Whether to drive business growth, ensure business success, or stay ahead of your competitors, customers are the key. Even if you have a great product or service, your business will go nowhere when your customers are not satisfied.
Wondering how do you even know if your customers are satisfied? What do they like about your product/service? How do they even feel about your product/service? To answer all these questions, we introduce customer feedback.
What is customer feedback?
Consumer or customer feedback is the input or the response shared by a customer or a user about their experience with the product, service, or the company. It can include criticism, opinions, genuine experience, or improvements that customers feel will make the product or service better.
Customer feedback is available in different forms, such as survey responses, reviews (offline and online), social media comments, interviews, forums, and more.
Different types of feedback
Let’s say that you conducted a survey and gathered customer feedback, but how do you categorize it? There are two primary types of feedback:
- Structured data
- Unstructured data
1. Structured data
As the name implies, structured data is organized data that can fit into a database neatly. The data is often quantitative in nature, such as numbers, rating, etc.
Examples: NPS® and CSAT questions
2. Unstructured data
As for unstructured data, it is unorganized data and does not have a clear, consistent structure. The data is often qualitative in nature, such as text, images, videos, and more.
Examples: Open-ended questions (text box questions)
Why is customer feedback important?
Here are some of the common benefits of customer feedback:
Understand your customers
Firstly, customer feedback will help you learn more about your customers. You can understand what customers want by listening to and analyzing their feedback. You will easily know what your customers like and dislike about the service, product, or company.
Improve your products or services
Another major benefit of customer feedback is that you can find flaws or issues with your product or service. After receiving the feedback, you can analyze it and implement certain changes that will make your product much better.
Measure customer satisfaction and loyalty
Customer satisfaction and loyalty are important metrics that affect the reputation and success of the company. With the help of CSAT surveys, you can measure customer satisfaction. In the same way you can measure customer loyalty by conducting NPS® surveys.
Find customer pain points
By gathering customer feedback, it is relatively easy to find customer pain points. For instance, some customers might feel that the pricing is really high for a certain product, how will you know that? That’s why it is important to gather customer feedback. There can be different pain points, such as pricing, features, quality issues, difficult processes, and more.
Enhance customer retention rate
When customers feel that their opinions are being heard, valued, and worked up on, it will increase their satisfaction level. When customers are satisfied, the churn rate will decrease. In short, this helps in enhancing the retention rate of the customers, which benefits your business greatly.
What is a customer feedback loop?
In simple words, the customer feedback loop is a customer experience (CX) strategy that involves gathering feedback from the customers and improving the product or the service.
There are generally four stages in the customer loop, such as:
- Gathering customer feedback
- Interpreting and analyzing the data
- Implementing the changes based on the feedback
- Reach out to customers post the changes
And that’s it – the customer loop is closed.
And why is the customer feedback loop important? There are many reasons for that:
- You get genuine data about the product and service from the customers.
- You can turn dissatisfied customers (detractors) into highly satisfied customers (promoters).
How to collect customer feedback?
There are different ways to collect customer feedback, such as:
Customer feedback surveys: One of the most effective ways to collect customer feedback is through surveys. All you have to do is create a survey with customized questions and distribute it to the customers. That’s it and you can easily collect valuable feedback using customer feedback software.
Interviews: You can directly reach out to the customers and conduct an interview to collect quick feedback. While interviewing, it is best to ask open-ended questions in order to gather detailed feedback. You can either go for planned or ad-hoc interviews.
Reviews: Online reviews are also a great way to gather customer feedback. People are more likely to write a review after a bad experience. So, make sure to keep an eye on online reviews across different sites to quickly collect feedback and act on it.
Focus groups: A little similar to interviews, but focus groups offer more structured and detailed data from your customers. It will be relatively easy to collect different opinions of multiple people at once.
Contact forms: You can also gather customer feedback through contact forms. This will help you collect the personal details of the customers as well like name, email, and more.
Social media: There is so much potential when it comes to social media for gathering customer feedback. All you have to do is track the comments and check the tags and mentions. You can also conduct polls to gather customers’ opinions.
Website feedback: You can add a feedback button on your website to collect the opinions of people who visit your site. For instance, you can add a pop-up at the end of the page or right before the customer exits the website.
Customer feedback tools
So, what is a customer feedback tool? It is a software application that helps businesses collect, analyze, and manage customer feedback through surveys. These tools allow users to create customized surveys, including satisfaction surveys, NPS®, and product feedback forms, to gather insights on customer experiences, opinions, and preferences.
You can easily send surveys, track responses, and engage with customers at various touchpoints. Beyond just collecting data, these tools centralize feedback and offer analytics features that help visualize trends, measure performance, and uncover areas for improvement.
Benefits of customer feedback tools
Now that you know what a customer feedback software is, we have listed the common customer feedback benefits here:
- It is easy to use customer feedback software as they often have a user-friendly interface.
- You can use premade templates to create surveys (they are often customizable).
- There are different types of survey questions available, such as rating scale, NPS®, CSAT, text-based questions, and more.
- Send customer feedback surveys in multiple languages instantly.
- You can distribute the surveys via different channels and manage the data under one platform.
- Collect qualitative and quantitative data quickly using customer feedback software.
- Sentiment analysis makes it easy to understand the emotions behind customer responses.
Collect and manage customer feedback under one platform with piHappiness
Whether you want to collect customer feedback via email, WhatsApp, or social media channels, piHappiness is here to make things easier for you. piHappiness is a multichannel customer feedback software that allows you to send surveys and gather data from various channels, such as SMS, email, WhatsApp, social media, personal links, anonymous links, QR Codes, and websites.
You can collect both quantitative and qualitative data by sending surveys with different types of questions. Gather genuine customer feedback, act on it, and enhance customer experience for better business growth.
If you are interested, feel free to reach out to us to schedule a demo now and see how piHappiness works.
