7 Reasons Customer Feedback is Important

Honestly, do you know  the real value of customer feedback? Customer feedback is paramount. You will never stop collecting data in your company’s lifetime. Some of it will be for ad campaigns and some of it for employee engagement. Of all the data you seek out, you need to invest your strongest focus on developing a customer feedback strategy. 

What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is any user-generated information that describes your brand. It can be survey answers or social media posts. It can be Google reviews. Or even be comments in a Reddit thread. All of these types of customer feedback work together to form a complete picture of who your customers are. It will help you determine their habits. Their likes and dislikes. The features they can use easily and those they have a difficult time adapting. 

Why customer feedback is important?

Customer feedback is important because it shows you are listening to your users. You are letting them know that their opinion matters and that your business will adapt to their changing needs. Listening pays. Customer feedback can even help you come up with new business ideas that can become differentiators with your competition and increase sales. 

Why would knowing all these different facts be important? There isn’t just one reason. There are seven.

1. Improves your product

Each tidbit of feedback may help you design and innovate. Products will see several evolutions within its lifecycle. Customer feedback nurtures this lifecycle.  They make sure the evolutions are true to what the final users want and need.

Customer feedback gives you consumer insights needed to improve your products and services. You’re going to be surprised to hear the next part.  Guess what the best customer feedback is? If you guessed “negative feedback” you’d be right. 

In fact, 72% of B2B buyers say that negative reviews give them insights into product quality.

Every time a consumer complains they open the door for your company to correct each mistake. A product or service purged of errors is as close to perfect as you can come.

2. Builds customer relationships

Collecting customer feedback does two things to create stronger customer relationships. One, it will show that you value them as individuals as investors in your brand. Then, through this, it will give them a good reason to stay with your brand over alternatives.

3. Attracts new customers

People respond to opinions. They watch patterns. People also love to observe and learn from others which is why customer reviews are crucial to your business. According to Fan & Fuel, 92% of customers were reluctant to try a product that had no reviews. Consumers will be more reluctant to try your product if there’s no social validation.  

The customers interviewed in this FanFuel article had one major preference. The reviews had to be written. They preferred these by at least 32% to star ratings with no words. 

Basically, when a new customer is making up their mind about your product, they like to see other people’s opinions.

4. Supports good press relations

Customer feedback is the grounds by which the world will form their opinion of your brand.

Not only will the customers themselves communicate with each other negative and positive experiences. But, the press will use these varying opinions to form their own narrative on your brand.

You can take a strong position as the leader in the conversation with feedback requests. You are giving your customers the public platform to talk to you and also about you. Transparency is the secret to generating positive press relations.

Allure magazine did this once. It was in March, 2017. They chose to take a recent diversity piece that had great feedback and turn it into a Twitter Moment to celebrate.

Then,  Misha Green, turned the Twitter Moment into her own feed discussion thread. The result was several hundred retweets. Customers also engaged with each other celebrating their mutual love for the brand.

5. Saves you money

Customer feedback has money saving capacity as well. As you use it to learn what your customers like and don’t like, you can take that a step further. Customer preferences help form loss prevention strategies. You can drop products and services that are actually bleeding cash from your company. Customer feedback will show you when it’s best to do that.

Cutting down and tailoring to suit consumer demand will save you money. Money that you can then reinvest in your brand. You can use that revenue to make the consumer favorites stronger options. Improving what customers already love will yield greater revenue from these products.

6. Differentiate from the competition

The easiest way for you to gather competitive intelligence is through customer feedback. Surveys and comments from customer feedback will show market trends. After all, trends start with customers.  Feedback also reveals why customers sometimes prefer your strongest competitor.

Feature differentiation is a good place to see some examples. That’s because feature differentiation drives its highest engagement from customer responsiveness. A scientific model highlights four major categories for feature differentiation. Let’s take a closer look below: 

Pictured above you can see the cycle feature differentiation takes for different customer categories. 

A: “Duty” features

The duty features don’t see a lot of engagement. They come from your regulators who are the immediate judges of your brand. Their input  impacts regulation compliance. It has a low tier influence on actual sales. 

B: “Wow” features

These features influence investors and customers. They have the highest impact on sales of the four categories. These features take the majority of their cues from market research. That research comes from customer analysis reports. That means the “wow”features are made using customer surveys and consumer trend data. 

C: “Checkbox”features

This category has no impact on sales. It is still important because the checkbox category is where competitor analysis happens. You use this section to tick off boxes on a list. These lists are created to help you analyze your operations performance.

D: “Flow” features

This category only has an indirect impact on sales. With these features, you collect feedback data on user experiences. End-users engage with these features. Their input helps you know if your sites and products are easy to use or not. 

All categories above show a different reason for customer feedback. In some, like category A, the feedback came from regulators and B2B clients. The other categories showed data that can only come from product consumers. Without customer feedback, this data is vague and hard to use.

Feature differentiation shows us why customer feedback is important to competitor intelligence and why we should use customer feedback in every stage of feature planning. It will either impact brand decisions directly or indirectly. All the categories take some direction from customer engagement.  

7. Improve customer service

For all the good reasons for customer feedback, the most obvious one is customer service. Customer feedback gives you the actionable insights into your brand’s experience quality. The feedback alone will help you to determine what you need to change and what you need to boost. Weaknesses can get stronger. Strengths can tone up. Remember, even when something is good it doesn’t mean you can’t always make it better.

Final thoughts

There are a plenty of other reasons why customer feedback is essential. These seven reasons are more of the essentials ones to remember. If you keep these eight reasons in mind, not only will they change your customer interactions, but boost sales as well.