To understand your customers, customer feedback is important. Companies that listen to their customers have the tools to succeed - You’ve heard this many times and you have probably even given it consideration for your business. But what’s missing is a solid explanation. You’ve heard that customer feedback is crucial to your business grow, but the how’s and why’s are what I’ll try to help clarify for you.

Here are seven reasons why a customer feedback rating is important to the success of your business

1) Allows you to identify products that need improvement

You know your product, every variation, size, color, style, feature and you have educated your team hundreds of times. Unfortunately, your passion may not allow you to see the imperfections. It is important to know what appeals to your customers, as well as what was subpar and why. Listen to your customers and provide the products that they desire.

2) Engage with your Customers

Listening to your customer feedback makes your customers feel involved and valued. When customers feel listened to, they positively connect with your brand and direct their good experience back to you, which makes them a part of your business family and ensures return visits.

3) Positive Feedback generates Recommendations

Word of mouth advertising is very successful, and referrals are the most effective, free way of advertising. These most often come from friends and family and are often the most convincing recommendations.  Always remember to strive for positive feedback, if you want to gain customers through recommendations.

4) Convincing Customers to come back for more

You can always sell something once, but the true test is getting the customer to return over and over. Feedback is helpful in providing some of the finer details that encourage the recurring business. Is maybe free shipping, same day alterations, polite/educated support team, user friendly website which is the key to solidifying the customer relationship.

5) Embrace the Negative Feedback

Especially nowadays, with competition down the street and on line, its essential to tackle a problem or misunderstanding immediately. With the bandwidth of social media, a bad comment can do far reaching harm to your business.

Seek out a rating system can has the capability to alert you to negative feedback immediately – before your customer has left the store. Allowing the customer to share the unhappy experience and providing you with the opportunity to rectify the issue immediately.

6) Feedback helps you acquire new customers

As a consumer, one of the first things you do when looking up a business or product is to read online reviews. Make sure that you have reviews available to draw in the new business, and further more, make sure that the reviews are positive. Asking your customers for their feedback in store will allow you to react before it appears online.

7) Listening to customer feedback helps build loyalty for the brand

Actively soliciting feedback from your customers and reacting to their opinions creates a relationship that makes the buying process more personal. The customer perceives the business as being run by friendly people that care about their experience, instead of just a company that sells product.

As you see, eliciting feedback from your customers is important and can be very beneficial to your business, as it helps you get to know your customers better, increases their engagement and loyalty and brings in new customers. As it turns out, customer feedback is quite important!