Very often, successful entrepreneurs have one consistent advice to aspirants - ‘keep your eyes to the ground’, ‘always make sure you’re listening to your customers’ and ‘customer is king’. All these adages essentially reinforce that smart entrepreneurs value customer feedback. They pay attention to what the customer says and  leverage these insights and learnings to further improve their products or services.

Customer satisfaction is important to growing your brand, and customer feedback is the tool that gives you insights to ensure customer satisfaction. Here are 5 ways in which customer feedback can help grow your business:

1. Identify pain points - Unhappy customers soon move on to alternatives. It is prudent to have an effective feedback mechanism in place, to identify pain points as and when they pop up. This prevents loss of customers and helps improve your product or service. An improvement in quality can further help bring other customers on board.

For example, by asking a few customers about their experience in their retail store, an entrepreneur might find that footfall is negatively impacted by having high-priced items with price prominently displayed. The remedy could be to make the prices more unobtrusive and thereby encourage potential customers.

2. Asking a customer helps them be valued - Customer retention is key to business growth. A Harvard Business Review study shows that it is 5x to 25x cheaper, depending on the business, to retain old customers than set off in search of new ones. Simply asking a customer if they were happy with the product or service experience makes them feel valued and is likely to make them come back to your company and potentially even give you a boost with positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

3. Identify strengths and leverage them - Similar to identifying pain points and remedying them, asking for feedback can often lead to surprising insights about what your strengths are. Even if these insights don’t lead to a change in your business, they can make you create effective strategies for business out-reach and promotion.

For example, if you find that your logistics provider ships goods out very quickly, you can promise that in your next marketing campaign - such a promise is guaranteed to attract attention.

4. Monitoring changes in satisfaction levels over time yields insights - Periodically asking many customers for feedback with a survey can help provide both micro and macro insights that can be actioned to optimise your business results.

Starbucks, for example, conducts surveys on its members periodically and these allow it to track customer preferences from store to store enabling them to get the most sales by tracking customer preferences seasonally, for their drinks, and food offerings. They might see that a Caramel Macchiato does well in the summer months and then take out a caramel themed ice drink to target those customers to leverage that market.

5. Testimonials and digital reputation -  In the age of social media, your firm is likely to have a digital footprint. Prioritising feedback helps you be in-charge of that discourse as much as possible. People who are unhappy with your enterprise can be a source of information that can be used for improvement and addressing them openly can reduce negative word-of-mouth that may occur with online reviews.  

Customers who are happy with your experience can be tapped as a resource for testimonials that can build your reputation. A solid reputation always helps in attracting customers.

Conclusion

There is a lot to be learned from customer feedback. For an entrepreneur who actively listens, feedback can be a major tool in streamlining product and service offerings. It can be the cornerstone for growing a business.