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You want to grow your business, but you don’t know where to start. Instead of hitting your head against the wall trying to find the right answer, you can start with user feedback.
If you wonder what user feedback is all about and how you can use it to ignite your company’s growth, keep reading. In this article, you will learn why user feedback is critical for your company’s growth and how you can get started with it today.
Why Your Company Needs User Feedback
Serve your customers
When you think about customer service, you probably think about customer call centers, FAQ pages, and automated live chats. The truth is, customer service is much more than that. If used right, customer service can lead to higher retention rates and increased customer loyalty.
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According to ThinkJar, one out of every 26 customers is likely to share their complaints with a company; the other 25 won’t say anything. For ThinkJar’s CEO Esteban Kolsky, the lesson is that “companies should not view the absence of feedback as a sign of satisfaction. The true enemy is indifference.”
A Zendesk study found that 42% of consumers said they buy more after a good customer service experience. Since it’s much cheaper to generate a sale from an existing customer than to acquire a new one, you should proactively collect user feedback to serve your customers properly and increase your sales.
Measure and improve the customer experience
“Customer experience” is the latest buzzword that represents how your customers perceive your company’s treatment of them. The better you treat your customers, the better the customer experience.
Why has this word become so popular? Because consumers no longer base their loyalty on low prices, they base it on the experience they receive from companies. The better your customer experience, the higher the chances of generating loyal customers.
But how can you improve your customer experience if you don’t know what they want? That’s where user feedback comes into play. By recollecting user feedback, you can use the learnings to create an ideal customer experience for your unique target audience.
You can use the data you gather to create a long-lasting relationship with them and get them to spend more. According to research from PWC, 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. What’s more, Segment found that 49% of buyers make impulse purchases after receiving a more personalized experience.
Improve your products and services
It’s no secret that the only way to survive in any highly competitive industry is to innovate constantly. But to avoid making changes in your products and services that will make no difference in your sales—or, worse yet, that will decrease your sales—you want to know what it’s that your customers want and need.
You can leverage your user feedback to nurture your product development process early on. You can use their pains, doubts, and fears to design a product and service that’s perfect for them. You won’t need to copy your competition or lower your prices; you will be the market leader thanks to your user feedback.
User feedback also allows you to move to a modern and innovative marketing methodology known as “growth marketing". Growth marketing is a data-driven methodology that uses lean testing methodologies to execute a marketing strategy.
For example, you can discover the podcasts that your target audience likes to listen to, so you promote your products in them. Consequently, you will spend less than you traditionally would and increase your conversion rates (and sales) simultaneously.
Optimize your user experience
Your website plays a big part in your customer experience. You want to present a website that’s easy to use, clear, and simple. You want your visitors to feel comfortable.
With the help of user feedback, you can develop a human-centered design methodology. That means, you create a website based on the people that use it. Designers build every element around your visitors’ needs and pains, so the entire user experience is flawless. By doing so, you can increase your conversion rates and, as you saw before, improve your customer experience.
How to Use User Feedback to Boost Your Growth
Gather user feedback with surveys and live chat
From the half a dozen mechanisms available to gather user feedback, surveys remain the most simple and effective to use. With the help of a survey software tool such as SurveyMonkey, Typeform, and Frill, you can add surveys in a few clicks. Here are things the best survey tools have in common.
Any of these tools offer pre-made survey formats, but they also let you create custom surveys that fit your exact needs.
Two popular survey types you can use on your site are:
• The Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSAT) helps you understand your customers’ level of satisfaction regarding your products and services.
• The Net Promoter Score (NPS) helps you measure the likelihood a customer will recommend your company to a friend.
Once you have created a survey, you can either add them to your website or through an email automation campaign. In both cases, you should pick your target audience carefully. For example, if you want to survey users with abandoned carts, you should show your survey only to these people, both on your web and email.
To get the best answers out of your visitors, use a feedback request template to help you understand and retain your customers.
Alternatively, you can gather user feedback with the help of a live chat tool. While live chat tools serve a different purpose than surveys—that is, to provide a positive customer experience—you can find the most common problems your customers have by reading through the conversations they have with your customer support representatives.
In a way, live chat tools work as an indirect survey mechanism—you can’t ask them specific questions like you can with a survey, but you can see their level of satisfaction they have with your brand. If all your live chat conversations are negative and end up with an unresolved problem, you can imagine your overall customer satisfaction score will be low.
You can implement both surveys and live chats simultaneously to start collecting user feedback data faster.
Analyze user feedback
After you have started using surveys and live chats on your site, grab all your data from every source and centralize it in a sheet. It’s critical to categorize your data according to the frequency and importance of the issues found and segment the answers around your different customer segments.
For example, you may see that your customer satisfaction score is higher among your oldest customers—e.g., those that have made their first purchase over a year ago—and lowest among your newest ones.
If the latter group is more numerous than the former, you may conclude that your customer satisfaction is low, when that’s not entirely true. It may be that your customers take some time to extract all the value from your products. To avoid such issues, segment your data accordingly.
You can use a text analysis tool to improve your data analysis and get better insights from your user feedback tools, especially your live chat transcriptions.
A text analysis tool will take all your data and carry out different levels of analysis such as:
- Topic extraction, which tags text based on its subjects and themes.
- Entity extraction, which identifies the important nouns (including addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses) in a piece of text.
- Keyword extraction, which highlights words based on the number of times they are mentioned.
- Sentiment analysis, which classifies text as positive, negative, or neutral.
- Emotion analysis, which identifies emotions based on the words used.
- Language detection, which deters the language type used in the text.
After you have gathered all your data, start looking for patterns. Pay special attention to those topics with high frequency, as they are most likely the most important. You also want to prioritize these topics that you consider more important for your business.
For example, you may see that only a few people complain about your payment processing options. Although seemingly small in size, this problem can lead to users leaving your tool due to lacking a payment option that best fits their needs. Therefore, the financial implications of this problem increase their importance, regardless of its volume.
Finally, define solutions based on the data analyzed previously. Talk to your team about the solutions you can implement to fix the problems found in your data.
Take action
The most crucial effect that user feedback has on your growth marketing efforts is to validate your ideas and hypothesis. Instead of shooting in the dark, user feedback will provide you with unique insights no one—not even your competitors—has about your target audience.
However, it’s essential to avoid getting too carried by user feedback. Remember the words of Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” That means, your user feedback shouldn’t be the reason you take your decisions; it should be their backup.
Following the growth marketing methodology, you want to run A/B tests where your variation tests a hypothesis developed from your user feedback. Your tests will validate whether your user feedback was right or not; if it’s not, then you either gather more data to find more information, or you discard it altogether.
Consider using an SOP software tool to make sure every member of your marketing team uses your user feedback when executing your marketing tactics.
If you need to take action on your user feedback, start using productivity apps such as Trello (for project management), Slack (for communication), and Toggle (for time management) to improve your efficiency and team collaboration.
Accelerate Your Business By Incorporating User Feedback
User feedback should become a common practice in your company. You need to be continually gathering this information, analyzing the data, and taking action. When you need to run more tests, you collect more data, and you keep the feedback loop running indefinitely. The more you do it, the better you will become at it and the better chance to create a loyal customer base. At the end of the day, user feedback will lead to higher-quality decisions that will carry a positive impact throughout your company. It’s time you get started!
Smart Tricks to Motivate Your Customers to Share Valuable Feedback
Best 3 Effective Customer Feedback Surveys
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