Table of contents
1. Help your employees understand your customers
2. Increase employee morale
3. Prioritise changes in your business
4. Identify what is working by tracking those changes
5. Ensure client satisfaction persists
6. Find out how to win back lost clients
7. Create brand advocate and affiliates
8. Improve your overall reputation
9. Create new sales opportunities
10. Conclusion
1. Help your employees understand your customers
The only way for your employees to know how they can better serve your customers is to find out what they think about your service as a whole. You can do this by gathering feedback from your customers. Compile these reviews using a customer survey or by asking for their opinions on certain aspects of the service in person. Either way, your goal is to ask the hardest-hitting questions about your business to get real insights from your customers.
Using customer experience management software allows you to oversee all these tasks and give you insights into what needs to be improved to serve your clients better. Client feedback is an excellent way for employees to find out the best ways to provide customer-facing solutions and services. Your employees should know how important their feedback is so they can provide better service.
2. Increase employee morale
If your teams are aware of the general sentiment about your products and services, they have a much clearer direction on how to do their job right — all while having fun in the process. A well-known example of this is Zappos. Its employees get a kick out of reading what people are saying about them online. And just like the people at Zappos, receiving feedback from customers and other stakeholders should make your employees feel like they’re part of the company’s success story. Emphasizing positive customer reviews on social media like Instagram is a great way to motivate your employees to maintain their performance. Collect these as social proof that your employees are doing a fantastic job at work.
Recognizing the stellar work of your employees is a wonderful incentive to encourage this type of output from them. Simultaneously, this act helps them feel like they belong, instilling a sense of purpose and joy.
3. Prioritise changes in your business
By knowing what your customers feel about your company based on their feedback, you can make the necessary changes in specific areas of your business to help improve your overall service. At times, you might encounter some negative comments. But working with such feedback can advance your company more than any social praise. Accepting it, however, doesn’t always come easy. It’s because you’ve probably become too attached to certain aspects that make your business work. As a result, acknowledging some of the things that are holding your brand from growing is impossible.
That’s why the unbiased viewpoint of user feedback is vital to your operations. Its specific thoughts and comments on what works and what doesn’t allows you to see your business from a different perspective.
More importantly, you see it from the eyes of people who matter the most: your customers. Therefore, user feedback allows you to put your personal feelings aside and focus on aspects of your business that you must prioritize and take care of first. When making changes, make sure to set up fail-safes in place so you can revert to original settings if something unexpected happens during the change. For example, when making tweaks on your WordPress site based on user feedback, use a WordPress reset plugin to help you recover the site to its original state.
4. Identify what is working by tracking those changes
Once you’ve implemented the changes, you can monitor the performance of your business and see how the tweaks affected your business for good or bad. The goal is always to generate positive results from your changes you’ve made. And the best way to determine this is from how your customers respond to the changes. You can always run another user feedback campaign to generate insights immediately. However, it’s better just to let the changes take effect first.
Monitor the performance of your business and see how the tweaks had impacted traffic, conversion rates, number of transactions, and more. For instance, you’re launching a brand new SaaS product in the market soon. If not, they can provide feedback using your designated feedback tool so you can work on the kinks before releasing the product to the public. With most feedback tools, you also have a changelog for references of the changes made while the product was in development. While data analytics aren’t user feedback in the strictest sense, they serve as real-time data that provides valuable insights about your business.
5. Identify what is working by tracking those changes
Aside from the data provided by sales and revenue, run another user feedback campaign to check if the changes you made in your business improved what people think about your brand. For example, if you’ve made changes to your site’s layout like adding in-app video ads or have switched to a new carrier for shipping packages, ask people what they think about the change. If reviews are mostly positive, that will show that customers appreciate the adjustments and might even purchase more from you. One way to monitor how happy your customers are with your business is the Net Promoter Score. It’s a quick and efficient scoring system where users provide you with a score of 1-10 (10 being the highest) about how likely they are to recommend your product or service to their peers. A single score can tell a lot about what your customers think. At the same time, you can segment customers based on their answers and craft marketing campaigns for each.
6. Find out how to win back lost clients
If you lost clients along the way, you could use the changes you’ve made in your business as a way to get back in their good graces. It’s easier and cheaper to win back a former customer than acquire a brand new client.
The following statistics are from a study conducted by Gemma Nisbet at the University of Warwick: “A company is six times more likely to win back an old customer than acquire a new one.”
That means that if you’re trying to grow your small business, it’s good practice to put in place strategies for winning back lost customers! And one of these strategies is to incentivize your user feedback campaign targeting former clients. Maybe some of them are still part of your database or email list. Identify who they are and reach out to them, asking for their time to answer your survey. In the survey, ask them questions about why they’re no longer your customers to understand why and find ways to keep similar clients from leaving.
It shouldn’t take longer than a minute to complete the survey. However, they probably won’t answer it unless you give them a reason to. This is where the incentive comes into play. It could come in the form of discount codes, freebies, gift cards, or anything that you can give away for free. The idea is to show goodwill with these people and want to make things right by them.
Also, regaining back the trust of an old client is a team effort. All departments must be in sync with what needs to be done for each prospect so you can seamlessly convert this person back as a customer. Therefore, internal communication processes must be set in place to help keep everyone on the same page. Use project management tools to bring everybody together regardless of what team they represent.
7. Create brand advocates and affiliates
User feedback gives you information about customers who are satisfied with your business, most of whom you can turn into advocates of your brand! These people know the value and quality that your company has offered.
In fact, you can turn their appreciation for your business into a partnership that benefits both. One way to do that is to encourage them to join your loyalty program. From here, they can keep purchasing products from you and get cash back from their orders. This way, your clients see the additional benefits of doing business with you. If your customers have a penchant for marketing, you can reward their allegiance to your brand by inviting them to your affiliate program. Here, they will help promote your services to your audience. In exchange for every successful referral sale, they receive a commission from the sale for the hard work they put.
To launch this program, you need to set up a dedicated process for both. For instance, you need to determine which affiliate marketing software you want to sync your program to. Tools like ReferralRock enable you to monitor the performance of affiliates and provide them with resources to succeed. Both programs will be a pain to set up. However, they’ll be worth the time especially if they help build a much deeper relationship with your customers. And you’ll be able to do this by first identifying who these people are from your user feedback campaign.
8. Improve your overall reputation
User feedback is perhaps the best way to feel the pulse of your audience and find out what needs to be done to help strengthen your brand credibility.
We’ve already discussed finding positive reviews to motivate your employees. Using them as social proof is something that not all e-commerce sites do. This is a shame because positive reviews such as these generate more conversions. At the same time, you want to monitor the negative reviews your brand has received or is receiving. Mind that, the intention here is not to demotivate your team. Rather, it’s the other way around — you want to use their feedback as an opportunity on how to improve your services even more!
To find them, you’ll need a social listening tool to collect mentions of your business on Facebook, Twitter, and the like. It also helps you have a help desk system or a chatbot widget where people can easily address any concerns they have. This way, customers come to you instead of the other way around.
From here, identify the constructive criticism and respond to each one of them. Some of the comments will be hard to swallow, but it is important to face and learn from them. Make sure to respond in a very professional manner and resolve any misgiving your customers have with your business. Keep in mind that one wrong move can undo all the goodwill your brand has built with customers through the years. So tread carefully.
If there are complaints that you can’t readily fix, then the best thing to do is listen to your customers and let them know their voice is heard. Use this as a teachable moment to your business in its effort to grow!
In a nutshell, negative user feedback keeps brands on their toes to avoid stagnation of the product offerings.
9. Create new sales opportunities
Sales opportunities from user feedback work both ways. You can offer satisfied customers products or services similar to their previous order. To complement data from user feedback, analytics tools help you identify related products you can advertise to them.
For concerned customers, offer incentives or special deals to help smoothen up the relationship.
Some of the things you can do to make your customers happy are:
- Offering a refund, coupon, or credit for their next order.
- Replacing an old product with a new one at no cost if it is broken or damaged.
- Providing free shipping on all future orders.
Both approaches allow you to build a sustainable campaign of using customer feedback to keep customers, satisfied or not, engaged with your brand.
10. Conclusion
As you can see above, user feedback is the catalyst to most of the changes taking place in the business. The voice of your customers is the most important of all, and it’s in your best interest to listen to what they have to say about your business at the very least. But this is only possible if you take action and use the insights to your business’s advantage. And if there’s one thing you must remember from this post, it’s to keep running user feedback. From their glowing reviews to pointed remarks, user feedback helps push the limits of what your business can do and become.
