customers in the future.
3. Increasing Trustworthiness
Nowadays, everything happens online, including our decision-making process. Much like we used to rely on personal recommendations from friends and family members, we now read about different products and services online. We find reviews directly on websites, but we also look through social media testimonials and other platforms such as Google. In fact, a survey has shown that 93% of interviewed customers rely on reviews to make their purchasing decision.
In essence, we put great trust in what other people say about brands online. We rely on their genuine opinions, and we tend to check other people’s experience before relying on the brand alone to ensure us that we’ll be happy with their offers. So, when you use your email campaigns and your social networks to successfully inspire reviews and publish them on a regular basis, you will give your business a far greater chance to earn the trust of its audience.
4. Discovering & Fixing Customer Pain Points
There isn’t a single brand that hasn’t received some sort of criticism from its customers or the general public. Even if it’s something as mild and simple as “I loved the product, but the shipment was two days late”, you can use the information to improve your service, and hopefully, exceed customer expectations in the future. These types of comments also give you a chance to offer an apology and make amends, so to speak, by sending them a personalized discount on their favorite product from your range, or a complimentary upgrade to your service for several months.
Singling out problems lets you discover long-term problems among customers that may lead to more innovation on your end, as well. So, in addition to those temporary issues your customers’ experience, which you can fix in no time, you’ll get a glimpse of more market opportunities for your brand to step in and save the day. Once you get their review and you make a change in how you do business to prevent such issues from recurring, let them know you’ve taken steps – they’ll appreciate it and feel more valued than ever.
With so much competition in every single industry nowadays, your brand cannot afford not to utilize a method such as collecting customer feedback to obtain invaluable data and improve their experience. Make sure your brand is making the most of what your customers are saying about you to grow your presence, and you’ll always be able to stay at the forefront of your market.
Editor’s Note: The article is part of the blog series Grow Your Business brought to you by the marketing team at UniTel Voice, the virtual phone system priced and designed for startups and small business owners.
