How customer feedback helps your company grow

In this blog post, I zoom in on customer feedback to provide you insights into:

• Why customer feedback is essential to your company’s growth
• Which 3 methods can you use to collect feedback from your customers (+ their pros and cons)
• Which trends you should keep an eye on
  
  

You also get TimeLog’s Chief Revenue Officer, Sascha Skydsgaard's 3 best tips on working with customer feedback.

With all this inspiration, you’re ready to accelerate how your company works with customer feedback.

If you don’t receive feedback from your customers, it’s difficult to know what makes them happy (or unhappy). Without this knowledge, creating customer loyalty and retaining customers is difficult, two of the most significant growth factors, according to Zendesk and HubSpot.

3 reasons why customer feedback is important

1. Customer feedback saves you from churn

A survey from the Rockefeller Institute shows that the primary reason why customers determine to leave your company is that they think you don’t care about them. Here, customer feedback comes to your rescue.

When you ask your customers for feedback, you involve them in your product and show them that you value their opinion.

2. Customer loyalty provides new customers

The more loyal your customers are towards your product, the higher the likelihood that they will recommend it to family and friends.

Think about it. How many times have you selected a hairdresser, restaurant, movie in the cinema, you name it, based on a recommendation?

3. Recommendations are your no. 1 lead generation channel

It’s concluded in this article from HubSpot, but let’s look at some numbers.

A survey from Heinz Marketing documents that companies with referral programs get about 40% of their leads from recommendations. In addition, companies report that these leads have a higher closing rate than those from other channels than referral programs.

Use customer surveys to increase the customers’ investment in your product

According to an article from Harvard Business Review, customer surveys increase the customers’ investment in your product. This was proved in an experiment at an American company where more than 2,000 customers had signed up for a customer relationship program.

A group of 945 random customers participated in a phone survey about their satisfaction, while a group of 1,064 random customers didn’t participate in a customer survey. The company followed the buying behaviour, termination rate and profitability for the two groups for a year.

The results showed that the customers who participated in the customer survey were three times as likely to open a new account, terminated half as many times and were more profitable than the customers who didn’t participate in the customer survey.

You can use many different methods to collect user feedback. Here, you get a short introduction to the three methods we use in TimeLog and a graphical overview of each method’s pros and cons.

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

You can use NPS to get an overall picture of your customers' loyalty to your product. NPS builds on the question:

On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?

The answers to the question are divided into these categories:

• Promoters: Customers who answer 9-10
• Passives: Customers who answer 7-8
• Detractors: Customers who answer 0-6

Do you consider using NPS to collect customer feedback? Here you get a quick overview of the method’s pros and cons.

2. Customer Satisfaction Score

How satisfied are you with our service?

This question is a classic example of a Customer Satisfaction Score. Many companies use These simple questions to gain insights into customers' satisfaction with what they offer. Customer Satisfaction Score is often used at the end of a live chat with a support team.

Here are the pros and cons of the Customer Satisfaction score method.

3. In-app surveys

With in-app user surveys, you offer your customers the option to give feedback on your product while they use it. It makes the survey contextual and relevant to the customers.

You can see the pros and cons of the method below.

3 trends within customer feedback you need to know

Would you also like to get better at working with customer feedback? Here, you get three trends you can’t afford to miss!

1. Speech Analytics: Covers software that collects customers’ feedback via sound and helps you analyse data. The benefits are that you can quickly understand and reach to your customers’ needs, and the customers’ feedback is very personal.

2. Personal follow-up: Your customers are more likely to provide feedback if they feel you listen to them and that you improve their requests. Therefore, it’s a good idea to follow up on the customers’ requests individually when they have taken their time to provide feedback.

3. Filtered feedback: If your system allows it, it’s a good idea to filter your customer feedback into categories like company size, industry or region/country. It provides you with an overview of your customers’ challenges, how they differ, and which solutions specific customers need.

Our Chief Revenu Officer’s 3 best tips on customer feedback

With her +10 years of experience with Customer Service, Sascha is an experienced player in customer feedback. I’ve boiled her experience down to three specific tips you need when using customer feedback.

1. Start with the low-hanging fruits

You don’t need to start a complete customer satisfaction survey to receive customer feedback.

A good point of departure to get quick insights is to find a way to look at the indications you get through the daily contact with the customers. E.g. in your support tickets, when you talk to the customer on the phone or when the consultants visit the customers.

These indicators are as valuable data as a big customer satisfaction survey and, therefore, an excellent place to start.

2. Be proactive, not reactive

When you have a complete overview of the methods and systems you use to collect customer feedback, you need to think about how to proactively work with the feedback.

A specific example is to make a service call to your customers. With a structured array of questions, you can gain valuable insights into short- and long-term use in your upsales and retention efforts.

3. Preparation is half the work

This is how an old saying goes. And this is also true when it comes to customer feedback.

When you select the method you’d like to use to collect customer feedback, the most important thing is your own preparation.

Make sure to make thorough considerations about the purpose of collecting the user feedback, how you want to work with it and at which level you want to do reporting and pull insights, both on operational and strategic levels.

If the work with customer feedback should create value, it demands a continuous focus and a robust reporting basis. So keep an eye on which insights you wish to build your activities on today, tomorrow and in two years.

And with these final wise words from our Chief Revenue Officer, Sascha, you’re ready to turn customer feedback into your new growth motor. Have fun!