Reasons to get feedback from customers

Catherine Constantinides

14 years ago

What is your organization doing to get feedback from your customers?

If you are still collecting feedback the traditional way (through surveys, focus groups, questionnaires) you may be missing opportunities to truly engage with your customers and create long-lasting productive relationships.

Customers expect organizations will not only listen to their suggestions and concerns, but that action will be taken on that feedback. Unfortunately, there is alarming evidence that many businesses have not yet invested in any form of VoC software and fail to integrate valuable customer insight into the product and service development process.

3 critical reasons to get feedback from customers

Successful, customer-centric organizations understand that it’s an excellent and wise business investment to get marketplace feedback straight from the source — your customers.

When you get feedback from customers, you can expect to:

1. Increase Customer loyalty and satisfaction. This may seem obvious; however, organizations often fail to understand that customer loyalty and satisfaction are strong predictors of positive ROI. The best way to make your customers feel valued is to listen to and integrate their feedback into the product and service development process. Happy customers remain loyal and recommend your products and services to others, while unhappy customers defect to your competition and communicate their negative reactions to others.

2. Grab the market by the ‘horns’ and develop competitive edge. To know if your products and services are meeting and exceeding marketplace expectations, you need to get feedback about what customers love, hate and think overall about your products and services. This can ensure your product development team takes action to correct any issues and leverage product strengths. Feedback focused on customer needs and on what competitors are doing can be used to create product innovations that put you in a leadership position.

3. Measure operational effectiveness. Just like a medical examination is an evaluation of overall health, customer feedback is an index of the operational health of your organization and its product and service offerings. Through feedback you can identify the areas of your operation that need attention or corrective action, in addition to those that are functioning well and need to be sustained. When customer feedback is combined with employee and other stakeholder feedback you can really focus on improving the effectiveness of all areas of your operation.

Naturally, there are many reasons why organizations should make it a point to get feedback from customers, employees and business partners. The simple point that I am making here is that feedback is essential to building and delivering higher-value products and services to market faster and more efficiently. What organizations need is a well structured system to get feedback.

OneDesk: Powerful software to get feedback AND integrate it!
Through three core applications, Customer Feedback Management, Requirements Management and Task Management, and a social collaboration layer, OneDesk helps you to get feedback and manage it effectively. These applications allow you to centralize valuable insight and customer data; to communicate and collaborate with customers; to get, clarify and manage their feedback; and to effectively integrate customer suggestions and ideas into the product and service development pipeline.

What are some of your organization’s best practices for collecting customer feedback?