Customer Feedback is your friend.
Not convinced? This quote from Brian Halligan explains why you should be:
“If we don’t know what’s right, we can’t do more of it. If we don’t know what’s wrong, we can’t do less of it. Without customer feedback, we are destined to fail.”
Brian Halligan
Every company wants countless positive reviews, but could hearing about a negative experience actually be more beneficial in the long run?
Why Customer Feedback Matters
Why should our organisation seek feedback? I know we’re performing, we’re hitting all our targets… we don’t need it!
We’ve all heard this before but if you’re in this position, doubting the value of feedback, think again.
Feedback enables you to unearth otherwise unknown issues early on, meaning you can action a response before any new problem gets out of hand.
Doing so ensures you stay on the organisational front foot and valuable resources aren’t wasted putting out fires that could’ve been dealt with sooner, had you only provided the platform for people to make you aware.
The impact of feedback isn’t solely limited to giving customers a voice.
Recent Harvard Business Review studies have shown that it can cost up to 25 times more to acquire a new customer than to keep one and that those who feel content and fully engaged return 90% more regularly and spend 60% more per transaction.
It pays to keep customers happy.
This can only be achieved by finding out what clients like about your offering, irrespective of your current success, and doing more of it!
How Should I Collect Feedback?
Tracking activity and collecting data is invaluable, but is, at best, clinical.
Why? Data can often lack the emotional insight behind what actually motivates your customers.
Speak to them directly, and you unlock a whole new side of what 6/10 for service actually means.
Automated Surveys are a fantastic way of giving your users a voice, are easily scaled and simple to analyse.
Anthill technology can automatically trigger surveys at key stages in the customer journey via customisable workflows, facilitating your feedback loop and keeping customer satisfaction on track.
This helps to prevent those damaging negative reviews surfacing when it’s already too late.
By remaining flexible with constant, iterative tweaks, you drive forward your processes incrementally, without the need for drastic overhauls.
Here are a few examples of when a survey can be extremely insightful:
- Immediately after an initial sales enquiry
- After successfully “closing” an opportunity
- When a customer doesn’t go ahead
- Post purchase, when the buyer has had time to reflect on their journey
Analysing The Results
You’ve collected your feedback, now what?
Well, if the data is quantitative, digesting it is relatively simple. However, the real value often comes by taking the time to read into the language used when you allow your customers to extrapolate…
Reading the “why” in the words is really insightful as the initial reasons for buying can be lost in translation or given a generic tag within your CRM that doesn’t fully explain the events.
Using the language of your own customer also makes you feel a more tangible proposition to new clients in similar positions and allows you to tap back into the original motivations.
Perhaps someone didn’t convert first time round? Try inviting feedback to understand “why”, reactivate those leads and increase close rates.
The Impact Of Customer Feedback
Bill Gates once said…
“your unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”.
Bill Gates
We tell ten times more people about a negative experience than a positive one.
These two facts together should be enough to show you that welcoming feedback is important enough to be classed as a “business critical”.
Your customers are at the centre of your business; speak to them and improve your products or services to offer the best solutions to their real pain points.
Everything you do must be customer orientated.
Feedback drives improvement by taking what your clients love and multiplying it, making you an even more attractive proposition to your target market.
So rather than worrying about what you might hear, welcome critique, you never know what you might find out…
Intrigued to learn more? Check out our Insights Hub to keep your business at the cutting edge.
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- February 23rd, 2021