Customer feedback: What is it, why it matters, and why you should invest in collecting and analysing it
Customer feedback has become a defining factor for a successful business over the last few decades. According to research by Barclays, 85% of small and medium enterprises say gathering customer feedback has benefited their business.
In particular, when it comes to e-commerce, by listening to customer feedback, brands can improve their products and services to reach customers' expectations and give them good reasons to return to their store.
If brands fail to listen to their customers, it could lead to a decrease in customer loyalty. Customer feedback is a significant source of information that may give you vital insights into every aspect of your business, resulting in increased market share, revenue and customer satisfaction. This article discusses the importance of collecting and analysing customer feedback in more detail. Keep reading!
What is customer feedback?
Customer feedback is an honest evaluation of products or services from your customers. It could be positive or negative, but its purpose is to reveal the customer's level of satisfaction and expectations for the future.
It is used to help brands improve the quality of products, customer service and operations. Customer feedback is the best and most trustworthy source of information about your business. It can positively influence the success and growth of your business if harnessed correctly.
How to get customer feedback
There are two ways to get customer feedback, proactively and reactively. Brands can proactively collect customer feedback by polling, surveying, interviewing customers or asking for reviews.
On the other hand, reactive feedback can come from social media channels, help centres, app store reviews, community forums, reviewing platforms and most importantly, your e-com website and post-purchase solutions.
Why is Customer Feedback Important?
Customer feedback helps brands understand what their customers want and expect, like and dislike, and where their products and overall customer experience need to improve.
Reviews and online ratings have become essential sources of information for customers. A report by Podium details that 93% of people say online reviews impact their purchase decision. If the feedback is positive and customers feel the products are worth for money, they'd be more open to buying and recommending them to their circle. Word of mouth boosts a brand's publicity and motivates customers to purchase the products, increasing revenue.
listen to your customersSix ways to leverage customer feedback to build a long-lasting and successful brand
Customer feedback is the lifeblood of your business. Without it, you're just guessing what your customers are looking for, which is not a good place to be.
Don't make them jump through hoops or fill out long surveys— the best way to collect feedback is by making it easy for customers to give it! Keep that in mind 🧠👈
Analysing feedback and taking action on customers’ pain points significantly impacts customer loyalty because customers feel heard and understood. Below we will dive deep into how analysing customer feedback can help your brand. Let's get to it!
Enhance Customer Experience
If you want to enhance your customer experience, it's important to collect customer feedback. You won't know what your customers think of your business unless you ask for their opinions.
When you collect customer feedback, you'll be able to identify the things that are working well and the areas where improvements can be made. You can use this information to improve your products and overall brand experience to ensure that they meet your customers' needs and expectations.
More efficient production
Customer feedback can be valuable for your production and design team when creating new products and re-designing or updating old ones.
By involving the customers in the production process early on with a co-creation programme, you can help the production and design team to take data-backed decisions when creating new products. Implementing a co-creation program is a great mid-to-long-term investment, as getting early-stage feedback can be very beneficial for steady success when a product/s finally launch to the world.
On the other end, collecting and analysing return reasons can also help make quality improvements in production and make the necessary adjustments to reduce the return rate. We'll talk about this in more detail later on.
Improve your website for a better experience
For an online business, your website or app is the first thing many users see. It should be intuitive, interactive and customer-friendly to ensure they browse.
Installing a chatbot is one of the best ways to make your website interactive. Aside from helping you provide a better customer experience, it can be a great tool for collecting feedback on website performance. It can help identify problems users are having, what they're looking for, and how you can improve your website. On top of that, it can also help you gather demographic information about your visitors to ensure your site is accessible to everyone.
Co-conception with CobbaïBoost your customer satisfaction score
The best way to understand customer problems is by analysing their interactions with your brand. One bad interaction can push your loyal customers towards your competitors, and I'm sure you don't want that! 😉
If you examine customer feedback and find interactions where customers are unsatisfied, there's still a chance to reconvert them by connecting and listening to their comments. One efficient way to gather customer feedback is to conduct surveys. These surveys give an overview of customer opinion on myriads of topics related to customer satisfaction. Here are surveys that brands can use to raise their customer satisfaction scores.
- CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) surveys: Assess the level of customer satisfaction for your brand.
- NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys: Ask how likely customers are to recommend your product or services.
- CES (Customer Effort Score) surveys: Used to measure the easiness-of-use of products.
You can use the survey results to address and enhance customer experience issues that impact satisfaction levels.
Reduce churn
Churn results from a disappointing experience that leads a person to never buy from a particular brand again. In this regard, proactively reaching out to customers with an offer or discount, constantly engaging with them and survey feedback are some examples of reducing churn.
It seems like we're a broken record, but listening to your customers is the best way to get to know them and understand their opinions on your products and services. For this reason, we recommend implementing automated emails or even SMS to reengage with lost customers and proactively keep in touch with the “VIP” ones so that they feel supported and valued. These strategies can play a significant role in reducing churn.
Reduce returns
In e-Commerce, returns are impossible to eliminate completely, but brands can reduce their frequency by taking and analysing customer feedback. The most efficient way to collect and analyse return data is using a return management platform that provides data analytics. yayloh is a return management software for ecommerce brands with a data analytics dashboard that collects and analyses return reasons.
By collecting and analysing return feedback, ****brands can find patterns for returns. By analysing return reasons and customers’ comments, brands can make solid decisions that can lead to changes in product descriptions, fabric quality, sizing and even design. Applying these data-backed changes, brands can considerably reduce returns and boost customer loyalty.
yayloh return management platform helps brands reduce returns with data analytics
Analyse customer feedback during the return process
The return process is undoubtedly one of the most important processes in the customer journey. A manual return process has put the break in analysing return reasons and customer comments for many years. Nevertheless, software solutions like yayloh return management platform digitise the return process for their customers and team, making it very convenient to collect and analyse return data as customers have to fill out a digital return form to process a return.
A digital return form lets customers share feedback on their return reason and even write a comment. This data is collected and analysed by yayloh on a data analytics dashboard that the product team can use to make necessary product adjustments and, later on, reduce the return rate. All these data can be extracted as a CSV file that can be used to feed data to a feedback analysis platform like Cobbai.
If brands want to stay on top of things, they should put customers at the heart of the business and treat their feedback as the company's most valuable source of information.
We can argue that bringing new customers is easy, but retaining them is the most challenging task. By listening and taking their feedback into account, customers feel more connected to the brand, increasing customer loyalty and retention, two healthy and sustainable business metrics.
