Customer Feedback Is More Than Just Numbers

When gathering feedback from customers, most businesses are looking to see whether they are hitting KPIs or metrics targets. While these are useful for measuring multiple aspects of your business, they don’t actually tell you what your customers are thinking or feeling. To find out what is driving your customer experience, you need to talk to them.

Asking “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our product or service to a friend”, as an example, will give you a very general view of how your customers feel about your brand, but it won’t tell you why, or what specifically it is about your company that they like or dislike. If you are looking to measure changes in satisfaction after a product launch or alteration to an existing product, you need to delve beneath the surface to find out the reasons why people have answered the way they have. Only then will you be able to improve.

The Steps To Improvement

To improve your service or product, you will need to utilise numbers and statistics, as well as qualitative data from customers (for more on this, see our blog post on qualitative and quantitative market research). Here are three key things you should keep in mind when conducting your own customer feedback…

Understand Your Data

Look for correlations between customer satisfaction and revenue. More often than not, you should see parity between the two. Then, try to delve deeper into why these results have occurred. If you have low customer satisfaction and low revenue, ask the right questions to find out what it is that your customers are not satisfied with. Likewise, if you have good satisfaction scores, you should identify what it is that you are doing well so that you can replicate and fine tune this.

Increase Retention, Decrease Churn

Once you have identified your strengths and weaknesses, it’s time tighten up your operations. Give your customers more of what they love, and less of what they don’t like, and you should see in improvement of customer retention.

Take Your Customers’ Advice

It’s one thing listening to your customers, but using their comments as a platform for improvement is what will set your business apart from your competitors. Not only should you plan your next product or service around your customers and their wants and needs, but you should also let them know that their feedback has been listened to, and you’ve taken their comments on board.

If your customers give you feedback, they expect to be listened to. The best way to show them you are genuinely listening is to act on their feedback – this is when you will truly see the fruits of your outreach efforts.

If you would like help in collecting feedback from your customers’ or planning your feedback strategy, please get in touch.