Customer Feedback Loop1

Customer feedback loop: importance and how to create it

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Table of Contents

What is customer feedback loop?

Customer feedback loop is referred to a repetitive practice of gathering customer feedbacks and acting upon them to improve your product. In other words, customer feedback loop can also be called a constant process of product improvement based on what its users thinks about it. This loop is a form of “mutual causal interaction” where both the entities have mutual impact on each other. 

When we say customer feedback, it doesn’t always mean complains and bad feedbacks about the product. Sometimes customers also leave a memorable experience with your product, the times when your product helped them through their issues and how efficiently it is working. 

Hence there are going to be both positive as well as negative feedbacks. The tack lies in how you turn these customer feedbacks into revenue. 

Closing a loop in customer feedback refers to when a problem faced by a customer is solved and the solution is being provided to the customer. Example: a customer complains to a brand about delivering a defective product. The company can close this loop by sending an apology and replacing the defective product and providing them with the new one. 

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Why is customer feedback loop important?

In this section we will lay out some solid points addressing the topic on why the customer feedback loop is so important in today’s market and why you need to follow the trend:

  • Customer feedback loop allows you to retain more in the existing customers, which far better than finding the new ones. 
  • Helps you build customer engagement and get to know their needs and expectations from the product and services that you provide. 
  • You get to create a long term relationship with the customers and gain their trust and loyalty. 
  • Reduction in customer complaints by instantly reacting to their problems and working on them.
  • This acts as a reality checker, in cases when you think a certain idea might be good for the brand. In the end it is the users who decide what’s good and what’s not. 
  • Feedback loops define the commonly faced issues by the customers regarding your products and services and what part of the process makes them excited. 
  • Depending on the purchase experience and the service experience, 79% of the customers decide to go back to the same brand for their future purchases. 
  • 89% of them make a switch between the brands provided the experience was not satisfactory. 
  • The feedback loop provides you with a churn collateral process. 
  • It is an orderly manner of dealing with the customers with the hint of some analytical skills. 

Creating a customer feedback loop

The three crucial stages in the customer feedback loop are mentioned and explained as follows:

  • Gather 

Being obvious, to work on customer feedback is to first gather it. You can ask your customers to record their feedbacks using various methods like; live chat, social media, surveys, emails, etc. 

Though the most commonly used method surveys. It allows you to scale out your topic into various questions. The questions can be open-ended or close-ended depending on what type of answers they will provide you. Example: if you want to just have a count of something you can go for close-ended questions and in case of descriptive and brief answers, you can go for open-ended questions. This allows the customers to have a large range of options to choose from and does not take much of their time.

The more detailed you want your feedback to be, the more specific and targeted your survey respondents should be. 

  • Learn and analyze 

Once you have your data, it is time to make sense out of it. What the data is telling you about the customers’ perceptions of you and your products. This data will talk through patterns, facts, conclusions and analysing those means you are trying to make the raw data into information. 

Find what the customers are facing on a regular basis, what service betterments do they demand and what product upgrades do they wish for. Once you have this idea, it will be a 50% job done for you. 

  • Apply the conclusions 

This is the important part of the feedback loop. To close the loop you have to make them according to changes in your products and services. 

You can start with introducing customer feedbacks to your team members from various fields like the product development team, customer service team and marketing and sales team. 

Make sure you practice referring to the customer feedback as regularly as possible, daily, weekly, and monthly and so on. The more frequently you choose to keep up with the customer complaints, the more loops you get to close. 

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Examples of closing the customer feedback loop

  • Make people spend more with you – while closing the loop customers tend to leave a positive response regarding your brand. Decide to make it more interesting in a way which will make them shop with you more in the coming times. When they leave any positive responses like “Your service was awesome!” you can respond to it by saying something like “It would be our honour to serve you more” or “We look forward to shopping with you more”. 
  • Stop the customers from leaving – in the customer feedbacks, they tend to slide in a negative point in a tricky way like “I have been shopping with you for years and hardly got any special offers or deals”. The first sane thing to do is immediately close the loop. Provide them with their needs and reply with an apology. 
  • New customers through advocacy – when the customers leave positive feedback, you can reward them a bit for their concern and efforts to let you know that. This not only buys you their loyalty but you might have a chance at gaining new customers through publicity. Customers tend to prefer brands to other people and you can make use of this strategy to spread your ground. 
  • Improve existing products – this is the most touched area where the customer wants the brand to keep upgrading their product according to their needs. If you have been regularly keeping track of customer feedback, you can close loops by upgrading your products that already exist by adding certain features and efficiency to them regularly. 
  • A new product – customer feedbacks are the prime source of new ideas. You can discover new trends in the market and new ideas on how to develop your next product. Customers’ needs are always changing, and if you pay enough attention to customer feedback, you are more likely to find those right there. 

Voxco’s Close The Loop feature helps you create effective customer feedback loop