Lesson 07: The importance of customer feedback

What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is information provided by clients about whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied with a product or service and about the general experience they had with a company. Their opinion is a resource for improving customer experience and adjusting your actions to their needs. This information can be collected with different kinds of surveys (prompted feedback), but you can also find opinions and reviews your clients post online (unprompted feedback) and collect them using Internet monitoring tools. Both sources are important to get a full picture of how your clients perceive your brand.
Top performing companies understand an important role that customer feedback plays in business. They consistently listen to the voice of their clients. Not only they search for opinions they clients publish on social media and reviews they provide on websites designed for gathering feedback (e.g. TripAdvisor), but they also deliberately ask for feedback using distinct kinds of surveys. If you want to stay ahead of the competition you should never stop listening to customer feedback whether it is positive or negative, prompted or unprompted.

If you run your own business I know you do your best to please your customers, satisfy their needs, and eventually to keep them loyal to your brand. But how can you be sure that your efforts bring desired results? If you do not try to find out what your clients actually think about your service, you will never be able to give them the best customer experience. Their opinions about the experience they have with your brand are helpful information that you can use to adjust your business to fit their needs more accurately.

There are plenty of ways you can leverage customer feedback and profit from it. In this entry I will try to explain why collecting customer feedback, whether prompted or unprompted, is crucial in managing customer satisfaction and loyalty, in customer retention, improving products and services, and in many more areas of your business. Sit comfortably and continue reading to discover the benefits of customer feedback.