5 Ways Customer Feedback Can Help You Beat the Competition

by Jonas Christensen

If you’re not actively gathering customer feedback—and acting on this feedback—you’re losing out. Why? The happier you make your customers, the more likely it is that you’ll retain them. Bearing in mind that it’s six to seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one, I’d say you should definitely invest your time and effort into making the most of your customer feedback.

Let your competitors run their ads aggressively—you’ll be able to achieve bigger results (and sales!) by looking inward, and making the most out of your customer feedback. Here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Get people to use your site, and observe them

You’ve probably read a dozen “10 best practices to optimize your website for conversions” type articles, but guess what? There’s no one size fits all solution, and the easiest way to figure out if your website is user-friendly to your consumers is to simply observe them whilst they’re using your site.

Do they skip past your image carousel at the top without waiting for the images to rotate? Do they head straight for your testimonials page? Take notes diligently, ask questions afterwards, and then improve your website accordingly.

2. Use post-purchase questionnaires

You’re probably already sending post-purchase emails (which contain shipping details and other important information) to your customers. What you should also be doing is sending your customers post-purchase questionnaires to measure your Net Promoter Score among other metrics.

For the uninitiated, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an index which measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company to their friends. This gauges your customers' overall satisfaction with your product/service, as well as their loyalty to your brand. Collecting these post-purchase questionnaires is straightforward enough, with tools such as AskNicely, Promoter.io, and Delighted. Once the questionnaires are set up, they’ll trigger automated emails to your customers (requesting that they participate in a short survey), and compute your NPS from there.

3. Contact users who had bad experiences

Once you set up your NPS tool, you’ll now be aware of the negative experiences some of your customers may have had. (Without a feedback system in place, these would have slipped through the cracks.) Once your company receives any feedback indicating that a customer has had a poor experience, your front-line staff should reach out to them, and try and fix their problems.

Keep this in mind: You have an opportunity to make things right here—and as long as you do manage to resolve the issues in a way that satisfies your customers, they will return to do business with you.

4. Get reviews on products and users

Customer feedback comes in many ways, shapes and forms. There’s the feedback that you get in the surveys you send out, and then there’s the feedback which you get from online reviews. Whilst we’ve been talking extensively about the former, it’s important to beef up your strategy for the latter as well.

Pretty much all our leading e-commerce stores and online marketplaces such as Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, and eBay rely heavily on customer reviews to create trust and attract buyer-ready traffic looking for recommendations. This isn’t a coincidence. In fact, studies show that e-commerce stores that incorporate User Generated Content (UGC) such as customer reviews, customer testimonials, and photos taken by customers on their websites experience a whopping 161% increase in conversions.

Think about it this way. You’re in the market to purchase a new coat, and you’ve narrowed down your options to two: one is from Amazon, and one is from ASOS. They’re both standard black coats, and they’re priced similarly, but the one from Amazon has plenty of reviews praising the product’s quality and thickness, and the one at ASOS doesn’t have any reviews. Which one would you buy? Bit of a no-brainer, isn’t it?

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5. Get direct customer feedback

Some people think that talking to customers and getting direct feedback from them is a waste of time. Listen, I know that you’re super busy, and there are a hundred things on your to-do list, but taking just an hour each week (or month, even!) to pick the brains of a few customers can do wonders for your business.

Here’s how I do it. Every two weeks or so, I contact a handful of people who have either opened an account on our website or subscribed to our newsletter. I have a ten-minute conversation, asking things like how they found our site, how was their user experience, and questions about their general shopping behaviour. It’s amazing what you can learn from these conversations with your users; in fact, we regularly implement new features or fix issues as a result of these conversations.

The great thing about speaking to your customers is that a conversation is so open-ended and organic, which is something that surveys can’t always achieve. Case in point: I contacted a user a couple of weeks ago who had recently listed a bicycle for sale on the Bike Chaser marketplace. His reply to my email mentioned that he hadn’t properly checked out our website yet, and I was curious to know why he had opened an account and listed a bike without knowing too much about the platform or business.

His answer? “I did a Google search for bike sales websites, and signed up to Bike Chaser and another bicycle marketplace. Your site was free to advertise on for 60 days, so I decided to list it up real quick.” His answer told me that, first, price was the most important factor that guided his decision on where to list. Second, it’s also noteworthy that he couldn’t even remember the name of the other website he had looked at.

I already know how important it is to be found in a Google search (the prerequisite for the customer’s decision to choose us), and that we should always be working on differentiating ourselves from our competitors, but seeing how a customer’s behaviour ties in with this makes the next steps appear much clearer.

In many ways, your customers are your greatest assets. The way forward is clear: Put yourself in the shoes of your customer and tailor your business to fit their specific needs. If you can understand your customer’s pain points, as well as their internal motivations, you’ll have earned yourself a massive leg up on your competitors.

RELATED: You Can Create an Unforgettable Customer Experience Without Breaking the Bank