The importance of Customer Insights

Customers are the heart of every business. When your products and services provide convenience and ease to your customers, that’s when you should know your business will thrive. 

But how to provide that convenience and ease? Well, insights and feedback coming directly from your customers will give you a better realisation of how well you’re doing already and what more you could do to exceed customer satisfaction.

Customer insights and feedback not only give you market intelligence but also provide you with recommended actions that help you make effective decisions. Well, everybody needs some sort of information to base their decisions on. Right?

Here, in this blog, we’ll be talking about the different kinds of feedback, the sources you can collect it from, and the automated customer feedback tools that you can use to share your workload and maximise efficiency. 

Why is Collecting Feedback so Important?

Insights are everywhere. It’s up to your intelligence where you pick these insights from and what you do with them. 

Your ultimate goal is to satisfy customers – so that they keep on doing business with you. What would be better than getting your customers to speak about what’s working for them and what’s not?

Now, first of all, feedback helps you feel confident that you’re making the right decisions. You’ll know for sure that you’re not wasting resources and that whatever new changes you are about to bring, will work for sure. 

Secondly, you’d make higher revenues. Since you will be acting on customer feedback, your customers will feel valued and they will reciprocate by associating their loyalty towards you; they are sure that you listen to them and they’re not going to turn their backs on you. This means higher customer retention and consequently, lower acquisition costs.

Last but not least – you’d be lost behind in the battle of competition if you don’t follow up with your customers regularly. The feedback itself is a way to communicate with customers and keeping them engaged. Your customers won’t be searching for your competitors if they’re satisfied with you and busy interacting with you!

In a nutshell, taking customer feedback allows you to gather valuable insights coming from the segment that you wish to satisfy. It’s the best way to prioritise decisions, engage customers, and make them loyal with you in the longer run. 

5 Ways to get Customer Feedback 

As established earlier, there are a variety of sources that you can use to gather customer feedback from. Each one of these has its special utility. If used in the correct way and in the correct combination, you’d be benefitting more than you would ever anticipate. 

1. Survey 

Survey is by far the most easy and straightforward way to get your customers to tell what you’ve been meaning to ask. Survey results are easy to analyse and they can be embedded in your website, mobile application and also in-stores! The best part about surveys is that they can be made available to a wide range of audience at very low additional costs.

However, collecting survey responses is not as easy as it sounds. They have relatively higher chances of abandonment. Just think about it! Wouldn’t you feel drained-out by the thought of filling out a form when you clearly don’t want to waste a minute worth of your time?

It’s definitely an art to structure a survey and present it out to the customers to gain maximum responses. Our top tips and best practices for successfully designing surveys have been compiled here. Give it a thorough read to get maximum responses on your first survey! 

If you’re in a hurry or in no mood to get redirected, here’s a brief summary of points just to make sure you don’t miss out on important things:

2. Direct Follow-up

Just surveying isn’t enough. Surveys and feedback forms may help you get better analysis of what your customers think and want but they won’t help you predict the next steps. For better forecasting and decision-making, you need to have deeper insights into what’s causing your customers to think in a certain way. 

Follow-up calls open conversations. You can start by asking general questions and the responses will help you specify your approach and dig into topics that matter the most to them. This way, you’ll not only know when customer needs are changing but you’ll also know what to do in order to cater to those changing needs. 

Apart from follow-up calls, you can email your customers inquiring about a recent purchase. Many times, there are small annoyances that customers won’t tell you but that would cause them to silently churn away. Emailing your customers will give them an opportunity to open-up with you and express their concerns at their own pace. While emailing back, customers can take as much time as they want to draft a well-thought of response.

In a nutshell, making regular follow-up calls and emails will open up new potential for your business as you can tap on some unspoken feature requests, updates and bug resolutions. This will cause your existing customers to stick with you for longer and also in creating convenience for new customers.  

3. Customer Satisfaction Metrics 

This one’s my favourite! Customer satisfaction metrics are just one-question surveys intended to be asked at each of the specific touchpoints in the customer journey. Surveys and follow-ups could be general and might not help in analysing customer behavior or satisfaction level in crucial areas of interaction. These surveys can be embedded into the customer journey via any source physical as well as virtual. It literally takes a few seconds to rate and the responses are highly beneficial in improving CX! Let’s get into detail.

The Customer Effort Score (CES) is a customer satisfaction metric designed to evaluate the level of effort your customers have to put in while interacting with you at a specific touchpoint. It will get you a note of problematic areas right on-the-go. This should alert the customer support team to facilitate the customer right there and then! Apart from actual scoring, the feedback collected at the moment and acting on it can prove helpful in turning a frustrated customer into a satisfied brand advocate. 

The Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) feedback records customer satisfaction across the touchpoints. For example, you might remember how Skype asked you to rate your experience the last time you called someone? 

Well, CSAT is a very important metric to calculate in today’s business landscape because customer satisfaction, repeat purchasing, and revenues are highly related to one another. It not only monitors the satisfaction level of each customer but greatly helps you in forecasting consumer behavior and revenue returns by tracking the changes. For a more in-depth reading of CSAT, refer here.

The next and the best metric that gives a clear picture of CX is the Net Promoter Score. It asks customers to rate their intention of recommending your business to others. The score you get predicts the number of active referrals you’ll be getting and an estimated profit that you’ll be making.

All in all, we’re after sustainable business growth! The actionable feedback which NPS provides is precisely what sets us up to achieve this. Promoters are the driving force. Here’s why:

4. Data Analysis

Not all feedbacks are intended to monitor customer satisfaction. Some are intended in knowing buying behavior and purchase frequency. A thriving business is definitely about providing exceptional customer experiences but with that, you need to bring innovation and devise better marketing strategies to have a leg up from the competition.

Consumer insights collected from on-site behavior, browsing history, email requests, and engagements can prove highly practical in personalising CX and making more profits. Data and analytics have completely transformed the way businesses work. Now it’s your turn to make it work in your favour!

Looking for the right tools to get consumer insights? We’ve made your work easier…

5. Social Media

The Millennial generation is obsessed with sharing their life in public. They’ll post anything that they’ll feel like sharing and this includes their experiences with brands. I don’t intend to make you conscious but chances are almost 50% of your customers have already talked about you in the online world. This may include reviews, recommendations, or simply a narrative of a recent experience they had with you.

Social media is the new trend and if you want to hear out your customers, you better pay attention to what they say about you online. They might post a status on Facebook, tweet, or share an image on Instagram! A good way of knowing their sentiment is by engaging them online, running an audience poll, or conducting a giveaway contest.

See, how many customers gave unsolicited feedback on Adidas’s tweet regarding collaboration with Allbirds.

What to do with Customer Feedback?

Okay, so now you have all sorts of customer feedback. What next?

You need to “close the loop” by implementing feedback. The right way to do that is to consider a 360 CX that enables you to build deeper and more authentic relationships with consumers.

How does one implement the 360 CX?

The 360 CX suggests to gather, segment and respond to feedback customer-centrically.

The basic three steps to implement the 360 CX loop is explained briefly below.

Step 1: Gather

Isn’t it obvious? Gathering the responses is the first and the foundational step that we all need to take. Gathering the feedback depends how you’re collecting the feedback and which sources you are using. We can move on to the next steps once the responses are gathered.

Step 2: Segment

Most companies gather the feedback and just keep it for their own reference – or even worse: don’t refer to it at all. Now, in order to complete the 360 feedback loop, segmenting is a very important transitional phase that helps you provide the right kind of support to the customers at the right time.

Segmenting means to categorise and prioritise feedback based on the issue raised. Then, connecting a service rep to deal with the issue to ensure customer satisfaction.

Step 3: Respond

Once you got your feedback responses segmented, it’s time to take action! Responding in a timely manner and taking the right steps will ensure your success. Responses are meant to trigger insightful actions to drive customer loyalty and retention.

Now, if you want to implement the 360 CX while maximising its outcome, you’ll need automated customer feedback tools to ease the process and to yield the desired results faster!

Importance of Automated Customer Feedback Tools

Okay, so we’re in the twenty-first century, witnessing technology and automation at its zenith, and still, I’m having to explain why we need an automated customer feedback tool! Manual work has gone obsolete. Time is money and our generation values time over everything else. Nobody has the time or patience to gather, segment, and respond to each query manually!

I’m sure we’re all in the same boat for not fancying those old-school survey forms that took an hour to convince the other person to fill, and another hour to decipher the doodled responses.

With an automated customer feedback tool, the process of implementing the 360 CX becomes 100x easier and efficient. You can’t have somebody sending out feedback requests manually 24/7. Customer feedback tools have in-built integrations that when embedded into your systems, trigger surveys to go out after specific meaningful interactions. Some feedback tools also have an option to remind and schedule surveys according to the customer’s schedule. This translates into higher response-rates and more chances to satisfy customers.

Automation helps you segment the responses in no time! The clever algorithms are all set to understand whether customers were thrilled or disappointed with their experience and more importantly they have the potential to identify which areas of your business they are referring to. This means that when your customer is contacted by your team, they are contacted by somebody who knows their case and is able to act right away to solve the issue.

Software and algorithms are great for understanding issues and areas for improvement, but nothing beats human-to-human interaction once it’s time to recover a buyer who is about to churn. That’s why algorithms use intelligent routing to connect your respondents to your recovery team – so your team can focus 100% on service recovery.

With intelligent routing, feedback tool algorithms make sure happy buyers are directed to become brand ambassadors. At the moment when they have specifically expressed a positive interaction with your brand, (CSAT & NPS) the system will go ahead and nudge them towards sharing your brand with their local networks on social and other review sites.

How to Evaluate Customer Feedback Tools?

The best customer feedback tool should be the one that allows for 360 CX implementation seamlessly. The feedback interface should be cool, with clear back-end interpretation and the admin should be user-friendly. Of course, this should come with a great customer service team that would happily cater to your queries and concerns 24/7.

First things first, the customer feedback tool should provide you great value for your money. It should provide data security. Along with that, it should allow you to make personalisations based on … uh wait, isn’t this a bit too much of information to remember? Don’t worry, we have formulated a free checklist that you can download and save. Get it here.

Why is GroHawk special?

GroHawk is not just a customer feedback tool. It’s a one-stop solution to engage customers and to drive active referrals. Our automated feedback system enables you to hear exactly what your clients are saying about you in realtime and act accordingly. GroHawk’s smart algorithm not only measures customer experience but also segments users into relevant categories – allowing companies to service recovery, retain existing clients as well as create raving brand ambassadors.

Our systems are integrated with popular social media platforms to ensure users can spread the word of their favourite businesses to their local networks as well as leave reviews on popular review sites such as Google and Facebook.

Here are some key benefits of choosing GroHawk:

Ultimately, GroHawk allows you to ensure you are meeting the expectations of each of your clients. Once you have done so, we leverage this engaged relationship to drive loyalty, repeat purchase, and active new referrals.