Why Customer Feedback is Important for Brands of All Sizes

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As modern consumers, we all have gotten the emails, automated calls and texts asking us to rate a customer service experience. And while sometimes we ignore them, many shoppers do take them seriously, especially if they’ve received particularly poor or excellent customer service.

On the other side of the table, customer service teams might underestimate the importance of customer feedback. It’s understandable: amongst the many responsibilities service teams have to handle, asking customers for feedback – especially when your team already interacts with customers all day long – may seem unnecessary, or like just one more thing to take care of.

However, the benefits of customer feedback, and of asking for it regularly, are obvious. Your effort in gathering feedback shows existing and new customers that you care, and that you are dedicated to creating an environment of constant improvement.

Why is Customer Feedback Important?

Receiving customer feedback allows you to assess a customer’s experience directly from the actual customer, removing brand-side bias. Also, insights from feedback can be utilized for future growth, like product additions or improvements, changes to communication strategy, and community-building ideas.

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Benefits of Customer Feedback

• Gain insight into customer experience.

  This can cover many aspects of the customer journey, such as wait time, efficiency of navigating your website, or the ease at which a customer was able to understand and communicate with your customer service team.

• Uncover strengths and weaknesses.

  Whether you’re looking to invigorate your training regimen, or work on branding, it’s hard to know where to allocate resources if you don’t know where the improvements are necessary. Knowing where you’re successful and where you’re falling short will save you time and money in the long-run.

• Tackle product or technical problems more efficiently.

  Rather than spending hours coming up with ideas for testing, new product innovations or potential issues in the user journey, you’ll get real-time direction on where to spend your resource hours, which is especially valuable for lean or quickly-scaling brands.

• Boost customer happiness (and earnings).

  Happy customers tend to be loyal, and in an increasingly competitive market, loyalty is the new acquisition. Providing surveys allows customers to feel heard, understood, and to build trust with your brand. Even better–loyal customers can turn into brand advocates, creating net-new customers via word of mouth referrals without you spending an extra penny on marketing campaigns.

From Personal Interactions to Company-Wide Impact

The frontline nature of customer service positions it as a goldmine for feedback, holding a wealth of insights that can not only enhance customer experiences, but also steer the direction of marketing, product, design, and more.

Due to their constant exposure to one-on-one interactions, support teams wield a trove of critical data for the product and marketing teams. These teams can harness the data obtained from customer interactions to gain a profound understanding of customer needs, desires, and pain points. By acting on customer feedback data, brands can create a pipeline fed by one-on-one engagements that can output organizational-level change.

Scaling CX Efforts with Customer Feedback

As businesses seek to transition from personalized customer interactions to a broader impact, they often grapple with the challenge of scaling customer experience efforts. One effective way to bridge this gap is by transforming the intricacies of individual conversations into resources that resonate with the masses.

It’s not merely about communicating with multiple customers at once; rather, it’s about translating the granular insights gathered from personal interactions into solutions that cater to a larger audience. Consider the following methods to take customer feedback themes or content and scale it across your business.

Examples of scaling CX from customer feedback:

Empowering Product Teams with Customer Feedback

Unleashing the potential of customer feedback requires a strategic approach, particularly when it comes to translating insights into tangible actions. And the transition from feedback collection to actionable improvements is where the role of customer service really shines.

Suggestions, grievances, and original ideas presented during customer interactions hold immense value, often serving as a compass to direct product enhancements. Brands that use an agile integration of this feedback loop ensure that customer-driven innovations are swiftly incorporated into product development cycles. This alignment between customer service and product teams can significantly enhance a company’s ability to deliver solutions that align with its customers’ needs.

Does your CX tooling support customer feedback?

Gladly appreciates the value of customer feedback. In fact, each year, Gladly reaches out to customers to learn about what they want out of a company, and out of a customer service team.

In Gladly’s most recent Customer Expectations report, it was reported that 72% of shoppers are willing to spend more with a brand that provides a great customer experience, while 42% said they would stop buying from a brand altogether 
after just two bad customer service experiences.

Creating a Cycle of Customer Feedback & Improvement

Brands that neglect to act on (or even to collect customer feedback) are setting themselves up for avoidable mistakes. Customers, especially when shopping online, value person-centered customer service — and they’re willing to give invaluable direction to brands that will help get them there.

Additionally, a person-centered customer service strategy (rather than the traditional method that priorities tickets or cases,) is the best way to drive loyalty–and revenue–long term. You can learn more about how Gladly has designed its platform to help people—not tickets or cases— and keep customers at the center of every interaction with customer service.

About Gladly

Gladly is a customer service platform for digitally-focused B2C companies who want to maximize the lifetime value of their customers. Unlike the legacy approach to customer service software, which is designed around a ticket or case to enable workflows, Gladly enables radically personal customer service centered around people to sustain customer loyalty and drive more revenue.

The world’s most innovative consumer companies like Godiva, JOANN, and TUMI use Gladly to create lasting customer relationships, not one-off experiences.