Customer feedback: What you need to get from your customers

Timothy Ware on August 19, 2021

Whether you’re a startup or an established brand, getting in touch with your customers is critical. Customer feedback helps businesses identify problems and opportunities that they might overlook otherwise.

Baremetrics is a great tool for automating the process of gathering customer feedback. With Baremetrics, you can automatically prompt customers with a form asking for feedback whenever a customer cancels. Then, this information is processed via the Baremetrics Cancellation Insights tool. 

Try out cancellation insights with a Baremetrics free trial! Get on the app, see how it works, and start getting information about your customers today.

 

What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is information that helps business owners and managers understand what their customers think of them. Customer feedback includes opinions, insights into how your customers use your product, issues your customers have had with the UI, or any other input shared by your users about their experiences with your product.

It is much more than just verbal or written communication; customer feedback can take the form of ratings, reviews, and shares on social media platforms, as well as coverage in blogs or publications.

While there are so many ways of getting feedback from your customers, your focus needs to be on getting constructive criticism so you can really deliver a product that serves your customer’s needs.

Why is customer feedback important?

It is essential to know what drives customer satisfaction if you want them to be happy. Unless you understand the factors that lead to your customers being satisfied with your service, it’ll be impossible to create loyalty with them.

 

1. Identify inefficiencies in your user experience 

Customer feedback is the best way to identify any inefficiencies within your user experience. The customer, being at the receiving end of the experience you provide, knows what they like and don’t like about your product.

 

2. Get your users involved

When customers are asked for opinions, they feel more involved and important. They also feel attached and a part of the product development. Getting your customers involved helps you develop your platform for them.

 

3. Stop churn

A recent survey found that just 1 out of 26 unhappy customers is likely to complain about a service. The other 25 simply seek services elsewhere.

Thus, it is vital to reach out to customers and hear about their problems, because they won’t tell you otherwise.

There are multiple help desk solutions like an email ticketing system that can help you handle customer complaints and collect feedback efficiently.

Get customer feedback before churn happens and be sure to avoid the top customer retention rate mistakes that companies are making today.

 

4. Empower your customers to evangelize

Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most effective strategies for any business. If you do a great job of collecting customer feedback, it will help you in brand advocacy. By proactively reaching out, listening to your customer’s problems, and then fixing the issues, great reviews are assured.

When potential customers see these positive reviews, they’re more likely to buy from your company and continue spreading the word about how great it is.

 

5. Drive customer success with customer feedback

Your customer feedback service acts as its own customer success marketing team. Customer feedback can help you drive your business by improving the relationships you have with your customers.

 

What information should you collect?

How do you know what customers really want? This can be inferred by the information you collect from their feedback. Here’s what information you should gather through your customer feedback form.

 

1. What exactly do you like/dislike about the product?

You want to know exactly what attracts or repels a customer to your product. This is an excellent way to identify the selling points as well as the weaker points of your product.

 

2. What features would you like us to improve or add?

This question should be open-ended because it’s hard to guess what your customers need. There might be a simple feature you are overlooking that could revolutionize the user experience and increase sales. Providing an opportunity for customers to tell you their needs helps both solve day-to-day problems and improve the business model.

 

3. What services do you expect that we fail to provide you?

This is one way to figure out if your customers are looking for something that you don’t offer. When you see a pattern in the feedback form, consider creating a poll with multiple options that ask people what features they most want.

 

4. What makes you choose us over our competitors?

Find out exactly why your customers are choosing you vs. competitors. These reasons could be anything from price to customer service quality.

 

5. Why did you cancel your subscription to our services?

Why are your customers no longer willing to pay for your services? You need to dig deep to determine the cause of cancellations to improve your products and services. An innovative way to figure this out is by using Baremetrics.

The cancellation insights feature will help you track down the reasons your customers are canceling and how much revenue has been lost for specific reasons. Beyond gathering customer feedback, it can also generate automated emails to help get the customers back.

 

Customer feedback service acts as its own customer success marketing team

Get deep insights into MRR, churn, LTV and more to grow your business

 

6. How does the cancellation insights feature work?

When a customer attempts to cancel a subscription, they are directed to the form where they may select their reasons for cancelling. Then, personalized emails tailored to their cancellation reasons are sent to the customers.

You can edit, add, or remove the cancellation reasons on your forms at any time. Customers can also share additional feedback on the last page of this process.

 

7. What else do we really need to know about our customer experience?

At the end of the feedback form, leave a space for the customers to talk about their experience. You may not be able to ask all of the right questions, so give your customers the space to tell you what they really think.

 

What Customer Behavior do you want to track?

You might think that qualitative customer feedback is enough to achieve better outcomes, and it is massively important, but it is also valuable to take a data-driven approach and look at exactly how your customers are moving through your app.

 

1. Segmentation

With Baremetrics you can segment your customers based on any kind of characteristic you choose. For example, you could look at what features customers are using by plan size.

If only customers who are on large plans are using a specific feature, it might mean that feature is only useful for larger companies. This is the kind of feedback or insight that you need to design your service bundles and price them.

 

2. In app behavior tracking

In Baremetrics, you can develop custom attributes within your app, and then Baremetrics can keep track of how often those events occur. For example, specific button clicks, feature usage, or spending within the app can all be tracked with Baremetrics.

You can use Baremetrics to keep track of this behavior and analyze it against the customer’s plan type, the age of the subscription, and more.

 

3. Free trial behavior 

With the Trial Insights feature on Baremetrics, you can monitor your customers’ behavior during their trial period. This will give you a ton of information on how your customers are responding to your free trial experience. In addition, it provides you with up-to-the-minute data on the conversion rate, average trial length, and the number of active trials.

 

Other ways to get customer feedback

1. Sales Feedback

Asking customers about the barriers to purchase or what motivated them to buy can help improve your sales process. The best way to do this is to ask your customers directly in the sales call. This can be very challenging to implement operationally as you’ll need to train your salespeople, but it is very rewarding!

 

2. Net Promoter Scores

One method of measuring customer satisfaction is the net promoter score, a customer loyalty metric that measures how likely your customers are to stick around. It’s based on a 10-point rating scale, with 0 being the lowest score possible and 10 representing highest level of satisfaction.

Find out how Baremetrics increased customer loyalty by 125% in six hours.

Conclusion: Why customer feedback is critical

The more you hear from customers, the better equipped you are to improve their experience with your company. Customer feedback will help you:

 

1. Reduce churn

The churn rate measures the number of customers or subscribers that have stopped using your services during a given period of time. Customer feedback helps you reduce churn since it helps figure out why customers are canceling and what you can do to improve.

 

2. Give better service

Customer feedback helps you improve on areas that are lacking and identify potential new opportunities to offer better services.

 

3. Offer a better product

Customer feedback aims to keep your current customers happy and find out whether you can do anything to win back former customers. Ensuring that you align your product offering to your customers’ needs will help you increase your retention rate.

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Timothy Ware

Tim is a natural entrepreneur. He brings his love of all things business to his writing. When he isn’t helping others in the SaaS world bring their ideas to the market, you can find him relaxing on his patio with one of his newest board games. You can find Tim on LinkedIn.