5 Reasons Why Customer Feedback Can Help Your Business

When it comes to making changes to your business, including your website, products, or procedures, ATI encourages you to not make assumptions or speculations about what needs to change. If you've noticed a problem with one of the topics discussed above, it’s so important to do some market research in order to determine exactly where the issue arose, and find out what you can do to fix it. This all begins with customer feedback, which can be in the form of an email, phone call, survey, website feedback boxes, social media, and so many other options.

It’s been proven that when a business actively listens to the wants and needs of their consumers, they’re drastically improving customer satisfaction and the customer experience, which ultimately leads to customer retention. It proves to customers that the organization truly values their opinion and is more than willing to compromise to better meet the needs of the consumer. It truly is a win-win situation. Feedback allows the organization to receive firsthand information about what the customer liked, loved, or even hated, thus giving the company an opportunity to take that information and turn it into action.

We’re certain that most businesses that find themselves in a seller’s market understand how important it is to attempt to reach new markets and explore new opportunities in order to continue gaining new customers. However, taking a short bit of time to extract the good, the bad, and the ugly from existing customers is the key to capturing new markets organically. If you’re not making an effort to reach out to current customers to obtain valuable feedback, you’re missing out on so many opportunities to exponentially improve your offerings. In this blog we will discuss 5 reasons why customer feedback can help your business succeed.

Gather Information Directly from The Source

Customer feedback gives businesses an opportunity to understand their clientele better and begin developing a lasting, mutually beneficial relationship for both the client and the representative. After making a big sale, do you think it’s appropriate to celebrate? Yes absolutely, but it’s also important to take a moment to reach out to the customer who made that sale happen to begin with. A simple phone call to ensure an optimal customer experience occurred, including everything arrived exactly as promised, displays respect for the customer and promotes the company’s professionalism.

During this call, if anything had gone wrong throughout the buying process whatsoever, this is your chance to hear about the problem directly from the source and rectify that issue right then and there. Wouldn’t you say that’s better than hearing about it months later when your customer has jumped ship to the nearest competition, or has left a bad review about your company for future customers to see? Taking initiative to reach out to customers is a simple gesture that can leave a lasting impression that improves the overall customer experience for the client while simultaneously giving the representative valuable feedback to consider for future business endeavors.

Allows You to Measure Satisfaction Ratings

Is your business doing everything in its power to ensure that customers are left satisfied after the buying process? Contacting customers post-purchase not only allows you to learn about areas that need improvement, but it can also provide positive information about particular sections in your organization that are exceeding expectations. Therefore, measuring customer satisfaction ratings can also help your business determine where you should be directing more of your resources to. One of ATI’s favorite ways to gain this kind of insight is to ask customers to fill out a post-purchase survey or a Google review on their experience.

The sad truth is that buyers are more likely to leave negative feedback after a poor experience rather than if they’ve had a very pleasant experience overall. Therefore, it’s so important that you are actively reaching out to consumers to ensure they’ve had an exemplary experience with your company.

Improve Performance

Ensuring optimal performance inside the operations of a company is as almost as important as making the customer happy, if not equal to. If there are any an issue in the operations that you're not aware of, this could potentially be the root of the problem which resulted in an unhappy customer. Some examples to look out for include: a defective product in your inventory that was shipped, or a shipment with insufficient packing material, an irritating webpage that won’t load, or maybe there was a confrontation between an employee and a customer.

The likelihood of these occurrences could be more frequent than known if left unaddressed. Customer feedback is an easy way to give light to these scenarios and gives businesses the opportunity to take a stand and get in front of these issues immediately. It allows you to resolve issues like these while  also increasing employee morale and performance in the workplace resulting in fewer reoccurring incidents in the future.

Adapt To What the Customer Is Expecting

Business owners should be adjusting their strategies, products, and services to continue to adapt to offer the consumer what they’re expecting in today’s day and age. Markets are constantly changing, and feedback allows you, the business owner, to make a plausible adjustment to please a large audience. Let’s look at an example, today’s consumer has adjusted dramatically and expects online shopping to be practically instantaneous and as easy as possible thanks to our smart phones, tablets, and sellers like Amazon. If a consumer explains that they can’t find an item on your web page, that’s a serious problem that you could have sorted out fairly easily. This quick fix could have retained not just that single customer, but thousands that came before them, along with those that have yet to come.

Business is ever-changing, which is why ATI believes it’s so important that we speak to our customers frequently to offer them the best service that we possibly can. We’re truly interested in their opinion, and we go out of our way to make the customer experience as painless and as simple as possible. ATI exists to serve you, and to provide great opportunities for our employees, customers, and vendors, and if we’re doing anything less than that, we wouldn’t be satisfied.

Prove To Your Customers That You Care

Feedback is one of the most effective ways to ensure that you’re offering customers what they need and what they expect. Great feedback allows you to find solutions to existing problems which ultimately proves to customers that you truly care about their opinion and would do whatever it takes to ensure their satisfaction. Communicating this to your customers also allows you to convey credibility and trustworthiness when consumers think about your brand. A brand that goes the extra mile to show their customers that they care are the ones that grow exponentially in the years to come.

Keep at it and stay strong and the results will come, slowly but surely. When it comes to optimizing your business to better assist your customers, you should see the process as a marathon not a sprint and remember that there’s always room for improvement no matter how well the business is performing. If you’re a customer of ATI, and have had a positive experience with us, we ask that you please take a short moment to click the link below and leave us a Google Review so we can continue to offer our customers the best customer experience possible when working with ATI.