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“The eerie silence on your part is quite appalling! Not only did you ignore all my suggestions, but you also never cared to respond or do a follow-up. I would like to discontinue all your future services.”
Imagine opening your feedback dashboard and seeing a message like this. Not the perfect start to the day, is it? What pushed the customer to drop a bombshell like this on you suddenly?
After all, the launch was flawless and the product is out on the market; still, why is the customer angry with you? Let’s give you a reality check. Somewhere down the line, you forgot about the most basic rule of contemporary business – Listening to your customers.
A common blunder that every startup makes is that they tend to take it easy once they have acquired the customers. They start forgetting about the customer retention part, making you stray away from your customers’ needs.
To make matters worse, the customer needs constantly evolve due to the market’s dynamic and competitive nature. And, when you lose track of these ever-changing needs, you will start feeling overwhelmed, eventually taking you down into a state of no return.
Is the launch phase the most important phase of your product lifecycle?
, we do concur with the common notion that the launch phase is an integral part of your product cycle, but you must understand that it is not the final one. You cannot relax and lean back yet. What follows is an excruciating journey of listening, learning, iterating, and delivering numerous feature improvements based on accurate customer feedback.
This phase of decoding the customer feedback often gets drowned in the initial sales spike of a product launch as it creates a mirage of record traffic days. You must realize that even in these peak traffic rates, only a small number of customers actually buy the product.
So, what should startups do in order to cope up in this fiercely competitive ecosystem? You cannot go toe-to-toe against well-established organizations as you might not have the resources or competencies. Instead, you can opt to leverage customer experience.
Customer feedback, an essential cog in customer experience, represents a gold mine of opportunities for startups. Easy to acquire and sometimes easy to convert into features, maintaining a good feedback loop with the customers can efficiently boost your startup’s growth.
Why feedback is a necessity and not a luxury during product launch?
Let’s try to understand how customer feedback can help your startup after a product launch –
Feedback creates a remarkable connection with the customer
Customer feedback defines the emotions of the customer perfectly. When organizations start moving from the old school approaches and start listening to the customer, there will be a new and encouraging aura. The feedback could be positive or negative; nevertheless, it gives you valuable information that can prove vital in decision-making scenarios. It also generates a feeling amongst the customers that they are involved with all aspects of the newly developed product.
The raw insights from the customers represent their mindset and what they are expecting from your product. As a startup, this is where your advantage lies; you are flexible and can adapt to these expectations quickly. When customers feel like they are being listened to, they begin to establish a firm connection with your brand or product, resulting in increased sales and a better retention rate. More importantly, it further solidifies brand loyalty.
Feedback provides critical insights for your pricing strategy
How can startups gain a competitive advantage in a market dominated by big players? The only options in front of you are to develop a compelling product and execute sound strategies for positioning the product in the market. Pricing strategy is an essential part of product positioning as it creates a competitive advantage that will set you and your product apart.
Customer feedback is a crucial part of this pricing strategy. Many startups try to listen to their customers, especially when it comes to pricing. By collecting and decoding customer feedback, you can gain insights into the competitors’ pricing strategies and tailor it to help you achieve a significant advantage, which will help you attract new customers and retain the existing ones.
Feedback points out the flaws in your product
Developing a product is highly tedious. And after working on it for a long time, you know every small feature and application that you would have discussed over a thousand times with other stakeholders. At this stage, it’s normal for you to start turning a blind eye to the product’s imperfections. It is like a trap, which almost every modern-day organization falls into even when they are aware of its presence.
Collecting feedback from customers and understanding it will help you claw out of this tricky situation. At the end of the day, the customer only wants a perfect product, and it is natural for them to expose those imperfections that you failed to address while developing the product. They will voice their opinions, and with collective criticism, they will point out the features that need to be improved so that the product will function better.
Startups can cash in on this opportunity presented to them by the customer. You have the leeway to incorporate these improvements suggested by the customer; all it takes is collecting the customer’s feedback effectively and listening to them consistently.
Feedback shields core customers and generate personal recommendations
The core customers are those who take the product under their wings at an early stage. Collecting constant feedback from them and implementing the suggested changes are extremely important for an organization irrespective of its size. These core customers will start acting like your brand ambassadors and vouch for your product, thereby generating personal recommendations.
Many startups fail to realize the value of the core customers as they are always running behind in acquiring new customers. What you must realize is that making a product successful in the market is a longish process. You cannot snap your fingers and get it done instantly unless of course, your product is the champion of the niche and comes without any flaws, which is never the case in reality.
Feedback helps to measure customer satisfaction
How do you know that your customers are delighted with your product? You can sometimes make it out with your regular conversations with them – that might give you some hints. But if you want objective data, where would you go?
Customer feedback is the best way to measure satisfaction. The new-age customer is not shy, especially when it comes to voicing their opinion. By keeping a watch on your social media platforms, website feedback forums, or even asking for quarterly NPS reviews, you can amass feedback.
Gathering customer feedback is an unavoidable activity for startups. It’s mainly because most of the startups operate on a smaller budget and resource pool. So, identifying a product’s success or failure at an earlier stage is crucial for corrective actions.
Feedback helps in designing useful content for the website
Acquiring feedback from different sources will unearth a vast number of suggestions. But these suggestions are not only limited to your product. Sometimes the feedback will point out the aspects of your website that need improvement.
In a way, we can say that feedback helps optimize your website content. You can also use what you learned from the user feedback to collect or curate content for your future blog or newsletter, which will increase your engagement and conversions.
Feedback helps to validate buyer personas
Validating the buyer persona is a tiresome process. It is a fictional character that sums up your customer. You will need to get into the field and interact with a significant number of customers to obtain a good and valuable amount of data. You can then use this data to validate the buyer personas for designing several marketing activities.
Startups need to have a clear picture of their ideal customers. Feedbacks make this process of procuring data much more straightforward, so much so, the data comes to you. Customers share their opinions that will give out slight clues about their character traits. This priceless bit of information can help you understand what type of customers you are selling your product to.
How to collect feedback efficiently?
Website and in-app widgets: There are numerous embeddable on-site widgets that can collect instant customer feedback. The main advantage of this form of feedback collection is that you don’t have to ask the customer any questions. Some widgets rely on chat functionalities that increase the interaction with the customer and pick up vital information.
Tools like Antaha lets you capture feedback by enabling options for your customer to react to any product updates. All they have to do is submit a quick response reaction using emojis. It works on a very simple principle – customers are more likely to give feedback immediately after a product/feature announcement.
Customer feedback surveys: Developing a survey is no cakewalk. You will feel the urge to ask tons of questions to the customer, but always remember to ask the questions to meet your end goals. Here is a free template that you can use for conducting customer feedback surveys.
Email & customer contact forms: Using emails for obtaining feedback will help you gather honest responses. To increase the rate of customer responses, ensure that you set clear expectations, organize email feedback, and send personalized requests.
Social media: It is the latest player to enter the fray. It helps companies acquire candid feedback from customers. With retweets, comments, likes, shares, stories, and mentions, social media has become a vital tool for gathering customer feedback. Here is a brand asking for feedback from customers on Twitter –
Pick your battles wisely
Let’s be honest here; it’s an unapologetic world out there. People are incredibly vocal and harsh on online platforms. It’s not hard to find reviews like these on popular platforms –
You might be flooded with a never-ending stream of criticism if you are a startup in particular. It is natural to feel demoralized when you have to stand up to a huge chunk of negative feedback.
So, how do you tackle this predicament? Instead of caving in, you have to keep a level head and seek out the best possible way to adapt to the situation. You should think from all angles, and if you can stretch your investments for a product that is receiving constant negative criticisms, you can go ahead and commit to it. But if you think iterating again on the same product is just a waste of time and resources, remember, it is wise to pick your battles.
These days customers are extremely cautious and spoiled for choice at the same time. They always look for the best option and never settle for anything less.
By treating customer feedback as a crucial component of the customer’s journey or experience, you can turn it to your advantage. And, by optimizing the customer’s journey when they face difficulties, businesses can create critical moments of truths that will influence the customer’s purchase decisions.
Feedback will also result in constant innovation and out-of-the-box ideas, which are the core foundations of a startup. If you are looking for continuous growth, you must make sure that you have set up all the additional feedback metrics relevant to the situation.
Start asking questions about your product’s features, get the customers involved, encourage them to express their opinions, engage in constant dialogue with them, turn all the insights into a positive experience for the customer, and ultimately make them come back for more.