The Importance of Collecting Feedback from Your Community

In order to make sure that you are constantly improving your business, it is important to collect feedback from your community. Gathering the opinions of those who are experiencing your business from the outside looking in gives some valuable perspective and is a crucial step to successful inbound marketing.

Below are four reasons why collecting feedback from your community is important:

Find out how your customers feel about your product or service

Collecting feedback can be done through numerous ways such as surveys, email, in person, or by phone. The feedback gained from these channels can be used to understand what aspects of your product or service that your customers enjoy ... and possibly those they don’t.

For example, it is extremely simple to put together a survey through a service such as SurveyMonkey, which even has pre-made templates you can use, like the above image.

It shows your customers that you care

Everyone wants to have their voices heard, and collecting feedback allows just that. You are showing your customers that you want to hear from them. This is a win-win situation for both you and your customers. The feedback gained from  customers helps improve your product while also helping them feel that they have a say in shaping your product or service.

Go a step further and respond to those who took the time to provide feedback. Whether the feedback was positive or negative, they will be happy to hear from you.

You can learn who your evangelists are

The feedback gained from your community can also help you identify who the evangelists of your product or service are. Evangelists are those customers who give your business high ratings and are likely to do things such as refer your business to their friends/family, become repeat customers, or write testimonials. It is important to know who these customers are so you can contact them and build stronger relationships.

If you haven't already, form strong social media networks. Your evangelists will help spread your brand widely through social channels. Customers follow and trust recommendations made on social media. With the use of social and your best brand evangelists at your side, you can watch the leads roll in.

You can find ways to better your product or service

Your customers give a new perspective of your product or service. Their feedback may teach you something new about your product/service or what features they want to see. Opening the lines of communication between you and your customers can spur innovation based on what your customers want.

Acting on feedback from your community can only help your business. When you look to comments from those who are familiar with your brand, you gain valuable insight. When this insight is applied to your business, you can increase sales and overall satisfaction of your customers.

What are ways that you open up the lines of communication and collect feedback from your community?