Feedback is one of the most important, most valuable things a business can receive. Why is it so important to understand customer sentiment, and what should we use it for?

Feedback from this who interact with your organisation is one of the most important, most valuable tools for businesses. Feedback from your users can help to influence everything from your marketing strategy to aftercare, operations to product development. Understand what you’re getting right, and you can continue to do what you’re doing; understand what you’re getting wrong, and you can enact change and improvements. By simply listening to your customers, you ensure that the product or service that you provide is meeting the needs and demands of your client, and aligns with their own values. 

So it’s clear – customer feedback is good for your business but why? What are the specific benefits, and what should you do with all that information? Here are a few reasons:

Customer Feedback helps to steer business decisions

To stay on top of your game as a business, customers have to be at the centre of everything you do. By collecting feedback at regular intervals throughout the customer journey, you capture an accurate and detailed map of the experiences of customers as they interact with various parts of the business. The feedback will help to form marketing campaigns, operations and product development of the future, ensuring each part of the business is meeting the expectations of customers.

Customer Feedback helps to create the best customer experiences

The most effective way to provide your customers with an amazing experience is to make them and their opinions feel valued. Recent studies from Harvard Business Review showed that the act of simply asking for feedback can have a positive impact on a customer’s perception of a brand. By actively asking for feedback, customers are induced to form opinions that may otherwise not occur to them. While they may already love your product or service, they may not have consciously felt that way. Bringing sentiment to the forefront of their minds makes it more likely for them to form a positive opinion of their brand, and to become a repeat customer; result!

Customer Feedback informs other prospective consumers

With seemingly everyone active on Social Media, the power of promoting a good product rests with the consumer. By collecting customer feedback, you can let the customer do the talking, promoting the benefits of your product, and sharing their thoughts and feelings with others looking to purchase a similar product or service.

Collecting Customer Feedback grows brand loyalty

By asking customers about their experiences, you show that you care, and that you value your opinions. You involve them in your business, making them feel valued and attached to your brand. Feedback is about sentiment, and sentiment shows a human element to your business, demonstrating genuine concern for the quality of products and services provided and for the opinions of its clients. Listening to the voices of your customers helps to creates stronger relationships with them, and creates strong brand ambassadors who will spread positive word-of-mouth recommendations for you.

From creating loyal brand ambassadors to helping to shape your products and services of the future, customer feedback is key. Feedback should be collected regularly, allowing users to provide a quantifiable score as well as providing additional information, allowing for quick and easy analysis of feedback that can be collated to find patterns and common sentiment towards particular aspects of the business. Providing a good product or service and marketing it well is the job only half done. A lasting commitment to fostering a customer-centric culture, followed by a fierce commitment to gathering, analysing, and sharing the feedback across the company and implementing it plays a vital role in propelling your product and the business forward.

Looking for a tool that can capture customer feedback where it matters most? OneClick is an easy to use, easy to implement survey tool that makes measuring customer sentiment easy. From surveys in email signatures to automated messages asking for feedback, OneClick offers it all. To learn more visit our website, or book a demo here.