Customer Feedback. Anyone who has a business knows that they need to do their best to satisfy the needs and wants of their customers. You need to make sure your customers stay loyal to your brand, so you can keep getting more sales from your existing customers.
How do you know that your efforts to generate sales are providing the best results? You need to hear from the customers. It you don’t do something to find out what your customers actually think about your products or services, you will be unable to get an accurate gauge on whether you are doing the best you can be doing.
The opinions of your customers, with regards to their experience with your brand, can be helpful and essential information that you can then use to adjust your business in order to fill their needs more accurately.
What Is Customer Feedback
At its core, customer feedback is information that is provided by your customers about whether they are satisfied or not with your product or service. It will also identify the all-around experience they had with your business.
Customer service is a resource which can be used to improve customer experience. It can also be used to modify your products or services to match their needs. You can collect customer feedback in many different ways. You can collect their feedback using different tools and techniques, depending on which ones work best for your business. The feedback you will receive will help you keep a better and clearer understanding of how customers perceive your brand, along with what you are selling.
How to Use Customer Feedback
Asking for feedback is an essential component of any business today, if it wants to stay competitive. Understanding your customers is critical for when you want to increase your sales. By asking for feedback, you can learn a whole lot about what your customers want and provide that to them. This will increase your sales conversion rates across the board.
Obtaining and using customer feedback is a fantastic opportunity to increase your level of understanding of what your customers’ needs and wants are. You also get to identify any potentially missed opportunities.
There are many ways you can use the feedback of your customers to generate and increase sales. Here are some of the most successful ways to use customer feedback.
Implement a Review Section on Your Website or App
Having a review section on your website or app can generate more sales from potential customers coming to your website and looking at your products and services. If you stand by what you are selling, you can proudly display customer feedback for everyone to see when they visit your website.
You can either have reviews under specific products and services or have an entire page dedicated solely to reviews. You can also have a reviews section displayed on all of your pages to get customers to continuously be reminded of the rave reviews your products and services receive.
This method of using customer feedback is a great opportunity to show off all of the wonderful things your customers have said about what you are selling. It will increase the confidence of your potential customers that you are selling quality products and services that are worth the money.
Even if you get some reviews that aren’t completely glowing, these can actually be helpful. They will show an air of authenticity because there is the perception of those being honest reviews. It will also give you an opportunity to show your audience how you deal with negative feedback which previous customers may have raised. Potential customers won’t think you are editing out bad reviews, indicating your brand is one which can be trusted, even if not all of the reviews are five stars. You should drop the idea that anything less than 100% perfect reviews will turn off potential customers, because they won’t.
When you have a prominent review section on your website, it helps customers make an informed decision. If you don’t have reviews for a product or service, but a competitor does, a customer will most likely take their money to your competitor. A majority of customers are hesitant to purchase something from a business if there are no customer reviews.
The bottom line is that potential customers see feedback from previous customers, they will trust your business more and feel more confident that purchasing your products and services will be a sound investment. Customer feedback will help you get more sales, so this is an important feature to consider including on your website.
Use Your Customer Feedback in Marketing
Besides proudly displaying customer feedback on your business website, you should also use that feedback in your marketing efforts. This is really easy to do, since you already have the bulk of your marketing content created for you by your previous customers. You simply need to find ways to include the feedback naturally into your marketing material.
You can put together a spreadsheet with quotes of specific parts of the feedback you believe would have the most positive effect for marketing. You can use these quotes in blog posts, customer emails, or even on trade show fliers. When you take this route, try to stick to short and punchy quotes that highlight the best and most defining aspects of your products, services, or business as a whole. Make sure this customer feedback shows how you stand out.
Remember those less-than-flattering reviews we talked about? You can even use those in your marketing material. If you get a negative review about some aspect of a product or service you offer, you can create a blog post addressing it. Talk about the steps you’ve taken to rectify what the feedback has highlighted. You can also share what sort of changes you have implemented as a direct result of that feedback.
Even though you are highlighting a review that does not put your business in the best light, you are demonstrating that you genuinely care about improving what you have to offer to people. It also shows other potential customers that you will actually read the customer feedback you receive. Remember, bad reviews don’t have to be perceived as being bad at all. Leverage them to your advantage and generate more sales.
Reach Out to Previous Customers
If you received less-than-stellar reviews and feedback from previous customers, you should go and take into consideration what they said and implemented changes. Once you do that, you should try to get back those customers. When you have made meaningful changes that have resolved the issues those previous customers had, you can try to win them back.
You can ask them for new input into the improved products or services. By this point, they will see that their voices have been heard and they are having a direct effect on the positive improvement of your business.
The most important thing to remember about your customers is that they are human beings, like you. If you don’t provide the kind of communication where you acknowledge what they said, making improvements, and letting them know about those, then you are lacking that human touch between you and your customers. That could make you lose out to a competitor who does take their customer feedback into careful consideration.
Track the Results
All of the customer feedback you receive should be used in some way. Remember, this is all very valuable data which can only help to improve your products and services, putting you ahead of the competition.
Acknowledging customer feedback is the first step you should take, but it is definitely not the last. You will also have to take that feedback and review it. Identify what you can improve on based on what your customers divulged.
Once you have implemented the necessary changes, follow-up with your customers to let them know how you have upgraded your offerings. Offer them to provide additional ideas and input on the improvements. They may provide feedback which can further help you tweak and refine your products and services to be even more aligned with what your customers are looking for.
When you initiate changes driven by feedback you receive from your customers, you should be able track some results using the suitable KPI’s. Track which customers offer you additional ideas and input. Keep score of how many of your customers are giving you input. When you get more of the right kind of customers participating in the customer feedback process, your business grows and thrives as a result.
Create Case Studies
Another way to use customer feedback to increase your sales is to perform customer case studies. These are something that will take a little more time and effort than the other two methods, but they can be well worth it.
The first step you need to take is to gather up the content for your case study. You can create a survey to send out to your customers, for example. This will make it a focused case study instead of a general one.
You can even arrange a more detailed interview with specific customers and ask them to explain why they chose to support your business over another. You can also ask these specific customers how they found the product or service to be. How did it fulfill their own needs and wants?
A benefit of case studies such as these is landing similar customers in the future. Prospective customers will be able to see how the user experience with what you are selling is. Case studies, especially if they go into greater depth about a product or service, will take some time to complete. However, once finished, they will become excellent marketing tools, which you can use in many different ways.
- You can send out marketing emails to prospective customers, showing off the features a product or service you are selling has to offer.
- You can post abbreviated versions of the case studies on social media.
- You can send the case studies to inquires you receive from potential customers if their questions can be answered by the case studies. This could be a quick way to show off exactly what kind of features and feedback the products or services received.
- You can include case studies in other marketing materials, including related blog posts. This allows potential customers who want to read up more on your business, or a specific product or service you are selling, and find easy-to-digest customer case studies.
- You can create a customer case studies section on your website, prominently displayed, to help potential customers visiting your website to easily discover and read the ones pertaining to their needs and wants.
However, you decide to use case studies, you will be able to leverage data provided by your previous customers to help you generate more sales. By now, you can probably see the theme here. Customer feedback enables you to turn your previous customers into marketers of your business. All you need to do is collate the data and package it in a way which will be easy-to-digest for potential customers and help convert them into customers.
Generate Those Sales
Now that you know how to use customer feedback to generate sales, you can use the feedback you receive in ways you may have not realized was possible. Always use the feedback from customers you receive to your advantage. This is valuable data that you can use as part of your marketing strategy. Not only will it gauge how well your business is performing, you will also be able to use the data in many different ways to increase your sales.
Customer feedback, both good and bad, can be a powerful tool to generate more sales and show how your business cares about what its customers think. It will put your brand in a more positive light in the eyes of prospective customers and help convert them into paying customers instead of seeing them going over to a competitor.
