Customer feedback is an important aspect of a business. It’s important for the sake of improving your product and services so, what does it involve and, how can you leverage it? In this article, we will discuss how to leverage customer feedback in your business.
Building a business in Nigeria can be challenging and frustrating even with the skills, financial support and competent working colleagues. This is why customer reviews are valuable and informative which can help a business thrive.
Customers can share useful details in how they experienced your products or services as well as providing constructive criticism and suggestions to improve on the product or service they received.
To start with, you need to get your customer feedback as you cannot leverage what you do not have. Doing business in the twenty-first century means that customer opinions have power sometimes, even negative reviews can be valuable if you know how to take advantage of them.
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Strategies to Leverage Customer Feedback in Business
This is the part every business owner or manager should take seriously. One of the benefits of customer feedback is that it influences future business decisions and allows you to connect better with customers. Moreover, making use of the data with you is one step towards your business growth.
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Learn from the feedback
The most essential thing is that you want to attract your customers and retain them, confirming that you are the first person they consider in your industry or their vicinity when they need your service or product. Don’t forget this saying that goes thus, “Customers are always right.” You can use customer feedback to discover what is significant to them. Learn from their pain point, their point of view.
The good, the bad, the ugly – even negative reviews – are all the way your customers’ satisfaction are met. So learn and don’t avoid negative feedback. You will never know what is wrong with your product till your customers start giving you criticisms.
You might even learn a new way of conveying your services to your customers in no time and just like that, you will realize that your customers leave their comfort zone just to patronize your trade despite your location.
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Manage customer feedback
Now you know the pain point and point of view of your customer, you may begin to receive more customer feedback than you could possibly imagine. It won’t be worth much if you fail to manage those responses from the good to the bad reviews.
For instance, you got a customer review that “your product is wonderful but the cost of your product including delivery is very expensive.” “I really love the packaging and delivery, I got exactly what I ordered for.” You will agree with me that both look similar, right? They both love the product but one customer hates the price/billing of both the product and delivery service while the other loves everything about your business.
How you analyze comments like this is very important to the growth of your business because customer service is very important to skyrocket a business.
An online reputation management (ORM) system is the right solution to analyze those feedbacks from your sources. This hands on reputation management system helps you sort and analyze those customers feedbacks such as categories like usability experience, pricing/billing, generic negative (e.g. “this product is bad”), generic positive (e.g. it’s an amazing product, I love it”), customer service, and feature request. This way you can pay attention to what people say about your brand and improve on where you should.
Analyzing customer feedback can drastically improve your business growth because it gives you a chance to uncover product defects and customer service issues.
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Make changes to your product and services.
With the help of your customer feedback, you don’t need to solely depend on your colleagues and teammates for ideas about what’s working and what isn’t. The reviews given can be used to strategically drive changes to your products and services. Implement them and increase sales.
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Create a testimonial page on your website or social media pages.
When customers go through your website or social media pages and find testimonials of other customers like them, it boosts their trust and confidence in your product and service. Having positive comments from past customers can help attract new ones to your business.
Your positive response to negative comments can make your customer understand your willingness to help, not just to sell to them which is a very good way of communication that improves engagements, strengthens relationships and also increases sales and ratings.
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Motivate your employees.
Everyone wants to be appreciated because it makes you and me happy and you are prompt to do better. A happy employee is a productive employee. Share those positive and negative customer feedback with them to appreciate their contribution and effort so far as well as encourage them to do better. Use those reviews as a motivation tool.
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Look out for competitors.
You can learn a lot from what your competitors are doing right and what they are doing wrong. Use that information to adjust your own business. Take this opportunity to make your business better and grow your customer base.
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Follow up.
This is very important because customers get attached when a brand checks up on them. You can send a few emails to your customers or social media DMs to show you are excited to have them patronize you and for their comments.
You can blast out their feedback in the form of a newsletter and share with them what you have learned and what you will be working on to improve their experience with your business. It’s always beautiful when the other person takes your feelings into account, in every relationship.
Conclusion
There are many factors that affect the performance of existing businesses. It is with this insight that I believe many business owners will attest to how important it is to have a clear understanding of their target market.
This includes getting a proper handle on what exactly your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses are and knowing what is expected from people who patronize their services. Therefore, don’t forget to use these effective strategies to leverage customer feedback in your business. You will thank me afterwards.
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About the Author
Oluwatomiwa is a content writer, budding UX writer, mental health advocate, and veterinary medical student interested in inspiring young minds to live healthy physically and mentally. When he’s not writing, he’s busy executing projects as a serial volunteer, reading books (mostly financial and self-development), and seeing a movie.
About Author
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