If you want to grow your business, you need to offer the best of the best to your customers. Whether your business sells a product or a service, you need to constantly strive to impress your customers and improve upon what you offer. And to do that you need to collect customer feedback.
What your customers have to say is important. After all, they’re the ones using your product/service so they know what they want and what works best for them. In fact, according to a study from Harvard Business Review, customers who were surveyed were more profitable than customers who hadn’t been surveyed and less likely to churn.
But collecting customer feedback can be overwhelming. Picture this: Your inbox is filled with emails from customers suggesting improvements. But, how do you find them, organize them, and make them most out of them to put your business ahead of the competition?
Here’s how to organize your customer feedback to get an edge.
Organize customer feedback into a central place.
The first step to organizing your customer feedback is to make sure you’re collecting all of your customer feedback into a central place. As we mentioned earlier, if you’re trying to collect customer feedback from email, live chat, phone calls, social media, and so on, it’ll be difficult to manage and organize. Of course you can still take note of customer feedback from all of those channels, but you need to create a streamlined way to collect customer feedback specifically.
You can do this with a survey tool. By using a survey tool, you can easily create a survey, add it to your website, and collect exactly the type of feedback you’re looking for.
For instance, take a look at this customer feedback survey from Netflix. Instead of waiting for customers to send in feedback on their own, they provide customers with a satisfaction survey that includes questions they’re looking to get answers for.
All of the answers you receive from your online survey will go into one central place where it can be easily viewed and organized. This allows you to avoid the time consuming process of searching through multiple channels for customer feedback and perhaps, missing out on some valuable information.
Create visual reports.
Aside from simply collecting all of your customer feedback into one place, you also need to make your customer feedback as easy-to-read and as understandable as possible. So, you should be creating visual reports of your customer feedback.
Many of the best survey plugins and tools will allow you to create stunning visual reports like the one below, so that you can visually see your customer feedback answers stacked up against each other. Instead of looking at a number, you can immediately see what’s most important to your customers.
Creating visual reports like this is also helpful when you’re sharing this feedback with your team. According to statistics, of all the information transmitted to the brain, 90% is visual. So, a visual report will help your team members easily spot trends and make the most out of your customer feedback.
Identify improvement areas.
After creating visual reports that allow you to easily see trends in your customer feedback, you can start to identify improvement areas. Because just collecting customer feedback isn’t what will give your company an edge, it’s how you use that customer feedback.
You don’t only want to focus on what your customers love about your product/service or your company as a whole, you also want to identify areas of improvement. For instance, maybe the online contest your company ran was a hit with your customers, but a large number of them also said that they would prefer more options to enter. Or, a number of your customers are satisfied with the friendliness and helpfulness of your customer support team, but a fair amount of people said that their issue took too long to resolve.
It’s important to look closely at every area of your business and how you can improve upon it — no issue is too small. After all, acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. So, you need to take your customer feedback, listen to it, and put it into action so that you can keep your valuable customers happy. Identifying these areas of improvement will allow you to grow your company to new heights and provide your customers with the best product and service.
Over to you.
Staying one step ahead of the competition is difficult. But one easy thing you can do to give yourself an edge over your biggest competitors is to collect customer feedback and put it to good use. When your customers know that their opinions are valued and your company will put their suggestions into action, they’ll be more likely to become lifelong loyal fans and brand advocates.