Customer feedback is gained by using methods such as interviews, questionnaires, or focus groups to ask targeted questions and give both existing and prospective customers the opportunity to tell you what it is about your product or approach that they like, and what they don’t like.
It also allows you to understand the standards and solutions that your customers expect. Learning how to properly use this information is often a key differential when it comes to increasing retention, growth, and revenue.
Why customer feedback is important
Customer feedback is highly important as it allows you to understand the people paying for your product or service, meaning you can alter your product/service and your sales techniques to optimise retention and satisfaction. Retained customers provide the basis of consistent revenue growth, as they are a reliable and consistent source of income for your business.
Listening to your customers allows you to understand their needs and expectations, as well as outlining the areas of your product, service, or approach that impressed them and potentially made them choose you over a competitor. Leveraging this information can help you to develop brand loyalty and awareness.
How can customer feedback be used by sales teams?
Sales teams can utilise customer feedback using a few key steps to drive retention and growth:
- Regularly collect customer feedback - Using surveys, focus groups, customer interviews and other feedback methods, companies can collect feedback from their target market. Feedback is much easier to gather if you incentivise feedback, and use multiple channels to do so.
- Analyze customer feedback - Use practices such as keyword extraction and sentiment analysis to spot themes in the feedback. Try to determine what you’re doing right, and where you can improve. This is easier to understand if you collect both qualitative and quantitative data.
- Act on customer feedback - With the data collected and trends spotted, act on customer feedback by incorporating it into your service design. Amend strategies, improve on customer support, and develop measurable goals for your team.
- Communicate with customers - Check your progress and the success of your new strategies. Also, inform your customers that you’re acting on their feedback, and you’re listening to their needs. This should increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. This process can be continued and repeated indefinitely, you can never make your customers too happy, and industries are always changing.
Mentor Group partners with Cognis Consulting to gain client insights. Using a service like this allows you to uncover hidden factors which influence buying decisions. This provides a serious competitive edge, as it allows us to see customers in a different light, which can be difficult to achieve directly from business to business, or even business to client.
Using customer feedback to increase retention
Using customer feedback is a major distinguishing feature in the most successful businesses. Almost every service or product provider which leads their industry, does so by repeatedly meeting customer needs. But how can customer feedback specifically be used for retention increase?
Customer retention is a cost-effective way to grow a business, as retained customers provide a baseline for revenue which adds security to your business model. If you focus primarily on using customer feedback to increase retention, brand reputation and loyalty both grow as a natural result. Whilst using feedback isn’t always simple, you can reduce it down to this: keep providing the bits your existing customers like, and improve on the bits they don’t.
It’s often a good idea to implement loyalty reward programs, regular communication, and personalised customer interactions to make existing customers feel properly valued, and increase retention. You should also try to simplify the feedback process for your customers, as this increases the likelihood of them engaging, and also eliminates the risk of them losing patience whilst doing so.
Using customer feedback to drive business through sales
The other side of using customer feedback effectively is through driving new business through sales. Once you’ve cracked customer retention, it’s time to start expanding, gaining more loyal customers.
The best way to do this is by analysing the data you’ve collected to determine what brought customers to your business in the first place. Work out where customers are coming from, what they prioritise in your industry, and what will always turn them away from a service or solution provider. This ties into market research, in the way of understanding what your intended customer needs, and how they need it.
Then, use these findings to implement changes in your sales approach. Use world class sales training to teach your sales representatives what elements of your service they need to be pushing the most, and what to focus on when persuading customers to buy. Some seemingly smaller element of your service or solution might actually be what many customers have been looking for, but not finding, elsewhere.
Finding these points could be the difference between stagnation and serious revenue growth.
If you’re interested in learning more about leveraging customer feedback and increasing retention, get in touch with us.
