Customer feedback is a crucial aspect of any business, but unfortunately, it’s often overlooked. Companies can easily stray away from aligning the product features with customers’ needs and wants when companies don’t leverage customer feedback. As a result, the product or service introduced in a market will be a poor fit that will not solve customers’ issues. Therefore, it’s essential to include customer feedback in UX research.
So, without further ado, let’s find out the importance of customer feedback and how to get quality and honest feedback from customers.
What is customer feedback?
You must have heard this term various times, but most people are unaware of its actual meanings. Generally, feedback is about providing helpful information and criticism, and it leads to a certain action between two or more parties. When we talk about business feedback, it’s a process of getting customers’ opinions about a specific service, product, or even a company.
You can improve the user experience by improving your product or service by taking their feedback seriously. More importantly, this information can help you satisfy your client’s needs and wants more effectively. As a result, they’ll get loyal and attached to your company.
When you listen to your customers and make changes accordingly, it’s the best way to keep your brand or business moving forward.
Benefits of customer feedback in UX research
Customer feedback helps in many ways. For example, it doesn’t only help your business grow, but it also allows businesses to uncover different opportunities. Some of the benefits of customer feedback are given below:
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Chance to catch on various opportunities
When you don’t listen to customers, you miss lots of opportunities. It can be about retaining the customers or fixing their issues. More importantly, you can learn from these mistakes so that the problem doesn’t arise in future.
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Build customer loyalty
Do you know a single unhappy customer shares his disappointment with almost 20 people? So, try to make a positive experience and build customer loyalty. It’s possible only when you listen to their criticism and feedback.
It’s said that maintaining an old customer is much cheaper than earning a new one. Attracting a new customer is 5 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. In this way, you can reduce the churn rate.
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Get new customers
As mentioned earlier, an unhappy person shares his disappointment with 20 people. So, a happy customer also does the same. So, feedback can help you get new customers. Based on the feedback, you can take measures to make your customers happy.
When you have happy customers, they’ll refer new customers, and you’ll be able to build a positive brand reputation, and ultimately you can make more profits.
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Better data-driven decisions
The best way to measure your performance over time is to listen to your customers and check how satisfied they’re with your product or service. You can correlate this data with what you’re actually doing. It can help you make changes internally.
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Improving customer experience
When companies get customer feedback, it helps them improve customer experience, customer retention, and ROI. So, regardless of your business stage, improving the customer experience can help you get a significant increase in profit.
The only way to improve customer experience is to get feedback through surveys and interviews. You can follow the below-given tips to get valuable feedback.
- Avoid irrelevant and long questions
- Have some fun while asking questions
- Reward your customers for completing the survey
That is how you can improve your customer experience and take your business to the next level.
How does UX research work?
The best practice is to call your customers, and it can be 30 minutes to 1-hour long call. You can conduct an interview and get their feedback and opinion. Another practice is to send surveys to your target audience and ask them to fill them. It can be filled in a few minutes.
Moreover, we get insights into how customers use our products and what measures we can take to improve their experience with our products or services. These insights are also shared with product managers and stakeholders so that they can take timely action.
Combining UX research and customer feedback
Now you understand the importance of getting feedback, and how UX research works, the next most important question is how to get feedback. Well, there are various options for it. Some companies prefer to implement feedback options on a web page. So, anyone who wants to give feedback can do it through embedded implementations.
Unfortunately, everyone doesn’t want to share their feedback this way. So, we need to ask questions from people who interact with our products. There are some powerful tools like Google Analytics that let us know that customers are using our product or service and tell how they interact with it.
So, now you got the customer feedback, it’s time to combine UX research and customer feedback. We can improve our products and address our customer problems more personally using this data. More importantly, when we understand how our customers interact with our products, we can ask better questions and ask them at the right time.
That is how we can combine UX research and customer feedback and improve our services and products to maintain happy customers.
Can leveraging customer feedback help increase revenue?
Yes, it can, but many businesses struggle to keep their customers satisfied and loyal. But the good news is companies are taking measures and developing digital tools to keep their customers happy. The best way is customer experience management. It can help businesses to attract new customers and retain the existing ones.
Here we want to familiarize you with another term: Customer Experience Management (CEM). It’s a practice where you interact with customers and then try to meet their expectations. As a result, you can increase customer loyalty, satisfaction, and advocacy.
Let’s discuss different stages and tips and see how customer feedback can help increase revenue.
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Early stage products
During this stage, businesses try to find ways to get new customers. Moreover, they try various things to earn their loyalty so that they can retain them. Getting new customers is challenging for almost every business. For example, when users sign up for a new service and feel pressured, they’ll turn away and will never buy your product.
But customer experience management can make the signup process feel natural so that businesses don’t lose customers.
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Mature products
In this stage, businesses have customers, and they try to retain them. CEM can help create a positive experience so that businesses can exceed customer expectations. You can do it by UX research, asking questions through surveys and interviews.
UX research is crucial because it provides customers with a personalized experience, and business can understand their customers. Personalized experience can turn your customers into loyal ones.
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Growth stage products
When your products or services get old, the customer will start searching for other and latest options. So, CEM can help businesses find ways to improve their customer’s interaction. For example, you can build mobile apps to allow customers to engage with your brand. As a result, it will increase brand loyalty and advocacy.
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Introduce customer-first culture
The success or failure of a product depends on the customers. Therefore, it’s essential to build customer-first culture. For example, please provide up to date information, make customers feel that they’re buying in person, and make the buying process easier.
If you’re not sure how to make the process quick and smooth, take, for example, Amazon and how it works. Do you know why Amazon is the biggest seller? Because it provides an excellent customer experience.
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Personalized interactions are key to success
As the name indicates, ensure that you offer personalized interactions if you want to make your business successful. It can increase customer interest and help generate more revenue. Show relevant services and products to customers keep them engaged.
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Keep things simple
If you want to increase revenue, ensure that you keep things simple. No customer wants to have complicated interactions. If your website or mobile app is difficult to use, the customer will not spend much time there. They’ll leave it and move to the next option. Therefore, keep things simple so that it doesn’t take them lots of time to make a purchase.
Final words
In this article, we have discussed the importance of customer feedback and how it can help increase revenue. So, take customer feedback seriously and make changes in your product and service to retain happy and loyal customers. If you need any help regarding leveraging customer feedback as UX research, you can contact TryMyUI.