How to use customer feedback to enhance retention and loyalty

Highlights

You'll learn about using feedback to drive customer retention and loyalty.

• Understand customer needs: Use customer feedback to identify pain points
• Build trust through action: Act on feedback insights to show you value customer input
• Enhance experiences: Leverage tools like a composable DXP and headless CMS to refine user journeys and deliver personalized experiences.

Make the most of customer feedback with a composable DXP to enable you to customize digital experiences to the needs and expectations of your customers.

Customers drive business revenue growth through purchases, but they can offer much more than that. Customers can provide relevant data that you can integrate into product development, use for customer service, or incorporate into your customer retention strategy. 

A robust customer feedback mechanism gives you an insight into customer choices, needs, thoughts and preferences. These insights allow you to address gaps in their experience and improve products and services. That way, you keep customers engaged and build trust, leading to higher retention rates.

It all starts with focusing on what customers want and getting that data through feedback mechanisms.

Why customer feedback matters for retention

Customer feedback is information that customers provide summarizing their experiences with a product, service, or experience. It can include their opinions, complaints, preferences, reactions, etc. 

Also, it can be positive, neutral, or negative, depending on whether customers are satisfied or if the experience falls short of expectations. Here are the benefits of customer feedback for retention strategies.

• Identify and fix issues: When you integrate customer feedback into your customer retention strategy, you can identify issues and fix them on time. That way, you satisfy their needs and improve the user experience.
• Improves customer relationships: Implementing a customer feedback mechanism strengthens your connection with your audience and positions your business as customer-centric. 
• Creates a customer-centric culture: Having a customer feedback culture is one of the signs of a customer-centric business. That fosters trust and leads to more engaged customers.
• Reliable data: You can be assured that you are getting accurate data on user experience, as customer feedback provides reliable primary data. 

Proven methods to collect customer feedback

There are several efficient methods to get customer insights using feedback channels. These channels are cost-effective, easy to use and easy to manage. Here are a few to consider.

• Online surveys: These are structured methods to receive customer feedback. They help you gauge customers' feelings and whether they are satisfied with different aspects of your products or services.
• Customer interviews: This feedback mechanism involves talking to your customers to understand their experiences. They provide deep insights that help you understand and address customer needs.
• Feedback through social media: Social media platforms offer analytics and features for customer feedback. You can use direct messages, polls, or even comments. They provide real-time insights into customer sentiment.
• Usability tests: A staple in product development, these tests allow you to test the ease of use of a website, app, or product. They help you understand the user experience and offer quality data with which you can optimize products.

Using feedback loops to gather input from customers

Feedback loops offer an ongoing system to get input from customers. It requires specific tools and precise timing.

1. Using specific tools and techniques

• Web feedback widgets and in-app surveys: These tools create continuous feedback loops. They collect real-time insights from customers while users are engaging with the site or app.
• Customer analytics: This is used to analyze data from customer interaction. It helps you identify patterns in customer behavior that can improve customer experiences.
• In-app feedback tools: These can be polls or pop-up questions that customers are shown while they interact with an app. They work in real-time and are excellent for gauging user experience.

2. Timing customer feedback

Timing is crucial as you need to use the right tools and language to obtain customer feedback. 

• Before a purchase: You may use polls or surveys to get customer opinions on their browsing experience. If you offer a trial, you can also get feedback on usability.
• After purchase: This is targeted at existing customers, who can provide more comprehensive feedback on the entire process. Use feedback tools to ask about their opinions on specific products, features, customer service, etc.
• During moments of friction: This is when potential or actual customers are facing difficulties. When a customer contacts customer support, it gives you the chance to identify areas they need help with. Contentstack's Care Without Compromise offers proactive customer service, ensuring that customers get answers when they need them.

3. Using customer feedback to retain customers

The goal of collecting customer feedback is to improve their experience. While there are many small steps and tools involved, the entire process can be summarized into three steps.

• Analyze feedback: Segment feedback by customer type, such as new versus existing customers. Look for recurring themes or complaints that could relate to product features, ease of use, customer support, etc. Assign relevant metrics to analyze the data, such as net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT).
• Strategies to act on feedback: Categorize the input, identify key patterns and prioritize what to improve. Next, personalize the customer experience and improve the products or services where required. 
• Closing the feedback loop: This is where you communicate what changes you have implemented. Given the importance of transparency, this fosters trust with your customers and makes them feel valued.

Benefits of customer feedback for retention

Leveraging a strong customer feedback mechanism in a retention strategy can benefit a business by making it more customer-centric, improving customer engagement and supporting a data-driven approach to developing products and services. Here are some benefits.

• Improved customer satisfaction: Businesses use customer feedback data to address customer pain points. This strategy results in products, services and digital experiences that align with customer preferences, which in turn leads to higher satisfaction levels over time.
• Reduced customer churn: Customer feedback, such as in-app feedback, enables you to identify issues before they escalate. This allows you to offer proactive customer service, reducing churn.
• Customer service improvements: Customer feedback enables you to offer precise support to customers when they need it. This ensures you have the right answers to whatever queries customers come up with.
• Strengthens long-term relationships: By closing the feedback loop, customers are aware that you have integrated their needs into the product or digital experience. This improves customer retention and drives repeat business.

Case studies

Digital tax platform

A digital tax platform's WordPress CMS was limited and did not support the delivery of personalized content experiences. Hence, they chose Contenstack's headless CMS to power content across their Spanish and German locales. The localization enhanced customer experience, allowing them to engage customers better and deliver a more customized experience.

"We work with a lot of variables — more than 300. It's very complex, but now with Contentstack, it's way easier to keep all the content up to date." Product Manager said.

Read more about how digital tax platform improved customer experience with Contentstack.

GetYourGuide

GetYourGuide caters to over 500,000 daily visitors, but its previous content management system lacked the bandwidth to manage the workload. The company opted for Contentstack's headless CMS, which enabled it to deliver personalized content and better engage customers. It also helped it incorporate customer feedback, leading to a 75% reduction in support and approval times.

Pedro Torres, the product manager, explained the changes. "With Contentstack, we can deliver on -- and exceed -- what customers are expecting, regardless of device, and consistently deliver those experiences as soon as new travel opportunities become available."

Keep reading to learn how GetYourGuide enhanced customer experience via Contentstack. 

FAQ section

What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is the comments and information customers provide about a company's services or products or their entire experience with a brand. Depending on how they experience the product or service, customer feedback can be positive, neutral, or negative.

Why is collecting customer feedback important for retention?

Collecting feedback helps identify issues with your app, web, service, product, etc. It enables you to improve the customer experience and align products with customer expectations. Thus, it reduces churn, improves engagement and can lead to customer loyalty.

How can businesses effectively gather customer feedback?

Businesses can use various tools to gather customer feedback, such as online surveys, oral interviews, social media polls and comments, or in-app or web analytics features. 

What are some best practices for utilizing customer feedback?

To start, segment your customers, look for recurring patterns and ensure the ease of use of feedback tools. Also, integrate feedback to improve the digital experiences, and finally, close the feedback loop by communicating with customers.

Learn more

Customer feedback can be integrated into product development or to improve customer service and digital experiences. It helps you address user experience gaps and pain points in the customer journey. Ensure that you design a system that makes it easy for customers to leave feedback. That way, you build trust, improve your products and retain your most valuable customers.

Contentstack's personalization solution enables you to collect and integrate customer feedback to create digital experiences that resonate. It integrates personalization into your CMS, allowing you to tailor content to customers' needs. It also allows you to leverage brand-aware generative AI to scale content for specific audience segments.

Global brands like the Miami Heat and GetYourGuide have benefited from offering personalized experiences based on customer feedback. You can follow suit to deliver even better results and retain your most important customers. Talk to us to get started today.