Responding to feedback from your customers has never been more important.
Today’s customers have no shortage of options for interacting with brands. They can connect on social media, read content on a blog, and even leave reviews on third-party sites.
But how can businesses put this feedback to work? Keep reading to learn what your business needs to know about using user feedback to improve and grow your business.
Gather and Encourage Feedback
Before you can begin using user feedback to improve and grow your business, you first have to encourage and gather that feedback. Depending on your business and the demographics of your target customer, where you choose to get this feedback can vary.
For service-based businesses, reviews are a great way to gather feedback from customers. But different customers will prefer to leave reviews in different places. For instance, Facebook is the most popular social media platform for both men and women between the ages of 35 and 44. This means that customers that fall within this age group may be more likely to leave a review on Facebook than they would be to interact with a business on Instagram or Twitter.
Google is the top site for leaving reviews. With customers most likely to leave a review after an excellent experience, it helps to remind customers of where they can leave reviews. Include a message asking for a review on your website, your online store checkout page, and in any emails that go out to customers after a purchase to remind them of popular places they can leave reviews, like Google, Facebook, or Yelp.
Show Your Customers You’re Listening
Simply curating those reviews isn’t enough; in most cases, your customers expect you to respond to their reviews, too. More than 50 percent of customers expect customers to respond to negative reviews within just a week. As many as one in every three customers expect companies to respond in 3 days or less.
Responding to negative reviews can help to de-escalate a bad experience. And responding to good reviews shows your customers that you appreciate their feedback.
Don’t just respond to reviews either. You can also show customers that you’re listening by taking their feedback and putting it to work. Are many customers leaving reviews asking for a specific product or changes to a product? Let them know you’re listening by making adjustments to your product offerings and by letting them know you’re doing so on social media or elsewhere.
Curate Your Content in Response to Feedback
Another great way to show customers that you’re listening is by curating content on your website or blog that reflects your customer’s feedback.
If you’re struggling to keep up with this feedback, you can invest in user feedback tools to curate any common responses that customers have. Another option is to send out a user feedback survey to customers. If your business struggles to get reviews or finds that reviews don’t include usable feedback, this is a great alternative.
You can include targeted user feedback questions that allow you to get specific ideas for what customers want.
Another great tool is social media listening. This strategy helps you to identify trends in your social media interactions. You can use these trends to better respond to your customers as a whole.
In this article, you can learn more about how to implement social media listening.
Putting User Feedback to Work
Putting user feedback to work starts with curating reviews and common social media trends. Then, take what you’ve learned and put it to work to better provide your customers with what they really want.
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