3 reasons customer feedback is more critical now than ever

15 seconds of feedback!

1. Feedback ready or not

In the past we spent a lot of time talking with clients about the need to draw out feedback from customers. Complaints were a gift, an opportunity to improve and beat the competition.

These days for most businesses there is more than enough feedback from sites like yelp and a multitude of other industry specific sites.

Whether you want to hear what customers think or not, they want to share their experiences and do on a massive scale.

2. It takes 15 seconds or less

In terms of reaching out to customers for specific feedback, one of the barriers was low response rates as customer were indifference or just did not see any value in spending their time to provide feedback.

This is changing with innovations like feefo which promises customers it will only take “15 seconds or less to provide feedback”.

How do they do this? They focus their questions only on the feedback their clients must have an can do something about. Plus there is a payoff for the customer. The customer can see what other people said about their experiences of the service, the good, bad and ugly instantly plus any responses from the company.

This is a real time customer feedback loop that is incredibly powerful.

We know from our research that one of the key drivers of customer centricity relates to how well a company operationalizes this customer feedback loop

The impact of improvements in this capability is very significant. Companies in our Market Responsiveness Index (MRI) database that do this well deliver a 6.5% increase in profit growth over those that perform at the average level. No bad for improving one element of customer focus.

3. Your competition is listening to your customers

Regardless of whether you choose to aggressively drive customer feedback programs or not you can be sure that your competition is working on ways to gather insights into your customer base.

There are a multitude of tools available for competitors to analyze your customer base

Here is a presentation from Sean of Cascade Insights outlining some of the ways to track the competition.

Can you afford to keep ignoring your customers?