At the heart of every successful business is people; whether those people are employees, clients, partners or customers. The most important thing to realize as a business is that while you build solutions that solve a problem and create value, and you’re exceptionally passionate about the business you’re building, you must realize that the value you create is for your customers, and knowing that means without adequate input and insights from your users, it is unlikely you’ll be able to gather information on what bothers them the most about your product/solution, and where they think you can make improvements and considering they’re the ones you build for, Their suggestions should be taken seriously.
We’ve spent a good amount of time over the past couple of weeks talking about the value of UX to your business, and how Bad UX can have a detrimental effect on the success and growth of any business, however, UX (User Experience) is actually more than just the cool designs and micro interactions you have on your digital platform or app, it encompasses every single experience people have while interacting with your product, and who better to offer valuable insights on how best to make that process seamless than the people you build those experiences for?
In this piece, we’ll be sharing four steps to make the most of customer feedback at your business.
Making the Most of Customer Feedback
We want to imagine your business is primarily online as this process will depend largely on the primary channel you perform business through whether online or offline. Here are the 4 steps to take to make the most of your customer feedback as a business.
STEP 1: GATHER FEEDBACK
Ideally, you can’t make the most of customer feedback if you don’t have any, so you need to create an effective and efficient system for gathering and retaining customer feedback as an online business, because one of your goals as a business is to build a customer centric business. In a more offline/physical scenario, walking up to customers to ask questions, and even relying on the occasional customer who will say a thing or two after using your product is key, however, in a more online setting, this is usually not the case. Since most people will be interacting with a website or a mobile application and you can’t just physically pop up from beneath the screen to ask them for feedback (if you can please reach out to us, we may have clients that need this service), you therefore have to rely on other means to gather user feedback. You may choose to insert a dialog box below your website to solicit for feedback from visitors, or you could put up a ‘non-intrusive’ pop-up that comes up at the right time and doesn’t ruin the user experience for your users (you ideally don’t want to have this on your homepage, would be better off somewhere deeper in your user journey map to avoid scaring away first time visitors).
Another effective approach to gathering user feedback could be to send them an email asking for feedback after they’ve made a purchase or they’ve converted (whatever that means for your business). At this point, they are usually more than likely to give an answer, and an informed one too, considering they have already interacted with your product.
Although not direct user feedback, Google Analytics is a great way to study the behavior of your users and even give some qualitative direction to your feedback and validation process. So if you notice a good number of page bounces on a specific page, you may want to ask users as feedback what bothers them about that page (we personally expect you to do this in a more stylish way than that).
STEP 2: QUALIFY FEEDBACK
Gathering feedback is the first part of the process, being able to qualify that feedback is important. As much as what your users say is valuable, you need to realize that not everything they share with you may be actionable, feasible or even align with the long term goal of your business. For example, I want to imagine an iPhone user complaining about the price of Apple’s flagship device. As much as it is customer feedback, it doesn’t align with Apple’s strategic imperative, as their pricing regime plays to their image of being a luxury brand, and that brand image is such a valuable asset that someone has literally sold his kidney to buy an iPhone.
Make sure you can objectively qualify the feedback you’re getting, and begin to spot trends and try to identify the insights in those trends. The more you can spot the real insight behind the information your users are giving you — the better positioned you’ll be to act on those insights to birth profitable business outcomes.
STEP 3: ACT ON YOUR USER FEEDBACK
Someone once said that “a plan without action is not a plan, it’s a speech”, and that’s rightly said. Regardless of the information and insights you gain from your users, if you cannot translate those insights into meaningful and actionable points to work on and take advantage of, it holds very little value for your business.
You must make up your mind to act on these insights by creating strategic action plans, and assigning ownership to specific insights and action points identified. Acting on what your users say is right is far more valuable than just claiming to know what your users say is right.
STEP 4: GIVE YOUR USERS FEEDBACK
Ideally, when your users sent in their feedback you probably sent them some kind of appreciation message, however, when you have finally put the product and user feedback they shared into a product upgrade, feature or even a redesign, make sure you can share that information with them to let them be aware of such developments. The more users feel their feedback at your business is valuable, the more willing they will be to give it in the future, and to use your product more frequently, considering the fact that they feel they have a say into what goes on in product development at your business.
Depending on the size and nature of your business, you may also want to give some kind of coupon or discount of your product to them for agreeing to fill out the survey and for how their feedback has now informed your latest product feature. The primary goal of this is to create future incentives for your users to respond to other surveys in the future or going forward.
CONCLUSION
Customer Feedback is to a business what eyes are to a bird. Without proper insights and understanding of what your users are doing and thinking per time, you’re likely going to build products that may although look good and fantastic to you, be less relevant to your target users and end users.
Creating a proper framework for collecting, processing, and acting on user feedback is extremely key to any business in the 21st century, and to avoid you running and operating a business that is blind.
Our vision at http://www.charisol.io is to engineer a world where startups fail less. We take out the ambiguity of what comes next and make it easier to get started. Our services include User Research, UX Design, Frontend/Backend Engineering and Digital Marketing.
Got questions? Drop our team a line or send hi to team@charisol.io
