Importance of Customer Feedback: Reasons to Amend your Brand!

June 11, 2014 Amit Kachhawa

Receiving customer feedback is like judging the pulse of the market. Customer feedback is of significant value as it signals the needs and requirements of the customers from the products. It provides a way for the customers to present their genuine opinions, judgments, feelings, like and dislikes about the product or service.  Customer feedback lets customers feel valued and generates a feeling among them that the company concerns about their opinions about their experience of using the product. Customers feel that they are also actively involved in the improvement of the product. This significantly reduces customer turnover to the competitor products thus reducing revenue loss.

Customer feedback brings to forth just the right concerns or requirement felt by the customers that they encounter in their daily life while using the product. This requirement may be small but if company solves that it leads to significant growth in customer satisfaction. If customers receive what they want from the product they are willing to open their wallets.

With customer feedback, companies can significantly improve the quality of the product by adding innovative features, enhancing existing features and removing features that are contributing less to the overall quality of product.

Customer Feedback can help businesses create highly efficient products and build a robust brand loyalty in the market. This will help improve customer satisfaction and create a strong loyal customer base that will keep returning again and again.

Make Strategic decisions

• Customer Feedback provides vital insights into the behavior of the customers about use of the company’s products and what are the distinct features that give them competitive edge over the competitor products. Customer feedback enables companies to make strategic decisions that can give them competitive advantage by adding new features or improvising on existing features.
  • A recent report from Forrester Research shows that many companies now aim to be driven more by customer experience and 2014 will see a year in which many companies will increase customer experience management.
• Customer Feedback provides a platform for the customer to express and share their views and ideas. This enables companies to provide customers with exact features that are important to them. These views and ideas from the customers can be leverage by the companies to increase the acceptability of the product in the market and reduce the chances of failure. One essential element of the customer experience is enabling consumers to provide feedback.
  • Compare to last year, three-quarters (76%) of the 2,000 consumers noticed an increase in the number of companies asking for feedback on their customer experience – eDigitalResearch report.
• Another important aspect of customer feedback is to find ways to improve the customer experience. Company can receive a lot of positive as well as negative comments. Company can learn from any type of feedback and let the customers know about it.
  • Customers are taking up the offer to provide feedback – over half of those surveyed (51%) have already given feedback on their experience of which 82% did so to report a positive experience, 11% reported a negative experience and 7% shared their ideas- survey by eDigitalResearch.
• The feedback must be shared with the staff members as it will help them improve on their performance and discard any useless practices to improve the quality of service. It is also highly important to act on the feedback and contact the customers who shared their valuable feedback. Contacting the customers will send out a positive signal that you have genuine concerns for your customers. This will build a strong loyal customer base that will continue to return for purchases as well as spread a positive word of mouth among their circles. Contacting the customers will quickly establish a bond with them and they are more likely to continue send genuine feedback in the future.
  • According to survey by eDigitalResearch, companies are acting on that feedback with almost half (49%) of those who made a complaint being contacted. Of those, 75% said that that contact changed their opinion of the brand into a more positive one, demonstrating that it’s not just the collection of customer experiences that matters but also acting on that feedback.
• Customer Feedback forms or surveys are a great way to judge how your customers feel about your products or services and what all changes need to be done to improve their experience. Businesses can receive both positive and negative feedbacks from the customers. But rather than just replying to the customers who have sent negative feedback and solving their concerns it is very essential to contact customers who have spared their valuable time to send their positive feedback.
  • According to survey by eDigitalResearch , among consumers who left positive feedback, just 18% were contacted.

Companies should not present any excuses in acknowledging the efforts taken by customers who provided positive feedback.

Tackling Challenges in Feedback process

Although feedback forms or online surveys are a great medium to get valuable feedback from customers, there are times when feedback sent by customers is not clear and does not portray valuable information.

Lack of Focus – Many times feedback lack focus on what they want to convey to the companies. They can be lengthy and time consuming and with hundreds of feedback to go through, it can cause significant time loss for the company.

Inconvenience– Customers at times may feel reluctant to send the feedback due to lengthy or complex feedback forms or due to time shortage. They may be busy in other work and may not find it useful to fill the feedback form.

Incomplete information – Many times customers send incomplete information in the feedback. It becomes difficult to act on such incomplete information.

Feedback forms or online surveys may not turn out to be resourceful medium for some organizations. Many firms are turning to benefit from the QA services that audit the interactions between agents and customers and extract valuable and insightful information from it. This will serve a dual advantage as QA services will monitor the quality of customer interaction for efficiency as well as it will continue to extract critical business intelligence data about the products or services.

At Etech, our stringent QA process ensures a customer experience that’s always improving. We also gather critical business intelligence data from each customer interaction.

Acting on the feedback given by the customers is extremely important as customer is still the king. Incorporating these changes in the organization will increase customer satisfaction, employee productivity, and profitability of the businesses. Businesses must keep in mind to regularly keep in touch with customers as they are active contributors in success of the businesses.