Customer feedback should be at the center of your customer-relations strategy. It is not uncommon for successful companies to devote a ton of time and resources to collecting meaningful feedback through customer surveys. Here are a few reasons why customer feedback is so important.

Better understand your users

You won’t know if you don’t ask. Analyzing customer satisfaction feedback is the most reliable way to measure customer satisfaction and the only way to truly know your users. While there is an art to designing an effective customer satisfaction survey, the types of questions you ask should be related to the customer's experience with your product including demographic information. That way you can see which kinds of users are most satisfied (and dissatisfied) with the product.

It’s impossible to make good decisions without first understanding the wants and needs of your customers. There’s also no better way to gain a read on the overall market than to survey your own users.

Customer satisfaction feedback can result in increased customer retention

Customer retention increases your customers' lifetime value and boosts your revenue when you know what is important to them. It helps build trust and amazing relationships. It is as simple as that. Customer feedback surveys can provide you with a complete picture of how your user base feels about your product, and the appropriate changes can be made based on this information. By listening to your customers, you are also showing them that they are valuable to you and your business. This alone can go a long way.

Improve customer growth

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer experience and predicts business growth. You can calculate your NPS by using the answer to a key question that uses a 0-10 scale: How likely are you to recommend your product, service, or company to a friend or colleague? Naturally, a high NPS is often key to growing your customer base. Analyzing your customer feedback surveys and investigating the drivers of your NPS is a great way to improve customer growth.

Also, if you have freemium or trial users, it is crucial to find out what their needs are. They are already using your product, so the next step is to convince them to be paying users.

Track customer satisfaction over time

Customer feedback surveys are particularly useful when issued regularly over time. A question like “On a scale of 0-10, how satisfied are you with this product?”, can help you measure whether satisfaction is improving or worsening over time. Repeated surveys also result in a larger sample size, which leads to more statistically significant results. A single survey can contain anomalies and irregularities, but a large sample over a prolonged period is usually very reliable.

Identify the impact of specific changes in your product

Product modifications can be made with the best of intentions, however, they are not always well-received by customers because they are not always viewed as improvements. Any time your product undergoes a major change, you want to survey your customers on how they feel about the updates. You can ask specific questions about the changes or simply ask for their general satisfaction.

Interested in tracking customer satisfaction? Here are some things to consider when constructing your survey.