8 benefits of customer feedback surveys for your business

Customer feedback is critical to creating a customer-centric business. In today’s competitive market, retaining customers is essential to driving growth. In fact, 5% of a company’s business comes from existing customers. This highlights the importance of understanding your current customers to keep them happy and support brand loyalty. 

Customer feedback is not only for enhancing customer experience (CX) but also for enhancing product experience. This guide will share the eight benefits of customer feedback surveys for businesses and how customer feedback survey software streamlines data collection. 

Collecting customer feedback enables teams to understand customers, make customer-centric decisions, improve products, and much more. 

Here are eight reasons why customer feedback surveys matter:

If you want to understand customer needs, expectations, and pain points, send customer feedback surveys. Surveys are an excellent way to gather information from your customers about their experiences with your brand and products. By asking the right customer satisfaction questions, you can glean insights to gain a deeper understanding of your buyers. 

Pro-tip: Use an expert Customer Satisfaction Survey Template to take the stress off deciding what questions to ask.

Businesses should aim to align product updates, marketing strategies, and customer experience improvements with actual customer needs. This supports a customer-centric culture that puts customers first in decision-making. Using actual feedback from customers to make strategic decisions helps boost satisfaction and support business growth.  

For instance, a customer feedback survey may reveal that customers wish your brand’s fitness app had the option to track macros instead of only calories. Your product development team can then use this feedback to update your app to meet customer needs in this way. Applying direct feedback shows customers you care about what they have to share. 

Customer feedback is also useful for boosting cross-functional collaboration. Sharing customer feedback across departments fosters alignment and efficiency. Teams can work better together when they are aligned on the common goal of improving customer experience. Customer advocacy survey templates can be used to collect feedback that can then be applied to make targeted improvements. 

Another reason to use customer feedback surveys for your business is to improve your product offerings. Feedback-driven product development ensures that customer needs are met and helps businesses stay competitive. 

Using real-time feedback to optimize usability during beta testing can help your team improve products by addressing customer concerns or suggestions. Create the best products and services possible by utilizing surveys such as Net Promoter Score (NPS®) to monitor customer experiences and satisfaction levels.  

Building customer trust and loyalty is essential to growing a business over time. Businesses that leverage customer feedback and act on it, demonstrate commitment to customer satisfaction, building trust and loyalty. This commitment to customer satisfaction can go a long way in building long-term customer relationships. 

Businesses can use feedback to build customer trust and loyalty by showcasing positive reviews and testimonials as social proof. Showcasing what customers have to say about their experiences with your brand can influence new customers to trust your brand and make a purchase. 

Happy customers are more likely to stay loyal to a business and become brand advocates. Brands can use feedback insights to enhance customer service efforts and boost retention. By applying feedback, teams can increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn which improves business growth and profits. 

Apply feedback strategically by focusing on both the positives and negatives customers share with your business. Consider what parts of your business need improvement and areas where customers are highly satisfied. Implement changes that align with your customers’ feedback to ensure their satisfaction. 

Customer service is one area businesses can examine to review what customers are saying about representatives and their experiences. By updating customer service protocols or implementing training for employees, businesses can see an uptick in customer satisfaction levels. 

Customer insights can also be used to help businesses target their ideal audience. Customers may share their opinions on how your products are or are not meeting their needs and solving for pain points. Businesses should pay attention to current customers’ feedback when trying to target the right new customers. Customer feedback can be invaluable to businesses and provide insight into who the brand should be trying to reach and why.  

Customer churn is a serious issue that businesses face. When customers leave, businesses must work hard to attract new customers to replace the lost profits. Understanding why customers leave, enables businesses to take preventative action and reduce churn. 

For example, a business should be actively monitoring reviews of their company and its products to look for dissatisfied customers. Dissatisfied customers who share why they are leaving a business can help businesses identify unmet pain points and improvements to make. 

Business can apply feedback to reduce churn by sending exit surveys and doing churn analysis to identify why customers left. By using the feedback and addressing issues proactively, businesses can sometimes save customer relationships on the brink of failing. Additionally, teams can use feedback and apply it to prevent other customers for leaving for the same reasons. 

There are numerous channels that your business can use to collect customer feedback, including:

Surveys are a versatile, concise, and accessible method of collecting customer feedback. When measuring the customer experience, you have several different potential survey formats to choose from.

Let’s break down the leading customer experience surveys, what they look like, and how they deliver your business the insight you need to thrive. 

The Net Promoter Score measures how loyal your customers are to your business. The NPS is seen as the world’s leading customer satisfaction and loyalty metric, allowing you to track how your customers feel about your brand over time.

Launching NPS surveys is fairly easy, as you only need to ask one question: “How likely would you be to recommend this company to a colleague or friend?”

Respondents will then select their response on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being extremely likely and 0 being extremely unlikely. Answers with a score of 9 or 10 are promoters; scores of 7 or 8 are passives; scores of 0-6 are detractors.

Calculate the NPS, by using the following formula:

Your final score will be on a scale of -100 to 100. To see how you're progressing over time, you can benchmark your score against industry data or compare it to past quarters’ calculations. 

Related reading: 10 tips to build stellar NPS surveys.

Customer Satisfaction Score is an easy-to-use survey that measures how satisfied your customers feel with a particular interaction or experience with your company. For example, you could use a CSAT survey after customers check out to measure their purchase satisfaction.

The CSAT survey uses a similar question every time: “How would you rate your satisfaction with X on a scale of 1 [very unsatisfied] to 5 [very satisfied]?” Here, X is the interaction for which you want to track customer satisfaction.

Once you’ve begun to collect responses to this question, you can use the following formula to calculate the CSAT score:

CSAT surveys are a fantastic way to check in at critical customer touchpoints and discover what your clients think. Learn more about why customer satisfaction is important (and how to focus on it). 

Related reading: 50 examples of great customer satisfaction survey questions. 

Customer Effort Score is a customer experience metric that measures the relative effort a customer has to exert to complete an action with your business. CES surveys measure the total friction that customers experience when interacting with your company.

CES is important because 91% of customers will recommend a business after a low-effort, easy interaction. You can customize the exact CES question you ask to the specific task you’re examining. 

Here’s a general question you might use:

The responses to this can then vary from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree). Businesses can then calculate CES by using the following formula: 

You can understand why people leave a certain score by implementing open-ended feedback in your CES survey. Over time, you can identify issues with a process and remedy them to decrease friction at this touchpoint.

Related reading: How to use the Customer Effort Score

A customer service survey allows your customers to give feedback about how your support team performs. These surveys offer insight into how your customer support teams can improve and enhance the customer experience. 

On a customer service survey, you can ask questions like:

Based on these questions, you can begin to quantify the quality of your customer service. Equally, your feedback will shed light on where you can give additional training to improve your team.

Related reading: What you should ask in customer service surveys

Purchase experience feedback allows your customers to share how easy, understandable, and intuitive they find your checkout experience to be. 

A post-purchase satisfaction survey allows you to evaluate the customer’s purchase experience and identify areas to improve. In this survey, you’ll find questions like:

Get started with the SurveyMonkey post-purchase satisfaction survey template.

Although it’s sad to see a customer leave, sometimes, this can be a valuable opportunity to gain insight. A customer exit survey questions customers who have decided to stop choosing your business. 

An exit survey can ask some of the following questions to find out what you can improve for future customers:

From better understanding customers to reducing churn, the benefits of customer feedback are vast. The importance of customer experience is paramount to the customer lifecycle. To stay on top of CX, use SurveyMonkey to collect customer service feedback and purchase experience feedback. 

Our customer feedback survey templates for customer satisfaction and purchase satisfaction make it simple to glean the insights you need to succeed. Get started collecting feedback today.