As business people, we often struggle with how we’re marketing or selling our products. Do they have the right features? Do our customers care about the benefits? Are they willing to pay what we’re asking? Are they getting value from what we’re doing? We spend a lot of time thinking about all these questions, but often the answer is just to ask our customers what they think.
With the popularity of social media, blogging, comments, and product ratings (etc.), people are very comfortable with giving their opinion online (even more so if there is some type of anonymity). Its so much easier to just ask people what they like or don’t like than it is to spend so much time pondering over the answer (or doing expensive research surveys). You can get good and honest answers directly from the source. And then you can improve your product or service into something that people actually want (or are willing to pay more for).
No one knows everything and no one has all the answers. It takes a lot of feedback to make a good product. It used to be that only the large companies could afford the type of research to make that possible. Now anyone can have direct contact with their customers online (psst, this works great in person too).
It’s also much easier to rapidly improve and change things through feedback, so nothing needs to be completely polished the first time (it’s not always expected either). Getting something out there so that people can interact with it and give feedback is often better than spending the same amount of time brainstorming internally.
Giving your customers a voice in your product also gives them a feeling of involvement, which means they’re more likely to feel some sort of attachment to your brand (which means they’re more likely to recommend you to others and tell you about problems). The flip side is that you need to actually do something with their feedback so they feel like you’re actually listening.
How do you use customer feedback?
(photo by kevindooley @ Flickr CC)
Liked this post? Consider subscribing to our RSS feed or our free email updates or following us on Twitter.
Technorati tags: brand, marketing, branding, brand strategy, business, reputation, brand management