Business

Why is customer feedback more important than ever?

By Charlie Proctor
5 years ago
In Business, Consumer Advice, Fashion, Retail

2,097 Views
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Your business can experience a total overhaul in success by doing something as simple as listening to your customers. While you might be confident that your products are ticking every box for your target audience, it is easy to become complacent with this belief. Reviews and suggestions are both aspects of customer feedback that can help brands to identify the ways that they can strengthen and build both their presence and their products. By being open to the thoughts of your audience you could see a drastic change in how your business performs. Join CT Shirts, a leading men’s suits retailer, to find out exactly how this works.

More than just a target audience

Purchases are based on far more than just necessity nowadays, and brands can not afford to be losing out on sales to rival companies who place more value in the people who buy their products. Personalisation has taken many businesses by storm, and for a brand to succeed they need to capture engaging elements in their market strategies, while also accounting for the human element that customers look for in an ever-automated world. Building strong customer relationships is more important than ever and listening to feedback from your audience is inherent to this. A recent survey from Infosys found that 31% of respondents said that they want their shopping experience to be far more personalised than it currently is.

Many companies have also become more accommodating of customers marketing preferences, and this is a great example of how listening to customer feedback can develop a positive perception of your brand by your customers, and the retail industry is leading the way in this demonstration. As brick and mortar stores become gradually left behind in the fast-moving digital age, businesses are constantly under pressure to evolve and nurture the data that they have on customers. Convenience is a sought-after aspect amongst the new, younger market demographic, and by listening to customer feedback you can devise ways to make your brand appeal to a potentially larger audience. Coffee giant Starbucks made their digital app ultra-convenient by using locational data as well as previous orders to make getting that essential caffeine hit a streamlined service. Introduced as part of their rewards system, the customisable options helped revenue to soar to $2.56 billion.

A satisfied customer is a happy customer

Customer satisfaction often goes overlooked, and this opens the floodgates to all of your direct market competitors. If you are smart with your approach to customer feedback, then you can boost your satisfaction rates as well as develop consumer loyalty. Every home will have its own stock of ‘household name’ type products that are absolute essentials on every shopping trip, and the reason that these products have achieved such status is by sustaining a consistently high level of customer satisfaction.

One of the best ways to target levels of satisfaction within your audience is by simply asking questions, and there are a few smart metric strategies that you could employ to help. One example is the Net Promoter Score known as NPS, which allows your business to uncover target responses from your customers relating to your product or service. Through a series of simple questions with answers based on a 0-10 rating scale, with 0 being most negative and 10 being most positive, you can develop an understanding of how satisfied your customers feel towards your brand. The UK cosmetics experts Lush have topped a plethora of polls based on customer satisfaction and experience. From their revolutionised tablet-based till payments to the ethical, transparent brand character, the business has become customer satisfaction force to be reckoned with. Many of the stores’ branches are experimenting with both visual search technologies and voice activated assistants, showing just how much they value investing in their customer satisfaction rates.

Always listening means always improving

As hinted to above, it is worryingly easy for brands to fall into stagnation when it comes to monitoring how their products do in terms of sales. As a nation, we are currently experiencing a stark demographic shift in the market, with millennial and generation Z shoppers acting as turning points in terms of what the customer wants from a purchase. If a product or service goes unchanged for a prolonged period, then it cannot meet these ever-changing needs and their offering is not up to scratch with the new customer requirements. Not all brands are clued up on the ways that this can be achieved and taking your market research to the next level is always a good place to start.

Whether you are in the initial stages of product development or you are looking to carry out a refresh for your existing services, you should consider exploring ways to contact current and potential customers to gauge their thoughts on your product. By pursuing these lines of inquiry, you can identify any flaws, experiences, and preferences which could prove fundamental for distinguishing your business and product in a congested market. These kind of insights are such a valuable tool for brands nowadays who are aiming to improve their products, but if they are not applying the findings in the right way then they become pointless. The thriving beauty and skincare business Glossier is a great example of this, as the team includes dedicated customer service agents who work closely with the marketing department and listen to customer experiences. By listening to customer feedback, you are essentially promoting a culture of improvement.

Listening to the opinions of your customers on your products and services will prove invaluable in the long run, and it is an essential consideration for any business that aims to thrive in the evolving, modern market.