Top 8 Customer Feedback Benefits for Your Business

Whether good or bad, customer feedback benefits your business in many ways. Attention to user sentiment transforms your company into a customer-centric business, setting it up for continued success.

In this article, you’ll learn:

• What customer feedback is.
• What makes it important.
• Best practices to follow when collecting feedback.

Let’s begin!

TL;DR

• Customer feedback refers to the opinion of those who purchase your product or service on their experience with the said product.
• You can collect customer feedback via in-app surveys, customer interviews, online surveys, or even from customer insights shared on social media.
• Customer feedback helps you learn about your customers’ JTBD in order to determine their user persona group and personalize the user onboarding experience.
• User feedback provides you with valuable insights that help you improve the product, via feature requests, bug reports, etc.
• Collecting user feedback and acting on it to eliminate reasons for dissatisfaction helps you improve the customer experience and boost customer satisfaction.
• NPS surveys help you identify “detractors” who are likely to churn, enabling you to convert them into loyal customers by identifying their pain points and addressing their concerns.
• Feedback helps you identify promoters and encourage them to leave public feedback that attracts new customers.
• Used correctly, feedback surveys improve customer retention and reduce churn. It tells you why users love (or don’t love) your product and how to satisfy them better.
• You can get more value from customer feedback by incentivizing customers to leave feedback, segmenting users before requesting feedback, and following up to learn more or inform users of your actions.
• Book a Userpilot demo to learn more about how it helps you collect user feedback without writing any line of code.

What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is any kind of information your customer provides that tells you about their experience with your company’s products or services and any other interaction they’ve had with your brand.

You can get feedback directly through product reviews, feedback forms, website feedback, reported bugs/complaints, requests, etc. It can also come indirectly, such as when customers discuss your brand online without tagging you. Let’s explore them in more detail.

How to collect customer feedback

There are several ways of collecting customer feedback today. As seen above, these different methods range from the active to the passive, with every one of them providing insights that improve your product/service. Among other things, you can:

• Gather feedback in-app: Collecting feedback via in-app surveys is increasingly popular due to its convenience. Users share their experience on the app or an app feature without exiting the app screen.
• Conduct customer interviews: Reach out to customers to hear their stories. Have them share personal experiences that add nuance to their ratings and feelings.
• Collect feedback from social media channels: Social listening via social media monitoring is another popular way of collecting feedback. Users may not talk to you or tag you, but their candid public opinions can help you improve the product design.
• Navigate users to long-form surveys: Online surveys remain very popular for gathering customer feedback. A customer feedback survey can include multiple questions, open or close-ended questions, and rating scales.

8 Benefits of collecting customer feedback in-app

Customer feedback gives you an insight into how customers feel about your business and brings lots of positives to your organization. Consider the top 8 benefits of customer feedback.

Create a personalized onboarding process and drive customer success

Customer feedback helps you to deeply understand your customers. A user persona survey, for instance, informs you of the customer’s needs and their job to be done (JTBD).

The data collected from this survey is invaluable for personalizing the onboarding process and driving customer success.

Use carefully crafted survey questions, such as this one from Postify below, to identify your customers’ needs and JTBDs. Trigger the survey to appear on the welcome screen, at the beginning of the user journey.

As you learn about your customers’ needs, segment them accordingly and personalize their onboarding to showcase features that will help them complete their JTBD using your product.

Gain valuable insights from existing customers regarding product development

Listening to product feedback and acting on it helps you improve your product to align with customer needs and expectations.

Use product surveys to learn customers’ thoughts about a specific feature or the overall product experience. Sample product survey questions include:

• Which features do you value the most?
• How would you compare our product to {{competitor}}?
• How would you rate {{feature}}? Why?
• What features would you like to see?
• Why do you use/love our product?
• How often do you use our product?

With the right questions, you can understand what customers desire from your product and what challenges they face using it. You can identify bugs, determine product-market fit, and collate feature requests.

Asking users about their needs before developing a new feature helps you avoid the feature fallacy trap. Rather than developing features the customer “might” need, you develop “exactly” what they need.

Provide a better customer experience

As you consistently gather customer feedback, you will identify ways to better the customer experience. Whether you’re tracking the experience for the entire product or just a feature, the customer feedback collected helps you to isolate areas for improvement.

It gives you a chance to open dialogue with dissatisfied customers, identify their pain points and determine areas for improvement in your product or overall business performance.

Tip: Trigger surveys right after customer interactions to receive fresh and valuable insights on the customer experience.

Enhance customer satisfaction and exceed customers’ expectations

Customer feedback helps you understand how your customers feel about your company. This allows you to understand and directly impact customer satisfaction levels.

A hugely important metric, customer satisfaction measures how happy customers are with your product, service, or any of their interactions with your business, such as your customer service.

Using surveys like the customer satisfaction survey (CSAT), you can understand your audience better, personalize the customer experience, and improve customer satisfaction and relationships.

Build a base of loyal customers

According to Hubspot, about 55% of customers say they’re less likely to be loyal to brands today than they were in the past. But customer loyalty remains key to retaining customers and keeping them from switching to a competitor.

Surveys like the Net Promoter Score (NPS) help you to collect feedback regarding customer loyalty. The survey asks how likely the customer is to recommend your product to friends.

Respondents who give a score of 9 or 10 are considered loyal customers who will be willing to leave positive public reviews if you ask them.

For passives and detractors (respondents with a score of 8 or less), you can use follow-up questions to identify the reasons behind such a low score. As you fix these challenges, you turn them into loyal customers and avid promoters.

Increase positive WoM to attract potential customers

Customers read online reviews and base their buying decisions on them. In fact, 91% of teenagers and young adults trust online reviews as much as they’ll trust someone they know.

By gathering customer feedback and fixing problem areas, you improve the customer experience and turn your existing customers into brand advocates.

To make the most of your reach through positive feedback, you can segment potential “promoters” among your customers.

Next, request feedback from them using an in-app modal.

Such reviews on third-party websites form an invaluable part of your word-of-mouth marketing toolbox, helping you boost product awareness and attract new customers.

Improve customer retention

You’re more likely to retain customers who feel seen and heard. This is especially true if you always make sure to close the feedback loop after collecting actionable feedback.

You close the loop by following up on customers who told you they had issues. You may request further information and attempt solving it with them or solve it directly and inform them of your solution.

By reaching out to the customer, you open the door to learning more about their experience and show them you care about their concerns.

Reduce churn with customer churn surveys

Ultimately, the best way to retain customers and reduce churn is to speak directly with customers who leave.

Use churn surveys to gather feedback from users who decide to cancel or downgrade their subscription plan. Trigger the survey right after the user clicks the ‘cancel’ or ‘unsubscribe’ button.

Look through the data to identify some of the crucial factors determining customer churn. Then, make sure to address these concerns. Although you may not keep that customer from leaving, your improvements will encourage others to stay put.

Best practices when collecting customer feedback

Collecting customer feedback without a clear customer feedback strategy is like cooking without a recipe. By following customer feedback collection best practices, though, you can maximize responses and their impact.

Offer incentives for providing feedback

Customer feedback may be beneficial, but not every customer feels inclined to give them.

One way to access the many benefits of customer feedback is by incentivizing users to provide it. Incentives make customers happy to complete online surveys as it becomes a win-win offer.

As more customers respond to your survey, response rates will go up, providing you with higher-quality feedback for improving customer satisfaction.

Collect feedback from different focus groups

Every customer base has multiple focus groups, each with unique needs and concerns. To maximize the value of collected feedback, be sure to address each customer segment individually.

Use segmentation to reach different audiences (such as unhappy, loyal, or new customers) and collect their feedback. You can also trigger in-app surveys to follow a specific customer interaction.

As you get a handle on the unique customer needs of each group, your feedback will be more accurate and will have a greater impact.

Use different feedback forms to collect customer feedback

If you’ve followed the article so far, you’ve likely realized that there are different feedback forms. While some are excellent for qualitative data, others are better for collecting quantitative data.

Each survey also has a specific goal. For instance:

• NPS surveys help you measure customer loyalty.
• CSAT surveys help you measure customer satisfaction.
• Smiley face surveys capture instant emotions, etc.

By conducting every kind of feedback possible, you get a better view of customers’ challenges and position your brand for success.

Combine feedback surveys with customer interviews

Sometimes, customer feedback throws up more questions than answers, such as when the user has made a complaint that isn’t clear enough to you.

Conduct interviews to learn more about the customer’s issue, how it affects the customer experience, and what you can do to resolve it.

Always close the feedback loop

Finally, always make sure to close the loop after collecting customer feedback. The feedback loop is only closed after you act on it and revert to the user with the updates you’ve made based on their feedback.

Even when you don’t make changes, you can close the loop by acknowledging that you’ve received their feedback and providing any necessary follow-up information.

Experience the benefits of customer feedback with Userpilot

Userpilot is a robust product experience tool that helps you craft personalized experiences for users. Its built-in feedback tool helps you to:

Customize customer surveys to match your brand

Create customer feedback surveys and customize them to match your brand style. Add colors, fonts, and your brand logo to make the survey your own.

Whether you design the survey from scratch or use an existing template, you’ll be able to change the structure and styling as extensively as you desire.

Gather customer feedback at every stage of the customer journey

Choose when and where your in-app survey appears. You can test out different on-page positions and compare the response rates for each.

Userpilot also enables you to determine when surveys appear using custom events. Create your flow with a single event or multiple ones and automatically trigger the survey when the condition is fulfilled.

Tag negative customer feedback to gain customer insights

Automatically tag negative NPS responses and track them on a simple dashboard. This feature makes it easy for you to identify the most common issues and prioritize them accordingly.

Conclusion

There are several benefits of customer feedback collection. They reveal unhappy customers and the reasons for their dissatisfaction. But they also tell you what you’re getting right and help you increase customer satisfaction.

Thanks to Userpilot’s code-free feedback tool, you can now collect different kinds of customer feedback, anywhere and at any time. Book a demo to have a representative reach out to you.