The Role of Customer Feedback in Improving Service Quality

Customer Feedback is valued in successful companies. So if you run your own business, know that you have to do your best to please your customers, satisfy their needs, and keep them loyal to your brand. This is done by collecting their opinions.

Getting to it is easy, if you follow a bunch of ways. Read our article today to find out what they are and why it’s important to collect customer feedback!

What is Customer Feedback?

Customer feedback is the information, insights, issues, and input shared by your community about their experiences with a company’s product or services and their general experience with the company.

This feedback guides improvements of the customer experience and can empower positive change in any business — even (and especially) when it’s negative. It is a reliable and primary source for improving products and services according to customer needs.

Why is customer feedback important?

Customer feedback is important because, as we mentioned in the definition, it serves as a guiding resource for the growth of your company. Don’t you want to know what you’re getting right — and wrong — as a business in the eyes of your customers? How can a customer success strategy be achieved successfully?

Below are the top benefits of collecting customer feedback. Includes:

1- Improve products and services

When you introduce a new product, brand or service to the market, you probably have an idea about customer needs. Customer feedback gives you an idea if potential customers would be willing to buy it, and they can also give you tips on how to improve it in the future.

2- Measure customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction and loyalty are critical factors determining a company’s financial performance. It is directly linked to many advantages, such as increased market share, lower costs, or higher revenue for the company. Therefore, the customer’s feedback is invaluable.

3- Show that you value customer feedback

By asking the company for customer feedback, assures him that his feedback is for them and gives him the feeling that he is a contributor to the development of the business. This also helps in strengthening the relationship between the customer and the company and increases the chances of sharing and publishing positive feedback about the company when the opportunity arises.

4- Create the best customer experience

Today’s marketing is heavily based on people’s experiences with products, services, and brands. For example, they do not buy Apple products just because they are good; they want to demonstrate their status and affiliation to a particular group. Therefore, if you focus on providing the best customer experience at every touchpoint, clients will stay loyal to your brand.

5- Improve customer retention

A satisfied customer with the company’s products will stay with it. An unhappy customer will eventually find a better alternative and leave. Customer feedback benefits are significant. It helps to determine if clients are satisfied with the service and detect areas for improvement. Thanks to asking for opinions regularly, it is always possible to keep up with the pulse.

6- A reliable source of information for other consumers

In the times of social media, consumers do not trust commercials or what they see and hear. Opinions provided by other customers who have already used a product or service are the more reliable sources of information these days.

7- Giving data that helps taking business decisions

There is no place for business decisions based on loose guesses on a highly competitive market. Successful business owners gather and manage distinct kind of data that helps them develop future strategies. Only in this way, they can adjust their products and services to perfectly fit customer needs.

What are the most effective ways to collect customer feedback?

There are several ways for collecting customer feedback. The most important of them are the following:

• Customer feedback surveys

Surveys and opinion polls are useful in obtaining customer feedback on a product or service after trying it impartially. Wonder yourself how so? Simply by answering a set of questions related to it.

Developing a useful customer survey may be more challenging than you think. There are a ton of questions you could ask customers. The survey should be as short and clear as possible.

The good news: today many platforms help you prepare these surveys. It takes a few simple steps to ensure that customers answer the entire survey. Here’s what:

• Only ask questions that help you meet your goals.
• Write thoughtful open-ended questions.
• Create consistent rating scales.
• Avoid leading or loaded questions.
• Email

Email is one of the easiest ways to gather candid customer feedback, as it is a support channel for most companies. Therefore, to increase the likelihood of hearing a response from the customer about a product or service he has tried, three things must be followed, namely:

• Set clear expectations
• Organise email feedback
• Send personalised responses
• Usability tests

For usability testing to bring deep insights to a company, it requires more upfront planning. With a clear strategy, a company can uncover challenges or gaps customers don’t know they’re facing and actionable insights that make their experiences better.

You may even want to consider rewarding your user research participants the way Google does.

• Exploratory customer interviews

Reaching out to customers directly opens up conversations that otherwise wouldn’t happen. Qualitative stories from customers help a team understand the feelings behind customer decisions and the community response to a company’s brand or decisions.

Keep the following tips in mind when you sit down to talk to customers:

• Start an open-ended dialogue. open-ended questions give your customers the flexibility to dig into their experiences with more detail.
• Get more specific as you go. Begin the conversation with wider impressions and get more detailed in your questions as the dialogue evolves. Every piece of feedback they give you is an opportunity for another more specific follow-up.
• Active listening. The interviewer should be open and receptive to any response from the client. Maintain eye contact during the dialogue.
• Don’t let distance stop you either. Use Google Meet or Zoom to speak to a diverse group of customers no matter where they are.
• Social media

Viewing the candid comments of social media users enables you to get real opinions about customers’ experiences with products and services and their honest opinion of what they found.

• On-site activity (via analytics)

Analytics reveals what customers don’t know about how they use a product or service. Especially when a company is selling something digital, analysing a customer’s use of that product is very useful in understanding how users interact with it.

• Instant feedback from the company’s website

With an embeddable on-site widget like Beacon, a company can collect instant customer feedback without asking the customer any questions.

Finally,

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