One of the ironies in the world of market research, is that while customer feedback is so incredibly valuable, many businesses fail to see it as a part of their market research data collection strategy. While many market researchers just want to push forward and discover new opportunities in product offerings and new markets, some of the best information your business can gather is from existing customers and their experiences.
If your business isn’t already listening to current customers, it’s missing out on valuable data. Once customer feedback has been sourced from surveys, interviews and more, it provides many opportunities for businesses to improve their services and customer experience. Therefore, examining customer feedback in your market research plan can benefit you in three main ways:
1. Improves Retention & Customer Satisfaction
Because current customers have already invested time and money into your offerings, they have a vested interest in making your offerings better. By listening to customer feedback, you are showing that you value your customers’ opinions and their experience with your offerings. If customers identify problem areas with your product and you change them, it not only creates a better product for the customer to use now. It also creates a better product for future customers and shows that you are actively improving upon your offerings.
All of this allows your customers to solve their problems more efficiently, which can lead to increased customer satisfaction and retention rates. In turn, this leads to more profits. According to Bain & Co, a 5 percent increase in customer retention can increase profitability by as much as 75 percent.
Further, optimizing the overall customer experience is now a large and influential part of the overall business-consumer relationship. In fact, a study by Walker Information concluded that by the year 2020, customer experience will be the most influential brand differentiator, surpassing classic heavyweights “product” and “price”. So you want to be sure that your customer experience is top-notch!
2. Learn How to Create Marketing for New Customers
Doing market research to gain customer feedback can give your business key insights into your strengths and weaknesses. Once you know what customers think of your business, you can position your current marketing and messaging to highlight your strengths while you work to improve your weaknesses.
Listening to your current customers can also help you respond and react to trends. If there are certain trends in your user’s industries, you’ll be able to find out through talking to your customers. Then you can start adapting to trends in your content and marketing, instead of catching up with them.
3. Identify Influencers & Pain Points
Identifying advocates and influencers who play an indirect – yet for some customers, critical – role in enabling or preventing a sale and relationship can be one of the greatest insights gathered from customer feedback market research. By getting to the bottom of who is influencing sales and retention, you can understand who you need to be marketing to and which tools these influencers need for success.
For example, if you run a marketing automation software that is used by marketing managers, you may find through market research that the real influencer is the CEO or business owner. By adding a tool to your marketing automation software that creates easily emailed monthly reports, you are providing value to the user (the marketing manager who will create the reports) and to the influencer (the CEO who needs reports to determine the software’s ROI).
Learn More
Accurately measuring customer satisfaction on multiple levels through market research reveals distinctions in service and support so businesses can fortify what is working and fix what is not. To learn more about customer feedback market research, contact the Communications For Research team today. You’ll speak with our co-CEO Colson Steber about your business and market research goals. He’ll be able to give you advice, answer your market research questions and provide a quote based on your timeline and budget.
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