If you own a business, you must already be aware of the importance of Online Community For Customer Feedback for your business. Getting valuable feedback from your customers and working on your products and services based on that feedback can help you effectively develop your business.
In this article, I will help you understand how to use a branded online community for customer feedback collection. But before that let’s understand what customer feedback truly means.
“Customer feedback is the information, insights, issues, and input shared by your customers about their experiences with your products and services. This feedback helps the business owner to improve customer experiences and can empower positive changes in any business.”
Why is customer feedback collection important?
Customer feedback collection helps you to understand if your products and services meet the expectation levels of your customers. Since the customers usually speak out the truth in their feedback, you can rely on this data for authenticity and work on the issues for better customer satisfaction.
Here are some statistics to help you understand the importance of customer feedback and why you should curate a community for the same:
- Gartner predicts that 89% of businesses are expected to compete mainly on customer experience.
- Around the globe, 96% of consumers say customer service is an important factor in their choice of loyalty to a brand.
- 90% of customers are influenced by positive reviews when buying a product.
- Customers who had a very good experience are 3.5x more likely to repurchase and 5x more likely to recommend the company to friends and relatives than if they had a very poor experience.
- 86% of millennials say they are influenced by negative reviews when purchasing a product or service.
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Key benefits of customer feedback collection:
- Customer feedback collection helps you to understand where you can bring changes and improvements to your products and services.
- Looking at the company taking the customer feedback seriously and making improvements accordingly is usually a great experience for the customer. They feel heard and appreciated. This helps the company instill a sense of brand loyalty in the customer. In the long term, such customers can be brand advocates of the company.
- Once the customer is loyal to the brand, they will also recommend the brand to their peers and coworkers, thus helping your company with word-of-mouth marketing – which is known to have a positive impact on brands.
- Seeking customer feedback and proactively working on the improvements has a huge positive impact on the customer. This helps your company to get a positive reputation in the market.
Collecting customer feedback from online communities:
Now that we have understood why getting customer feedback is so important for your business, let’s see how you can collect customer feedback from your online communities. Any given online community is a great platform to start candid conversations. This is the most important factor in engaging with your customers and collecting feedback via your online community. Online communities help the customer to directly interact with your product team. This gives them a sense of being listened to. An open-for-all online community helps multiple customers to give their feedback at the same time. This also means that once a customer has given feedback about a certain product, you can instantly validate it before other customers come up with similar feedback about the same product.
Given below are a few steps to help you get started with your online community for customer feedback collection:
- Create a dedicated space: The easiest way to get started with feedback collection through an online community is to create a dedicated space where your customers can post feedback.
- Allocate a team: Once you have created a platform for the customers to post feedback, you must have a dedicated team to handle the platform and go through all the feedback received.
- Reward high-quality feedback: An online community will always have all kinds of feedback from the customer. High-quality feedback that helps you improve your product will be very essential for your company and customers that give such feedback must be rewarded.
- Set the right expectations: While collecting feedback you must emphasize the fact that every feedback will be looked into and get evaluated. However, if a suggestion is submitted, it does not necessarily mean that it will be implemented by your team.
- Measure Success: The whole point of creating an online community for feedback collection is to ultimately grow your business. Regularly monitoring the success of your online platform in terms of customer satisfaction, getting more customers and valuable feedback is the key to the growth of your company.
Advantages of an online community for customer feedback collection:
A lot of business owners depend on the traditional methods of collecting customer feedback such as surveys. Then why should a company change its ways and create an online platform for feedback collection? Here’s why:
- Since an online community is open for all, your customers can also get help from other customers. This collective knowledge and collaboration help you to collect rich feedback.
- Online communities are always live, so a customer can log in and send feedback at any point in time, without having to wait for you to approach them for feedback.
- An online community also helps you to make a collective database of the feedback for all your products, which can be used whenever necessary.
- In an online community, all other customers can see when you implement and improve your product based on the feedback from one customer. This helps you gain the trust and loyalty of these customers.
To conclude on what we’ve discussed till now:
In this fast-moving world, creating an online community for collecting customer feedback can never be a bad idea. Customers are the backbone for any business and making them heard should be your #1 priority. I hope this article has helped you understand how to successfully drive feedback collection on your online community. By following these practices, you can ensure that your community captures the voice of the customer.
Thank you for reading and all the best with your community!
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