CUSTOMER FEEDBACK: Its Importance and How to Collect It
How do you know if your product still meets your customer needs? Is that new product feature effective? What does your customer have to say about their experience with your product/service?
We sometimes become overwhelmed with the solutions we are creating that that we forget the most important factor of its success; the customers.
Your product is only successful if it brings in revenue.
To ensure that your products meet the rapidly changing needs of your customers you need their input.
In this article, you would understand what Customer feedback is, its importance, and how to collect feedback.
What is Customer Feedback?
“We all need people who give us feedback. That’s how we improve.” — Bill Gates.
Customer Feedback refers to the information shared by your customer about their experiences with your product. The feedback whether positive or negative helps you to measure consumer satisfaction and understand how your customers perceive your product as well as your company brand.
Why is Customer Feedback Important?
Customer Feedback is important as it acts as a guide for product development i.e., you now build products with your customer needs and desires in consideration.
By asking your customers to provide feedback, you make them believe that their opinions are truly valued and that they are listened to, they begin to breed positive feelings towards your brand which in turn could lead to more sales in the foreseeable future.
Also, 34% of the reason why startups fail is because of a lack of product-market fit. To attain a product-market fit, you need to provide a personalized customer experience — wherein the product evolves with the customer — to do this you would need your customer’s feedback.
Effective Methods for Collecting Customer Feedback
There are several methods used to collect customer feedback, but before you begin you need to identify the purpose for collecting the feedback. Outlining your desired objectives helps you determine what method should be used to collect your customer feedback, this helps saves your time and your customers’
Without measurable objectives, you might not know when you have achieved success.
Write down the objectives and discuss them with your team before getting started.
Examples of Objectives are
· To understand what part of the customer journey you want to improve on (onboarding, retention, UI/UX, etc.)
· To understand the customer perception of your brand (Net Performance Score, Ratings, etc.)
Then choose the feedback channel that best suits the objectives.
1. SURVEY
Surveys are the traditional methods of collecting feedback, they are a list of questions aimed at extracting specific data from a particular group of people.
Tips for creating effective surveys:
· Ask questions that help you reach your objectives only. If the purpose of the survey was to inquire about the onboarding process, don’t ask questions about a new product feature
· Keep the survey questions neutral, don’t ask leading or loaded questions.
· Provide a set of balanced options for closed-ended questions i.e. (Extremely helpful, Helpful, Neither helpful nor unhelpful, Unhelpful, Extremely unhelpful).
· Ensure there are no more than 2 open-ended questions in the survey.
· Cross-check the entire survey when done for errors or unnecessary questions
2. EMAIL
This is also a channel for collecting feedback or inviting customers to give feedback via surveys or Customer interviews. This is because it serves as a support system for your company, every interaction can be used as a means to collect feedback.
Tips for collect customer feedback via email
· Keep it simple. The email design should be simple to reduce distractions and encourage users to take the desired conversion action.
· Personalize your email questions, this gets you more personal responses than a survey. You can use the data voluntarily shared by your user to ask relevant questions and ensure a positive communication experience.
3. ANALYTICS
With analytics, you can tell how your customer uses your products. Especially if your startup is a SaaS (Software as a service) you can benefit from using analytics to understand how your users interacting with your product.
You can deduce how your users interact with your UI/UX designs, your churn rate and also carry out real-time testing. All this serves as feedback that would be useful for you to improve on your product delivery.
4. SOCIAL MEDIA
Social Media gives you access to honest and uncensored customer feedback. Asides from comments, mentions, and direct messaging, you can also create polls as a means to collect customer feedback and align your team with consumer behavior. Many companies use social media to get the customers’ perception of their brand by asking them to rate and comment on their customer service, product feature, etc.
5. CUSTOMER INTERVIEWS
Customer interviews are a more direct approach to collecting feedback. It creates a personal experience that helps your team understand the motivations behind customer decisions and how to respond profitably.
With customer interviews, you can validate assumptions that have developed over time.
Tips for Conducting Customer Interview
· Plan ahead. Before inviting customers for the interview, determine what the purpose of the interview is, what assumptions you want to be validated at the end of the meeting. Write down your questions and verify them with your team, make sure the questions are about your customer problems and not your product feature.
· Ask open-ended questions. When conducting the interview, create room for an open-ended dialogue. This allows your customer to share their experiences vividly.
· Zoom in. Get more specific in your questions as the conversation evolves. Every response gives you the opportunity for a more specific follow-up.
· Talk less, listen more. To gain insights from the interview, you need to be receptive, talk only about their problems, and always keep the spotlight on them.
Don’t Just Collect Feedback, Act-On Them.
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
― Jeff Bezos
When the exercise is concluded share the information collected with the appropriate team so actions can be carried out to improve the customer experience.
Customers can change every aspect of your company for the better if you listen and implement their feedback.
