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Customer feedback is a powerhouse of ideas that have a lot of potential for your business strategy. And it’s even more valuable if you’re looking for fresh ideas to accelerate your marketing efforts.
You may know your product well, but your customers know it better, as they use it on a daily basis. They know what it lacks and they know how they want to see you present it. Their ideas can potentially bring a lot of value to your company strategy. Of course, if you use it right.
Customer feedback determines a lot of aspects of how your business runs. According to the stats by g2crowd:
- 93% of consumers use reviews to determine whether they can trust a business;
- 72% of respondents say they don’t take action in terms of purchasing a product until they see the reviews;
- When it comes to the impact of customer reviews on purchasing decisions, it is reported that purchase likelihood increases 15% when potential buyers read verified buyer reviews over anonymous reviews.
Collecting customer feedback is easier than you think. According to the same source, 68% of customers are ready to give their feedback after being asked to do so. Thus, you have no excuses to not incorporate customer feedback in your company strategy.
The value of including customer feedback in a business strategy is even bigger for startups. There’s so much you can use and learn from, even if you’ve just gotten started with your business.
The question is, how do you incorporate customer feedback into your company strategy? Isn’t it too much overwhelming work to go through all those reviews?
It may be. But let’s make it easier for you.
#1. Fix the Problems
Even if your customer service works 24/7, receiving messages from customers about the issues with the product, they still may not know about every issue. Different customers prefer different ways to communicate their problems, either through a phone line, social media or through a reviews website.
In the age of the Internet, you can find customer feedback everywhere. And, there’s no such thing as negative feedback if it contains constructive criticism that you can benefit from.
Amazon is one of the places where manufacturers can find reviews that describe different product-related issues and benefit from them. “The trick is to treat them right”, says Veronica Wright, Customer Success Specialist for ResumesCentre, “as a lot depends on your reaction and the solution you can offer”.
Yes, reviews that describe product-related issues must be answered. In your answer you should do the following:
- express your concern regarding the problem;
- offer actionable solutions;
- show gratitude that your customer took the time to write the review.
Here’s the example of an Amazon review with a correct reply from the manufacturer:
Source: Amazon.com
Paying close attention to such reviews can help you recognize product-related issues and immediately take action towards the improvement of your products.
#2. Think Globally
If your business is just beginning its journey, it’s better to concentrate on the overall customer experience rather than on separate reviews. With this deduction method, you’ll be able to see the global picture and then take action.
This works for every part of your company strategy. When launching a marketing strategy, taking into consideration the overall customer experience from your previous campaigns can help you trace and find the theme for your next campaign.
Moreover, the overall customer experience is the KPI you will have to track during and after your marketing campaign.
#3. Innovate
Sometimes customers come with breakthrough innovative ideas, which you can make use from in terms of improving your product and making changes to how your company runs.
The perfect example of using innovative ideas from customers is LEGO Ideas, a platform, where the company encourages the customers to share their creations and designs for new sets.
If someone’s project receives over 10.000 votes, LEGO reviews it and launches the production, bringing someone’s idea to life and launching a customer-generated product to be sold worldwide.
Image credit: LEGO Ideas
If you don’t want to use a separate platform to collect innovative ideas on a regular basis, you can issue a one-time statement about starting a contest, addressing your customers and inviting them to participate in creating and launching your next product.
Warning! The note about launching a contest should be informative, well-thought-out, well-written and proofread.
Seems like an overwhelming task, especially if you have no experience doing it. Luckily, there are tools you can use:
- Grammarly: this is a universal proofreading tool with the function of checking the style of your writing and improving its readability.
- OnlineWritersRating: this is an online community that unites professional writers and copywriters from across the world, who share their experience writing marketing texts and offering help in creative writing.
- WriteLoad: this is another community of writers, where you can hang out with professional copywriters in an online chatroom to get help and feedback.
- Canada-Writers: when it comes to notifying your customers about possible contests, you should worry about the readability of such notifications. This service will help you make this notification readable and engaging, making sure that there’s nothing that deflects attention and affects engagement.
You can add a bit of creativity and even create an explainer video to present your contest. With these tools, collecting feedback becomes simple, helping you draw the attention of your customers and ignite the flow of innovative ideas.
#4. Develop the Product
The feedback that describes possible issues is not the only way to develop and improve your product. Sometimes customers can generate ideas, like including additional features or improving certain functions, while being mostly satisfied with the product.
That’s why it’s a good idea to ask for customer feedback yourself, showing readiness to improve what you sell.
In your company strategy, you can use a customer feedback loop to ask for feedback.
It is a way for the casual interaction between a company and a customer, aimed at getting constructive feedback from customers. Here’s what customer feedback looks like:
You can really benefit from applying this model to your business strategy. Here’s how.
- This is the foundation of positive customer experience. It makes the consumers fell appreciated;
- It will keep you updated on a regular basis;
- Customer feedback loop helps you discover new opportunities to improve B2C relationships;
The biggest benefit is that this approach is the source of innovative ideas that will help you take a look at your product from a different perspective, generating ideas on how you can improve it.
#5. Cross-Department Collaboration
Incorporating customer feedback in your business strategy is a concern not only for your marketing team but for your whole company, and even for the departments that have nothing to do with the product development.
Working with customer feedback starts from your customer service and ends on a product manufacturing stage of your product. “Product development, marketing, and customer service teams should work together at every stage.
It helps reduce delays between collecting feedback and using it to improve a product. That’s what we always aim for”, shares Elvis Brock, the head of the marketing department at BestWritersCanada. You can use this idea for your business strategy too.
For a startup, every review matters, and discussing the overall customer experience, when you’ve just launched the production, is the way to remain updated and quickly make the necessary changes.
Having all the departments involved is the way to make sure that your entire company works in conjunction to improve your product.
#6. Make Decisions
Lastly, you can use customer feedback and their experience to make serious changes to how your company operates.
Take a look at DHL’s experience. Being the world’s largest logistics and mail delivery company, it often incorporates major ideas, powered by their customers. They hold regular workshops in Germany and Singapore, where they co-create solutions together with their customers.
The coolest thing they invented was a Parcelcopter, a drone that is able to deliver the parcels to the locations with the obstacles like water or mountains:
Image credit: DHL
This invention made major changes to how the company operates, both introducing new technology to the mail service and changing the way how packages are delivered to the areas, which are hard to get to.
As you can see, customer feedback is not only the source for the minor changes to your product. You can completely revolutionize your company, using ideas from your customers.
Wrapping Up
Customer feedback is a real treasure, full of innovative ideas. It helps you see your business strategy from a different perspective and gives you tools to make the changes, necessary for the success of your company.
Hopefully, the ideas, discussed in this article, will inspire you to make customer feedback an integral part of your business strategy and create a positive relationship with your customers.
