Harnessing customer feedback for product longevity

Have you ever launched a product so innovative yet so out of touch with market needs? Have your customers been making complaints about missing features in your latest updates? Has a new competitor been slowly but surely increasing their market share – at your expense? These scenarios are likely to happen if your business neglects customer feedback or doesn’t take it into consideration in decision making.

What is customer feedback? 

Customer feedback in simple terms is any sort of information, comments, reviews, or insights shared by your community of purchasers or users about their experiences with your products or services. This feedback can be a two-way street. Sometimes customers reach out directly, like when they start chatting with your support team, other times, they might share their thoughts online through reviews or social media. The key is to pay attention to it all! This feedback can be your golden ticket, leading you towards ways to make your company grow more (in case of positive reviews) or helping you fix any bumps in the road to customer experience excellence (in case of negative feedback).

Customer feedback takes on many shapes and forms. It is one of the most valuable resources companies can access, simply by providing open channels of communication to their existing customer base. Examples of these channels can be:

1. Regular surveys 
2. Follow-up emails 
3. Usability tests 
4. Customer interviews 
5. Social media 
6. On-site analytics 
7. Post-purchase feedback 

Collecting feedback proactively 

Think of your customers as your guiding compass on your way to growth. They want to help you improve so they can enjoy a better experience. All they need is a seamless, effective way to rate their experiences. Feedback is like a reality check for businesses, revealing what works, what doesn’t, what needs to be fixed or improved, and surely what’s missing. To ensure customers always have a way of reaching out, make sure to follow these steps:

1. Ask existing clients to offer feedback
2. Make communication clear and simple
3. Share progress reports with loyal customers
4. Be transparent about when and how they can reach out
5. Engage with customers directly on social media
6. Invest in customer relationship management software

Taking a proactive approach to customer feedback ensures that your business is on the right path to meeting customer needs and expectations. It may surprise you how much customers know about the ins and outs of your product or service. Their ideas are the most valuable resource you can benefit from. Not only do customers propel you to excellence, they’re also responsible for increasing satisfaction rates with your business, which in turn will lead to more customers. Integrating customer feedback into your business process will create a collaborative and cost-saving dynamic between your business and your end users.

Modern customers are your business’s stalkers

Gone are the days when people would blindly purchase a product or a service without looking up reviews, according to BrightLocal, a staggering 91% of consumers emphasize the importance of local branch reviews in shaping their impressions of major brands. The research also stated that 36% of consumers use more than 2 sites to check reviews, on top of that list stands Google with an overwhelming 81%. This is pretty much why it is crucial for businesses to live up to the customer expectations and invest in their customer services.

The importance of customer engagement

Customer engagement is on the rise more than any time before as businesses started grasping the significance of tailored, deep connections with their customer base and not just generic, impersonal interactions. The way forward for a successful life cycle of a product or a service requires businesses to be aware of the following:

• Customer-centric approach: According to CX Index, businesses who are adopting customer centric approaches report 60% higher profits than businesses who don’t.
• Personalized interactions: When getting feedback from a customer after a purchase they've made, ensuring that the crafted message is personal and relevant to the customer takes the conversation to another level, as 68% of consumers expect all their experiences to be personalized and 90% are willing to spend more money with businesses that offer tailored customer experiences.
• Acting on feedback: Adjusting your products and services to findings of the customer feedback is what ensures the longevity of your product because modern consumers won’t settle for breadcrumbs of attention, they want to feel that their opinions matter to you as a business.

Utilizing the power of AI in customer feedback

Collecting feedback is easier than ever now with the emergence of AI tools that streamline the process and provide reliable insights on customer categorization and preferences. It also helps businesses identify any issues related to their services and products, hence make better data-driven decisions, and personalize customer experience.

One of the outstanding case studies in adopting AI in tracking customer experience is Netflix, as the company utilizes AI in tracking user viewing habits to offer personalized content recommendations to meet its customers' preferences. This in return increases customer satisfaction and builds a meaningful connection with the brand.

Tips for collecting feedback

When collecting feedback, you must put yourself in your customers’ shoes and think how you would like to receive a feedback survey on text message or email, because there are a few things that can make a good survey could go wrong:

1. Keep it simple and short: Everything is extremely fast-paced, and no one wants to spend more than five minutes answering a survey, so the key is to keep it straightforward and not too long.
2. Make it about them: Personalization is everything now. Why would customers feel intrigued to give your business feedback if it doesn’t directly address them or feel relevant to their experience and interaction with the products and services they purchased? Sending out tailored feedback reminders or surveys encourage customers to leave a review or fill a survey form.
3. Pick your timing: This depends on your product or service and whether it can be evaluated instantly for quality or if it might take some time for the customers to form an opinion. For instance, purchasing a new denim shirt won’t need your business to wait for a few months to send a review reminder, unlike providing an analytical tool that needs testing and training which both require more time for customers to know if it works for them.
4. Don't forget to follow up: After receiving customer feedback, it’s important to let them know that you care about their experience with your business and how it can continue to evolve in case of satisfied customers, or how it can be fixed or improved if they are unhappy with a certain feature or a quality issue.

Conclusion

Businesses must stop viewing customers as complainers and start looking at them as problem-solvers. Whether your interactions with customers take place over live chat, video calls, chatbots, or voice-assisted programs, your customers should be your go-to collaborator. And while it is true that the customer may not always be right, customer feedback is always valuable.