If you’re not using customer feedback to help improve what you do, how is your business surviving? Collecting customer feedback is essential to business growth — loyal customers grow a business faster than any sales or marketing methods. If you’re not already gathering feedback, start today.

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“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”
— Bill Gates

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If we don’t know what’s right, we can’t do more of it. If we don’t know what’s wrong, we can’t do less of it. Basically, without customer feedback, we’re destined to fail. Are your customers recommending you to their family and friends? Why are you losing customers? Is there anything you could have done differently before it was too late?

For most businesses, word of mouth is the biggest and strongest form of marketing and it doesn’t cost anything. The more satisfied your customers are, the more likely they are to promote you. On the other hand, if customers are unhappy with an aspect of your service, and you’re not aware of it, you’ve got a silent customer acquisition killer, without even knowing it exists.

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Feedback provides data in three different ways:

→ Highlights problems, and affirms what you’re doing well.

→ Provides solutions you may not have thought of

→ Validation of the size of a problem or value of solving it. e.g. Is it just one customer with a problem or many? That’s information that will help you prioritise what, if any, changes you need to make.

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“I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.”
— Elon Musk

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Here’s a handful of examples of how customer feedback has been used by businesses, ultimately helping to provide a customer experience that people rave about:

→ Changed the way they communicate cancellation of tours due to weather.

→ Rewarding staff for providing an outstanding guest experience.

→ Fixed equipment, which the business didn’t know wasn’t working well.
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The world is constantly changing. What you’re doing today is not necessarily going to deliver the same value in the future. This is not just customer behaviour changes but also demographics maturing.

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Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot (who was recently voted as a top CEO in America) said it best:

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“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”

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