The customer feedback is an extremely important part of a business strategy. It is absolutely essential for customer satisfaction and customer happiness. The customer satisfaction drives customer loyalty, and the customer loyalty is crucial for customer retention. The customer retention helps business grow. Studies have shown that acquiring a new customers can be 5 to 25 times more expensive than selling to an existing customer. Obviously different industries have different dynamics, but one thing is certain that acquiring a new customers is much more expensive than selling to an existing customer.
A customer will only make a purchase again if their previous experience was satisfactory. The businesses who tend to grow each year are most likely to have an excellent strategy to listen to the voice of the customers. Because the customers understand your products and services better than you. Getting their opinion will help you understand what customers are liking and what they are not appreciating about your products and services. That is why the customer feedback plays a crucial role in improving customer satisfaction.
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When it comes to the customer feedback business in Dubai and all around the UAE are well-aware of its importance, however, some of the business take it more seriously than the rest. There are several methods and techniques that are used to integrate the customer feedback in the decision making process. Whenever a business requires to collect customer feedback they appoint a manager for the project. Usually it is customer experience manager who take responsibility to building a customer feedback strategy and executing the plan.
However, not each campaign produce equal results for all businesses. This is due to the difference between the methodologies and practices that a business follow to execute a customer feedback campaign. Obviously each business is different from the other, different methods and techniques produce different results in different industries. In this blog we will discuss the key component of a customer feedback campaign which are universal across all industries and can greatly help the customer experience manager to produce the desired results from the campaign.
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What is Customer Feedback in 2022?
By definition the customer feedback is listening to their voice or taking their opinion about the business, its products/services and every interaction which can help the businesses to understand the strength of their relationship with the customer and help them identifying the causes that can improve or weaken this relationship. Basically the customer feedback is the customer’s prospective of the business. The customer feedback is technically the same thing in 2022 as it was from the time of beginning. However, there are some fundamental differences in a modern day feedback which have completely evolved the customer feedback in 2022.
Now a day’s business have to have a better plan and strategy to achieve the goals of the customer feedback collection campaign. Another huge difference between the old-school or traditional customer feedback and the modern customer feedback is the digitalization and it expands to both internal and external audiences. Furthermore the traditional customer feedback campaign was a manual process, however, the modern customer feedback campaign is a semi-automatic and highly efficient digital process.
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How to Develop a Customer Feedback Strategy in 2022?
The customer feedback strategy involves research, planning and execution of collecting customer feedback data and then integrating it in decision making processes to take appropriate actions. This may sound simple but it is not. Every business strives for the best, the evaluation and improvement is a continuous process in healthy business environments. The businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE conduct two distinguished types of feedback campaigns, the internal feedback and the external feedback. The internal feedback is a major part of the performance management strategy and it is a completely different topic altogether.
In this blog we will only discuss the customer feedback which comes under external feedback however, in case of service-based industries the customer feedback also includes feedback about employee performance, which is majorly related to their interaction with the customers. Before we jump into steps of making a customer feedback strategy it is important to understand what are the purposes of collecting customer feedback? Because the objectives and goals of the customer feedback will largely determine the customer feedback strategy.
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- Make Improvements: No matter how good your sales are and how many subscribers your services have, there would always be a room for improvements. The marketplace is rapidly changing in Dubai and all around UAE. The customer feedback will tell you how well your products and services serve your customers and what else can be done to increase their satisfaction.
- Gain Competitive Advantage: If a business managed to align its decisions and strategies with its customers, it can gain a great competitive advantage. All competitors offer relevant solutions, the competitive analysis is a great strategy but it is the customer feedback which can tell you what you are offering or can offer to be better than the other competitors.
- Make Informed Decisions: Sometimes the managers and stakeholders make decisions based on their own experience and they make assumptions or take guesses of what the customer might be wanting. The success rate of such decisions is relatively low and the risk is too high. However, the customer feedback data help businesses make informed decisions.
- Be More Reactive: The market trends change very quickly, this demand businesses to be more reactive to keep up with the changes in the market trends and customer behavior. The customer feedback will keep you informed such as if certain features of your products are outdated, or has been replaced with more advanced features, of if there is defect in the product, etc.
- Improve Product Development: Estimated the ROI for any new product or service is crucial for a business. The customer feedback can help businesses build customer-friendly and most desirable products and services. Businesses can get customer response about several features they are considering to propose in the new product to make the product development process effective.
- Improve Service Quality: The service quality is one of the most important aspect of the customer satisfaction. The customer feedback provide an in-depth understanding of the customer service and help businesses identifying the causes of negative customer feedback. Which can be rectified gradually to improve the customer service quality.
- Improve Customer Experience: The customer journey and customer experience have huge impact on business’s sales. The customer feedback data help businesses highlight the areas of improvements and enable them to enhance the customer experience. A good customer experience means more customer satisfaction and higher loyalty.
- Improve Customer Relationship: When businesses ask customers about their opinion the customers feel more connected and feel how important they are for the business. The closed-loop customer feedback strengthen the customer relationship as it tells customers that the business take actions on their suggestions and feedback.
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The customer feedback can be very helpful in improving almost all business functions and help them achieve higher efficiency. The customer feedback strategy starts with a goal in mind, the goal could be new product development, product feature feedback, customer service improvement, customer journey and customer experience improvement, etc. The business first have to understand what they want to achieve with the customer feedback.
For example, their one of the most popular product’s sales start declining, then they must have to evaluate that product to understand what are the causes of the reduction in sales. If they have implemented a new method for customer service, but their sales start declining, then they must have to evaluate what went bad with their new method and so on. This is how the business should set a goal and purpose of collecting customer feedback data. Hence the customer feedback strategy starts with setting up goals.
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Here are the key component of the customer feedback strategy:
- Setting up goals and objectives of the customer feedback campaign
- Determine what information do you need to acquire from the customers
- Define the targeted audience who will provide you that information
- Chose right channels to conduct customer feedback campaign
- Select an appropriate digital customer feedback system
- Develop analysis and reporting mechanisms to get an actionable outcome of the feedback data
- Plan and implement the closed-loop customer feedback collection process
The customer feedback strategy is incomplete without discussing the different types of customer feedback. The customer feedback types are defined on the bases of data it can collect. The raw customer feedback data is analyzed by several analytical methods which help determining the conclusive results of the customer feedback data. It is important that the customer feedback data is both quantitative and qualitative. The quantity of the feedback will provide in-depth understanding and the quality of the data will increase the success rate of the decisions made using the data.
For example, you have 1000 customers, if you collect feedback from 30 or 40 customers only, you might not be able to understand how all of the customers might think, however, if you manage to collect customer feedback from at least 300 to 400 customers out of 1000, than the quality of the data would be significantly high. That is why the quantity of the feedback is so important. Furthermore the quality of the data depends not only on quantity but also on the questionnaire you design and the analysis you perform. For example, too long surveys led to incorrect responses as the customers want to complete it as quickly as possible.
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Here are some commonly used types of customer feedback surveys in Dubai and all around the UAE.
- Customer Loyalty or NPS Score: The customer loyalty surveys or NPS Score (net promoter score) is a measurement of the customer loyalty. It basically asks customer how likely they are to recommend your business, products or services to others and their response provide the customer loyalty measurement.
- Customer Satisfaction or CSAT Score: The customer satisfaction feedback or CSAT Score is a measurement of customer satisfaction. These surveys ask questions about how happy or satisfied customers are about the products, services they use or the experience and the interaction they had with the business.
- Demographics Data: The customer demographic data is crucial to understand customer persona. Most of the time businesses doesn’t focus much on the demographic data but it is critically important. It help businesses categorize different audience groups and target communication to maximize the customer happiness.
- Customer Effort or CES Score: The customer effort score or CES score is a simple measurement of the efforts a customer put to complete a task. The CES Score is used normally to assess the customer journey or a particular interaction. For example, how easy or difficult is was to upload the documents via self-service kiosk?
- Customer Service Feedback: The customer service feedback is aimed to evaluate the sales, service and support teams. When a customer have an interaction with the staff the surveys is designed to understand how it was and how the interaction can be improved for future. It is a great way to evaluate employee performance.
These surveys are most common as they produce the highly accurate and organized data which help businesses to take informed decision and make improvements which help them gain higher customer satisfaction, enable them to strengthen the relationship with the customers and help them to grow.
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Collecting the customer feedback data will help you understand the perception of your customers about your brand and it will help you evaluate your business practices, processes, products/services and much more. However, that is just the half part of it, the other half is to analyze the feedback, extract actionable reports from it and then take action. Taking action on the customer feedback means you make changes, adopt to new practices and methodologies or you develop new products and services or make changes to existing products and services to ensure maximum customer satisfaction.
The original purpose of the customer feedback is to make changes, identify problem and areas of improvements and improve to align your business with customer’s demands, needs, desires and expectations. Most of the time businesses reached to this point, however, a majority of the businesses never follow up or inform customers about the actions they took by inspiring from their suggestions and feedback. That is what is called closing the loop. Collecting customer feedback, analyzing and categorizing it, taking action on the bases of the customer feedback data and then informing the customers about those actions.
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One of the most important part of customer feedback strategy is the selection of right channels to reach out to the targeted audience. There are several ways businesses can reach out to the customers and targeted audience groups to ask them about their opinion. Traditionally businesses assign some staff to ask all customers and visitors to fill-in customer feedback forms. However, in Dubai and all around the UAE the lifestyle is very fast-paced, in fact all around the world an average consumer wants to leave the business as quickly as they have finished their transaction/purchase.
Then there are other problems with traditional practices such as manual feedback results in a lot of bugs during the data upload, on top of that the analysis becomes difficult and the overall quality of the data is reduced. That is why the digital customer feedback surveys are used, they offer multiple channels to reach out to the customers and help gathering high quality, well-organized and structured customer feedback data. Furthermore the quantity of the data is also high as it is way easier to attempt a survey via digital mediums than doing it on a printed feedback form.
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The modern day customer feedback campaigns are managed by a digital customer feedback system. The digital customer feedback system is software tool which can be linked to multiple channels such as interactive touch screens, tablets, self-service kiosks, corporate website, customer portals, emails, SMS, QR Code based links, social media, etc. The digital customer feedback system collects customer feedback and automatically store it in the database, which allow managers to perform several analysis with in-built analytical tools and prepare customized reports.
The modern customer feedback system can be integrated with several other internal databases, business tools and central information center and make the entire process digital and semi-autonomous. This help reducing the efforts and resources for the customer feedback campaign and reduce the cost. Furthermore the ability to link multiple channels help businesses get a better insight. The customers also feel more comfortable while sharing their opinion through a digital channel.
Traditionally the customers try to sugarcoat their responses as they are directly interacting with the staff, however, with the digital customer feedback system the customers tend to be more honest and blunt which raise the quality of the data.
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The digital customer feedback system offers several benefits such as:
- It reduce the time, efforts and cost to set up and execute a customer feedback campaign
- It collects data in highly organized and structured formats which make analysis easier
- It offers in-built analysis tools and customizable reporting formats as per the needs, business can learn customer and market trends with in-built tools and the reports can automatically be shared to the relevant personal via email along with dashboard notifications and alerts
- Businesses can easily modify the customer feedback survey questions remotely via administrative control panel and all the changes can be pushed to all or selective touch points
- It can integrate multiple channels to collect customer feedback
- It offers freedom and comfort hence the customers tend to be more honest with their opinion
- Businesses can launch multiple different surveys simultaneously
- A central management administrative module allow head office to monitor all connected branches and it also provide different administrative hierarchies and support internal work flows
- The customer feedback system can be linked with sales system, customer database, customer relationship management system, complaint portal and any other system to automatically send customer feedback surveys to the customers after their interaction
- Businesses can trigger alerts and notifications on any particular event, such as if the daily feedback got more than 10% negative feedbacks the branch manager and head office should be notified, etc.
- The customer feedback system help businesses closing the feedback loop by providing dedicated features and follow up facilities within the system
See Also: 8 Proven Practices for Successful Customer Feedback Management
These are the key advantages of using a digital customer feedback system. When it comes to the customer feedback system there are two major categories of feedback systems, one is the commercial off-the-shelf software or COTS and the other is the customized software development. The COTS are easy to deploy, slightly less initial cost, but mostly couldn’t fulfill the 100% needs of the business. The customized software development on the other hand is a very flexible approach to design and deploy a customer feedback system.
The customized customer feedback systems are tailor-made as per the business needs and offer high flexibility. The initial cost is slightly higher thou but the overall ROI is much better comparing to the commercial off-the-shelf customer feedback system solutions. That is why most of the businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE prefer to have a customized customer feedback system. The customized software development also offer more freedom and control over the software and make scalability, integration and upgrade much simpler and cost-efficient which is why its ROI is higher than the COTS.
See Also: Overcoming Challenges in Customer Feedback Collection and Management
Conclusion
The customer feedback is extremely important for any business to survive and grow in the modern day marketplace. The Dubai and all around the UAE the markets are very dynamic, vibrant and fast-paced. The customer trends can shift over the night and the tougher competition is also a big challenge. The customer feedback provides business with the required information that help them deal with such circumstances. It offers a window to the customers’ minds and help businesses understand their needs, demands, desires and expectations. Furthermore the customer feedback is also a great tool to analyze and evaluate business practices, methodologies and performance of the customer facing processes and resources.
An effective customer feedback campaign is impossible without an effective customer feedback strategy. In this blog we have briefly discussed the customer feedback strategy and all important aspects of a successful customer feedback collection campaign. RSI Concepts is a leading customer feedback system provider in Dubai, UAE. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you want our help to develop a highly cost-efficient and effective customer feedback system for you, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the below comment box and we will get in touch with you soon.
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