One of the main purposes of your business is to satisfy the customers. Running a company is nothing if the people using your services are not loyal to you. This is the lifeline of your business and not only one of the best ways to earn revenue but also to attract more clients and keep your business running and growing.
However, in order to keep your clients satisfied, you will need to know what they think about you. All of the successful businesses these days are listening to customers to create the best experience for them. And the best way to do this is through user feedback.
The trouble, though, is how to get the feedback. There are so many ways to do it, and the importance of user feedback is huge — so it becomes imperative to learn all you can about it. That’s why in this article, we take a look at all the reasons why user feedback is so important — and how you can get it from your clients.
What is feedback after all?
First, let’s just think about the very idea of feedback. You need to know exactly what constitutes “feedback” in the business world, and how you can apply it to increase your product-market fit.
By definition, feedback is the information users give you. This means any and all information — from what they want to see in your company to what they liked or disliked about it. They can talk about the experience as a whole or a product in particular. To you, it doesn’t matter. All feedback is important — but only after you do something with it.
Just like any resource, feedback is valuable once you start using it. It can help shape up your business into something that everyone will flock to! This way, you can easily stay in front of your competition — just by paying attention to what your clients are saying.
There are many ways in which you can use feedback when managing clients
When you think about user feedback, the first thing that might pop into your mind is the product-market fit. After all, we associate the feedback with it most often.
If you are new to the business world, you might not know it by this name. However, it is exactly what the name suggests — in simple terms, the way what you have to offer (whether a product or a service) will fit with your clients.
As you might imagine, the way you fit into the market will be a major playing in how your business shapes up to be. Success or failure depends on it. And getting feedback from your users can help you achieve a better stage of product-market fit through many ways:
- feedback can help you understand your clients
- it can improve the services or products you are offering
- it helps with making better business decisions
- feedback will also improve your client loyalty
- it helps with client retention and
- also helps bring in new clients.
Understand your clients through feedback
When you are starting your business, one of the first things you will want to do is thorough market research. This is how you find out about the needs of a community, as well as how you can help them. This way, you can get a lot of understanding for your clients. However, it is not the only one.
Through feedback, you can gather valuable information about your clients — some that you couldn’t even get through market research using a market intelligence platform!
What’s more, you can get a much better picture of who your clients are and what their needs are by directly talking with them. This is how you will boost your product-market fit even more.
4 Ways to leverage the power of User Feedback
Use User Feedback to improve your products and services
Another amazing way to use your feedback and fit in the market is by improving your products. Even with all the market research, you can do prior to you releasing a product, you can never know how well (or badly) it will fit in the market until it’s out in the wild.
But once you release it, it’s the customer feedback that will inform you about it! Once your clients experience what you offer, they can come back and share their thoughts about them. This way, not only will you learn about your clients, but you can also understand the advantages and disadvantages of your product you might not have realized before.
Make better business decisions thanks to user feedback
The third thing that feedback can help you with is making business decisions. There can often be scary — especially for a young entrepreneur. But if you want to manage your clients in a meaningful way, then you will have to make them.
They can be so much easier to make with data backing up your line of thinking. This way, feedback can inform the way you shape up your business. All you need to do is to put in effort in gathering up your data which you can later use for making decisions — as well as creating new business ideas.
Manage your client loyalty through feedback
Brand loyalty is extremely important. A lot of business marketing doesn’t even come from campaigns! Instead, people talk about your business and recommend it to their friends. This way, by word of mouth, your business can expend the client list with ease.
So, how do you build brand loyalty? Well, all you need to do is to listen to people and then work on their suggestions. If they enjoy your product, they will talk about it. If not, they will tell you, and you can adjust it. This way, you build a better business!
Retain your customers by listening to their feedback
Another way to absolutely win your client’s trust is to let them know that they are heard. A lot of your client base will appreciate this even when you cannot help with their complaints about your service. But by listening to their feedback, you show that you value their opinion and that you are there for them — instead of for their money.
This way, you can keep your clients for a long time. Happy people will stay with you and keep coming back to use your services and products again and again through positive word of mouth. Conversely, unhappy clients will leave.
What is the best way to find where each client falls? By asking them! This is why feedback can help you manage your client and keep your client retention high. This, in turn, means your business will keep running for a long time.
How User feedback can bring more clients
We already talked about how word of mouth can spread fast and help your business expand. But there is another way you can utilize the feedback you receive — by sharing it!
What is one of the things you will always do when thinking about getting a new product? 95% of customers will search for reviews online. This is why a lot of businesses incorporate review fields in their feedback forms. This way, you let your clients speak for you — and this is what prospective clients tend to believe more!
Learn how to harness user feedback in an efficient way
The important question to ask is how to harness feedback in a meaningful and efficient way. There are many ways to do it. Some will work for you, while others won’t. Usually, there are two “types” of feedback — prompted and unprompted.
Prompted feedback is the hundred different surveys that you get and send out. Unprompted feedback comes in the form of opinions and reviews. And even though it’s important to remember the distinction — you should mix them often. Only this way will you be able to get the full picture.
5 Ways to Collect User Feedback
NPS
NPS stands for Net Promoter Score and is one of the most common metrics used in feedback assessment. It consists of a simple question: “How likely are you to recommend our brand?” People answer in the scale of 0 to 10, 0 being “no chance whatsoever,” while 10 being “the highest regards.”
This method is simple, but it can give you a nice idea of where your clients fall on the scale. What’s more, any industry can use it. This is what makes the method so popular and common!
Surveys
Online surveys are quite possibly the second most used method — but also the one most people hate. However, they can be pretty useful, so you need to find a way to make them entertaining in some way.
What you need is to know the goal of your survey. This helps you form questions — which you should not have too many. What’s more, try to keep them as short as possible. You can also consider offering something to your clients — a voucher for their next purchase, for example.
Emails
Emails are much easier than surveys — and everyone is using them. What we mean by email, though, is literally every interaction you have with clients. Everything you do can give you feedback — so make sure that the clients understand you care about their thoughts.
This is why you need to add a personal touch to each email as well as try to be genuine. People will not respond to emails when they see templates over and over again.
Social media
Nowadays, social media has an ever-reaching presence. Because of this, it is also one of the best ways to gather a lot of user feedback fast. All you need to do is listen to what the clients are talking about using your hashtags or your brand name.
Read through their comments on your pages or any messages they send on your social media accounts. It can also be a great idea to extend your services to reviewers as well. This way, you can get an honest opinion about your product — and also some free advertisement.
Reviews
Expanding on the topic — there are many websites that host reviews too. And as we already mentioned — people love visiting these. So, focus on review websites — a lot of people will praise you for a good job — but you can also follow up on bad reviews. It can also help you spot problems with your product you might have missed.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many ways in which you can gather feedback from your clients. Similarly, there are many ways in which this feedback can influence the progress of your business and help you manage clients.
That’s why it’s very important to pay attention to how you collect feedback as well as analyze it. Create opportunities for your clients to offer it, and make sure they know their thoughts are valued and respected! This will lead to change, and it will take your business straight to the road of success!
