7 Reasons Why Product Feedback is Important
February 18, 2022 - 13 minutes read - Contributed Posts, Modern Marketing, Product ReviewsSo you created a product that is useful to people, one of high quality and with great value. Or, you have a great idea for a product and are hoping to turn it into success.
If any of these apply to your situation, we need to turn your focus toward the most important thing – your customers.
The customers are the things that make or break your brand. Ideally, we all strive to get high user retention, attract more leads, and keep the churn rate to the minimum. Still, the path there is long and demanding. You need to do plenty of things to market your brand and products and convince people that you are worth their while.
One amazing way to achieve this is through customer feedback.
Is customer feedback important?
Yes. Customer feedback is one of the most important things for your brand.
Thanks to the Internet, people today have access to real information sourced from the actual experiences of others. They no longer need to purchase blindly to learn if a product or a company is good – and they are definitely not doing this anymore.
Nine out of 10 customers will read reviews before they make a purchase from a brand they aren’t familiar with. This means that the number of leads you’ll turn into customers depends greatly, if not mostly, on the feedback people read about your brand.
Many businesses hope that their hard effort to create quality products and services, their lengthy and tiring marketing efforts to promote them, and the great customer service is enough to convince people to leave some testimonials.
In most cases, this is not enough.
Reasons why you need customer feedback
You can never get enough feedback from customers. If you have negative feedback, on the other hand, you need to work extra hard to eliminate it from people’s decision-making. Studies show that it takes 40 positive reviews to undo the damage of 1negative review.
This means that one of your jobs as a marketer of a product or service is to prompt and engage people to leave positive testimonials and create feedback. In this article, you’ll learn why this is vital to your success.
1. Product feedback helps you validate your ideas
One of the best tools you can use today to collect and test user data is Maze. Marketers use this tool at every stage of the process to gain a better understanding of their customers and their behaviors.
According to Maze’s insightful guide on product feedback, the first of the 3 key benefits it offers is validating your new ideas. This source points out how amazing user testing and feedback can be in terms of telling you if your product will be a success, showing you how people will respond, and guiding you on creating and marketing it.
Instead of guessing what people want and how they’ll respond to your idea, you can gather their feedback and make an informed decision. This can save you a fortune along the way since you can tweak the product to meet people’s needs from the start.
It so often happens that we create products and services that aren’t a good fit for our target audience. They don’t like the design, the product is somehow flawed, or they need something more from it.
When a customer uses such a product, they’ll see the flaws and start looking elsewhere for a solution. You’ll lose leads and might even get bad feedback, all because you didn’t perform the research needed and acted on their feedback in time.
Thanks to user testing, you can test an idea before you put all your money, effort, as well as trust into it. You can test a prototype on your target audience and make sure that people will be happy with your offer as soon as it’s ready to go on the market.
There are plenty of ways to check and evaluate feedback. You can do it based on feature ideas. Maze will help you track all feature requests internally, assess the popularity of your features, and help you decide if you should include different features in your product build cycle.
2. It can improve your relationship with customers
Customers love companies that value their input. This shows them that the brand cares about their satisfaction and not only about making sales. By asking them for some feedback, you’re showing them that their opinion matters.
The same applies to taking action on the feedback you receive.
Did you know that only 1 in 26 customers will bring up a complaint? This means that 25 of them simply take their business elsewhere instead of bothering to share their feedback.
This won’t happen if your brand shows people that their opinion is important.
According to Hubspot, 42% of companies don’t take any action based on the feedback they receive. It’s only natural that people won’t bother to leave feedback or send in a complaint – those brands won’t take any action to repair the situation.
However, if you establish yourself as a brand that values the opinion of customers, you can improve your relationship with them. This way, you will convince them to give you a second chance even if the first attempt failed them somehow.
3. Feedback boosts your credibility and spreads the word around
Marketing today relies heavily on the experiences that people have with the brand and its products. People don’t just purchase Nike shoes because they are of good quality. That’s just one of the reasons. They also buy it to demonstrate their affiliation to a group that uses quality shoes.
When people are happy with a brand, they spread the word around. They create a community with others who’ve used the brand and people who will use it based on word-of-mouth. If we apply the famous Pareto principle to this, described in Trustmary’s guide on customer feedback, “80% of the buyers you get for your brand are from 20% of your online feedback”.
This surely makes for a big number of leads and shows that people trust others when they are making important decisions.
The more people talk about your brand, the more others want to try it out. Feedback encourages feedback.
4. You can use it to measure and improve customer satisfaction
If you stop to analyze the testimonials that people left for your company, this will help you understand a very important thing – how satisfied they are with what you’ve done. You can then use this insightful data as input to improve and boost your customer service.
Feedback will help you detect issues you didn’t anticipate or knew you had. If you encourage people to tell you how their experience went bad – or good, you’ll know what to keep and what to change. This is very important for customer satisfaction.
5. Positive feedback can seriously improve your rankings
Reviews are the most important ranking factor in local searches. When people search for something, engines provide them with their options based on how they rank it. If you have tons of feedback and if it’s mostly good, you’ll get higher rankings in the local pack of engines like Google.
According to SEJ, reviews are the most important factor for Google’s ranking today.
6. Customer feedback can boost your retention numbers
It’s very simple – customers will stay with you if they are satisfied. Those that aren’t will look for an alternative and leave. If you’ve done your job well and encouraged them to provide some feedback, this can tell you why they left or are considering leaving.
This is why we regularly ask for feedback – to keep a finger on the pulse. When an unhappy customer shares their disappointment, we can do two things – fix the thing for them and fix it for other customers. Even if the client is gone forever, we avoid losing others because of the same issue.
7. It’s amazing because they do your marketing for you!
Encouraging people to create feedback for you can cost some money. Many brands today use tools to generate, as well as get reports on feedback. Still, the greatest thing about customer feedback is that it is marketing for you – and someone else is doing it!
When customers are leaving testimonials, they are adding greatly to your marketing campaign. In a nutshell, these are micro-campaigns that promote your business, and a lot of the time, you don’t even see them coming.
Final thoughts
Customers these days don’t trust ads and promises blindly. They don’t decide: “I’ll buy this because the website says it’s great”. The reality is, most brands will say that their offers are the best out there to make sales – and people know this. This is why the majority look for real information from people who’ve used the product or service. That’s how important testimonials are.
Whether you choose to incorporate a review system, send out emails to encourage people to leave testimonials, or hire someone to help you, it’s up to you. The important thing is to take action, do research, and use feedback to improve your brand and its success.
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Tags: brand, customer feedback, customer satisfaction, feedback, Marketing, product feedback, rankings, retention numbers, reviews, user testing
