Feedback Is The Gift That Your Customers Give, But Are You Throwing It Back In Their Faces?

The online revolution and its leaning towards immediate consumer relationships means that customer feedback is now making all-important audience understanding easier than ever to come by.

From surveys to questionnaires and beyond, companies don’t even need to leave the office to tap into these benefits. Or, at least, they wouldn’t if they knew how to put the consumer-packaged gift of feedback to good use. 

Unfortunately, countless companies find that they fail to do just this, landing them with stalling product issues and inevitable consumer losses to their closest ranking competitors. To help you avoid that fate, we’re going to consider how exactly you’re throwing customer feedback back at your audience right now, and what you can do to change that. 

Failing to utilize feedback-based data

At even a base level, feedback provides a clear indication of consumer satisfaction. However, given that most feedback is now digital, the data behind these answers can prove as telling as the answers themselves. Information like the location of the consumer (if it’s volunteered), and even the platform from which feedback is collected is going to significantly impact your resulting course of action. Unfortunately, countless companies either don’t realize this or don’t have the tools to put this secondary information to good use, resulting in lackluster improvements that don’t do much in the long run. To overcome this, it’s essential not only to realize just how much feedback can tell you but to also use reverse ETL tools or similar that make it easier to analyze and access that data to its full extent moving forward. Only then can you ensure that you’re truly using all of the feedback you receive, all of the time.

Discarding recurring advice

As every company knows, you can’t please all of the people all of the time and, as long as you’re addressing negative feedback as it arises (e.g. giving refunds, offering money off next time, etc.), the odd negative review doesn’t necessarily require complete company overhauls. However, in most cases, feedback has a habit of revealing recurring issues which, were you to treat them in the same way, could ultimately unravel your business. Instead of discarding or placating in this instance, it’s therefore vital to take recurring negative comments on board, and consider realistically the best ways to address them (e.g. improving customer service after continual CS complaints), and also the best ways to let your audience know that you’ve done so.

Forgetting to follow up

Feedback is useful because it highlights clear improvements to help you serve your customers more efficiently. However, making sure that those changes actually work requires you to keep an eye on post-improvement feedback. If you forget to do this, your improvements are unlikely to make any real difference despite you often spending significant amounts of money to ensure otherwise. As such, you should always follow up on feedback-based changes, and make sure wholeheartedly that your efforts here have actually made a difference to those people who matter most. 

Feedback is invaluable, so make sure you’re not wasting it with these fatal mistakes.

This is a contributed post.