Harness Customer Feedback To Improve Customer Retention

According to research, almost 68% of customers leave a company because they feel nobody cares. We all know that customer behavior is evolving with time and scoring repeat purchases means continuously coming up with products that your customers really want. But how do you know what they actually want? Through customer feedback! It’s not a growth hack, it’s what takes your business to the next level. Customer feedback gives you insights about your product and what most shoppers commonly dislike. This underscores the importance of ratings and reviews because it is a great tool that can be effectively utilized for customer retention. You can only retain customers when you know what they want from your business. 

Customers are requested to participate in user testing and focus groups. Based on the feedback, results are provided to the team for analyzing the feedback and their opinion becomes a resource for improving customer experience. Feedback can be gained from solicitation email after purchase, writing a review message and:

• Live chat sessions
• Reviews and survey responses
• Monitoring social channels
• Using polls
• Customer calls
• User experience testing 
• Customer support chat conversations

NPS (Net Promoter Score) is one of the easiest ways to understand your relationship with your customers. Respondents give a rating between 0 (not at all likely) and 10 (extremely likely) for listed questions. Based on their responses they are categorized as promoters, passives, and detractors. But what’s more important is that once you receive the feedback, it’s more important to act upon it. The customer should feel heard and let them know how much you appreciate their opinion about your business. The voice of the customers is truly a top customer retention strategy that should not be undervalued. Gathering feedback, analyzing them for trends and sharing inputs based on the insights with your team is a great way to keep them aligned. Apple’s NPS score in 2017 was a resounding 72 which is much higher than their competitors. It’s the result of the fabulous focus on delivering a great product and great experience to the customers time and again. For starters, Apple’s support page contains ample self help content that relieves purchasing anxiety. Plus buying and opening an Apple product is a sensory experience. Their attention to detail is remarkable and goes beyond the products themselves. For example, MacBook Air and the newer MacBook Pro devices have a ‘smart Caps Lock’ feature to prevent accidental Caps lock keystrokes.

Customer retention feedback surveys are great for: 

• Discovering what’s not working and understanding your customers better
• Identifying customers who are dissatisfied and engaging with them 
• Benchmarking of customer loyalty and retention levels 
• Planning of customer retention strategies 
• Establishing standards for excellence for improving customer retention
• Product and process improvement based on feedback insights 
• Getting referrals, reviews and testimonials from customers
• Improve customer experience 

Consider these stats: 

• It is found that 1 happy customer can lead to 9 referrals.
• But 1 angry customer can lead to 26 other angry customers.
• If customers are not satisfied, then 13% of them will tell 15 or even more people that they are dissatisfied. 
• 72% of customers will share a happy experience with 6 or more people. 
• A staggering 97% of customers have agreed that online reviews influence their buying decision. 
• 91% of unhappy customers will simply leave and never come back. 

According to Jordan Vellutini, managing director of Westline Electrical Services Ltd., “ensuring direct feedback from each and every client has allowed the company to not only sufficiently increase word-of-mouth recommendations but also improve the quality and efficiency of how and what services they carry.”

You can ask pointed questions like:

• How would you rate your shopping experience with us? 
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product or service to a family or friend?
• If you had to recommend a change in our product or service what would that be? 
• What is your most important pain point that you would like to be fulfilled by this product? 

For your customer survey to be effective, define your goals, identify what you want to know from your customers and then ask straightforward and specific questions. Ideally the survey should be kept short and crisp with not more than five to ten questions. Offering a survey incentive is always a great way to boost up survey engagement, get more responses and improve customer retention. Use your loyalty program to reward customers for completing surveys!  Be smart and strategic when using surveys. Too many surveys will annoy your customers.