Leveraging customer feedback to build a better product strategy

Customers are merely the people who matter the most for customer-centric enterprises across the globe. With the rise of technology and increase in customer needs and demands, businesses are constantly challenged to stay ahead of the competition by designing new products, bringing new ideas, implementing new strategies, and using customer feedback to build better product developments. Better customer experience is the ultimate goal for enterprises and to achieve this an efficient customer feedback strategy will help.

According to PWC, “When products and services come with great experiences, consumers are willing to pay up to 16% more.” 

What exactly is a Customer Feedback Strategy?

Customer feedback is nothing but the information provided by your customers about whether they’re satisfied or dissatisfied with a product or service. It can also be in terms of the general experience they had with your company. 

A customer feedback strategy means the ways and methods that enterprises incorporate to collect and leverage feedback from their loyal customers. This can be through surveys, calls, social media posts, etc. With CRM’s like Kapture collecting customer feedback and leveraging data has been an easy cakewalk for most businesses. 

How to Leverage Customer Feedback to drive product innovation?

One of the best benefits of a well-planned customer feedback strategy is that it helps in product innovation and development. It is important to know what your customers think about your products and services to enhance customer satisfaction and provide valuable service. Once you are aware of your customer’s pain points while dealing with your product or services, it becomes easy for you to develop and improve your products accordingly. Your loyal customers can offer a complete analysis of your product and services which in turn helps you to learn about the strength and weaknesses of your product. Once you start leveraging customer feedbacks you will be aware of their expectations and make advance improvements for the future. This will also help in saving them valuable time and resources that are otherwise wasted on developing unsatisfactory products. 

Here are a few steps to channel customer feedback into product innovation.

• Analyze customer data: A customer database is more than just demographic and behavioral information about your customers. It is also the best resource to understand your customer’s exact pain points, needs, demands, and expectations from your business. CRM’s like Kapture provides a well-secured cloud customer database and by analyzing it, you may discover major gaps or opportunities for more detailed implementation of a customer feedback strategy. 

• Be Socially Present Everywhere: With multiple social media platforms popping up every day. Companies need to expand their social presence and be present everywhere. Your potential customers have the liberty to choose their preferred medium of communication to report any queries or feedback about your business. With an Omnichannel support system, businesses can enhance their social presence and leverage customer feedback on a real-time basis. Social media interactions are also an effective way to enhance your customer experience strategy.  

• Make analyzing collected feedback a part of your business intelligence strategy: Analyzing customer feedbacks and keeping a track of the gaps that need to be filled should be a daily routine for all customer-centric enterprises. Including analyzing results into your business model will help you leverage the most from customer feedback. These are a few important strategies for effectively handling customer feedback. 

Now as you know how to use customer feedback to build a better product, here are few tips for leveraging your customer’s testimonials effectively. 

• Surveys that are meant for a purpose in enhancing your customer’s experience and help you receive feedback about your product strategies. 
• Ensuring a complete social media presence and interacting with customers on multiple platforms. 
• Polls with specific questions that enable product managers to obtain quantitative feedback about customer sentiment.

Having a loyal customer base can benefit businesses in several ways like promoting your business with positive word-of-mouth. If companies are unaware of what satisfies their customers, and what needs to be improved, then a loyal customer base ceases to be a dream. So, it is of utmost importance for businesses to implement a well-planned customer feedback strategy and ensure that every voice is heard and considered. To stay ahead in this competitive market customer-centric enterprises should ensure that their product development strategy is partly driven by valuable feedback from their customers.