If you are interested in growing your customer base, there’s one thing you absolutely need to have: customer feedback.
Customer feedback is the best way to get real-time information about what products and services work or don’t work. It helps you gain valuable insights that would be difficult with only statistics. For example, while analytics like Google Analytics are valuable, they only represent data.
Customers are more than just data points and segments. They are people, and people have stories. Data needs accompanying stories to really have an impact.
We’ll look today at some of the biggest reasons why your small business needs to start getting customer feedback.
It helps measure customer satisfaction
When you ask for and receive customer feedback, you gain insights into what your customers like and don’t like. But even more importantly, you get to see how your product or service fits into your customers likes and dislikes.
This means that you can maximize the likes and minimize the dislikes. For example, if you see a trend in your customer feedback surveys that 90% of your offerings are fantastic, but most of them dislike 10%, you can fix that.
When you know your customers’ level of satisfaction with your product or service, you know how to improve your product or service. This is necessary, invaluable information to have.
It helps with marketing
Asking for customer feedback is also great for your marketing purposes. There are two important parts to marketing (among many): getting qualified leads, and converting those leads to buyers.
Customer feedback can assist with both of these. By understanding how your customers feel about a product or service, you can uncover what led them to purchase your product or click on your link. It might be the wording, the image, or the offer. If you notice a pattern in your customer feedback, you have a guide to boost your leads.
Secondly, you can get the same type of feedback on your landing pages: what made them not just stay on the page, but sign up? What made them buy? What was the trigger? If you know that, you can emphasize that, as well as minimize or do away with the thing that was distracting to your customers.
It helps increase customer retention
It is widely accepted that it’s up to 25 times cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new customer.
By asking for customer feedback, you are keeping your hand on the pulse of your present customers. This will help you to avoid losing customers and turn down that churn rate.
If you are regularly asking for this feedback, you can adjust your products and services on a regular basis to keep up with customer wants and needs. Remember, customers are not static creatures. Their opinions, moods and feelings change. Beyond that, the market also changes. There may be an emerging competitor with lower prices or one that addresses a pain point you were unaware of.
If you keep up with your customer by asking for feedback, you can keep your customer with you.
It makes customers feel important
Getting your customer involved into your product is important. This creates a relationship between your customer and your brand—not your product or service, but your brand, which is different. Your brand is the soul of the business, whereas your product or service is the body.
By asking for customer feedback, and listening to it as well, you are communicating some important messages: we care about you, we value your opinion, and we will work to make ourselves better for you.
A customer that feels this message is true for a brand is a customer that will become loyal to that brand. You will make that customer feel valuable to the business. This is especially true when you enact a change the customers recommended. When you send you update notice, and a thank you note for their feedback, you are creating a wonderful bond.
You can find your customer evangelists
The most important thing to remember is that your customer is not static. He or she will move up or, unfortunately, down the ladder of customer loyalty. There are 6steps on this ladder to be exact:
- suspect – those customer who may or may not be right for your offer
- prospect – those who are considering whether to take you up on your offer
- first-time buyer – those who have decided to buy what you’re selling
- repeat buyer – those amazing buyers who keep on purchasing your products or services
- advocate – those customers that will recommend your business if you ask them to
- evangelist – those who shout your praises to anyone with ears and eyes
The greatest of these, obviously, is the evangelist, although an advocate is amazing as well. Your advocates are the testimonials you can use on your website or in your marketing purposes. they will be happy to say a few good words if you ask them to.
But your ultimate goal is to make evangelists. With customer feedback, you can quickly identify those people who are your evangelists. If you can identify them, then you can put them into their own group and analyze their purchasing behavior.
That data, together with their testimonials (repeat feedback for an evangelist is no problem) will help you to create better systems to move your other customers up the ladder.
These reasons above are some of the most bulletproof for why you need to start asking for customer feedback. Just remember two things: make your sample size large enough to be representative, and make sure to ask for customer feedback often.
Do this on a regular basis, and you’ll soon reap the rewards.