Why should you listen to the customer?


Listening to your customers may sound like a simple technique, but it is the key to success. Not only will listening to feedback and giving you customers a voice make them feel valued, but it could also help your business strategy. Once you’ve established your target audience, you should listen to their feedback and acknowledge their marketing preferences in order to keep them engaged. Customer feedback can help companies improve their products as well as their customer experience and over all brand. With this in mind, join CT shirts, a leading retailer of men’s dress shirts and suits, to find out exactly why customer feedback is so important.

Customers are the answer

With an ever-changing marketplace it is easy for brands to fall into stagnation. As a nation, we are currently experiencing a stark demographic shift in the market, with millennial and generation Z shoppers acting as turning points in terms of what the customer wants from a purchase. If a product or service goes unchanged for a prolonged period, then it cannot meet these ever-changing needs and their offering is not up to scratch with the new customer requirements. Not all brands are clued up on the ways that this can be achieved and taking your market research to the next level is always a good place to start. There are a variety of tools available today to meet the needs of extensive market research for a changing demographic. When you think of taking your market research a step higher, think of using tools like the kano template offered by product research experts like Conjoint.ly.

It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out or whether you already have an established brand, contacting customers is always relevant. By pursuing these lines of enquiry, you can identify any flaws, experiences, and preferences which could prove fundamental for distinguishing your business and product in a congested market. These kind of insights are such a valuable tool for brands nowadays who are aiming to improve their products, but if they are not applying the findings in the right way then they become pointless. The thriving beauty and skincare business Glossier is a great example of this, as the team includes dedicated customer service agents who work closely with the marketing department and listen to customer experiences. By listening to customer feedback, you are essentially promoting a culture of improvement.

Personalisation is key

Nowadays, there is more to a purchase than just supply and demand. Your brand needs to do something that your competitors aren’t in order to compete. Personalisation has taken many businesses by storm, and for a brand to succeed they need to capture engaging elements in their market strategies, while also accounting for the human element that customers look for in an ever-automated world. Building strong customer relationships is more important than ever and listening to feedback from your audience is inherent to this. A recent survey from Infosys found that 31% of respondents said that they want their shopping experience to be far more personalised than it currently is an easy way to achieve this is by having name badges so all customers know who you are.

Another effective way to accommodate your customers Is being aware of their marketing preferences. This is a great example of how listening to customer feedback can develop a positive perception of your brand by your customers, and the retail industry is leading the way in this demonstration. As brick and mortar stores become gradually left behind in the fast-moving digital age, businesses are constantly under pressure to evolve and nurture the data that they have on customers. Convenience is a sought-after aspect amongst the new, younger market demographic, and by listening to customer feedback you can devise ways to make your brand appeal to a potentially larger audience. Coffee giant Starbucks made their digital app ultra-convenient by using locational data as well as previous orders to make getting that essential caffeine hit a streamlined service. Introduced as part of their rewards system, the customisable options helped revenue to soar to $2.56 billion.

Creating loyal customers

If your competitors are putting your customers first and you’re overlooking customer experience your brand could be in trouble. If you are smart with your approach to customer feedback, then you can boost your satisfaction rates as well as develop consumer loyalty. Every home will have its own stock of ‘household name’ type products that are absolute essentials on every shopping trip, and the reason that these products have achieved such status is by sustaining a consistently high level of customer satisfaction.

The simple solution to customer satisfaction is asking questions. There are a few smart metric strategies that you could employ to help. One example is the Net Promoter Score known as NPS, which allows your business to uncover target responses from your customers relating to your product or service. Through a series of simple questions with answers based on a 0-10 rating scale, with 0 being most negative and 10 being most positive, you can develop an understanding of how satisfied your customers feel towards your brand. The UK cosmetics experts Lush have topped a plethora of polls based on customer satisfaction and experience. From their revolutionised tablet-based till payments to the ethical, transparent brand character, the business has become customer satisfaction force to be reckoned with. Many of the stores branches are experimenting with both visual search technologies and voice activated assistants, showing just how much they value investing in their customer satisfaction rates.

Listening to the opinions of your customers on your products and services will prove invaluable in the long run, and it is an essential consideration for any business that aims to thrive in the evolving, modern market.

If you want your business to thrive in the modern market, then it is essential that you utilize customer feedback. Listening to your target audience is a simple yet effective way to get an edge on your competitors.