Customer Engagement Will Grow Your Business (7 Reasons Why)

If you’ve previously administered a consumer survey, reviewed customer feedback, or been involved in a focus group, it will be no surprise to you how telling this information can be.

In this article, we’ll look at 7 key reasons why regular customer engagement helps grow businesses of all shapes and sizes, and how you can make the most of your feedback and survey responses when you do receive them.

1. Your customers pay the bills

Just because you spend a large portion of your time refining your business, doesn’t mean you’re completely objective as to the quality of your offering, nor does it mean you’ll see every potential opportunity at your disposal. This is where your customers come in!

Your website visitors, social media fans, and customers have already taken an interest in what you do, therefore you have a great opportunity to learn what they think you’re doing well, could be improved, or be an opportunity for you. If enough people are saying similar things, then you should consider taking action.

If you don’t, the most likely turn of events will be that your customers will go looking for these services elsewhere. Because you’ve already got the attention of these people, you’re in a great position to offer them services they want or improve the ones you’re already offering, therefore boosting their ongoing spend.

2. Plenty of choices online

As we touched on earlier, if you don’t provide your customers with what they’re looking for, they will most likely go looking for it elsewhere. So much so, that 86% of customers who receive poor customer service from you, will quit doing business with you. Customer service you say, isn’t that just good manners? Not at all.

Customer service is a full-cycle service that includes listening to your customer’s opinions and ensuring their journey from browsing your services to check-out is as easy as possible.

With all the different choices online, you have to be competitive across all areas of your business. Whether it’s improving existing services or adding new ones, your customers are the best people to tell you whether you’re keeping up.

3. Acquiring new customers increases costs

Have you ever wondered how much it costs to acquire a new customer vs. how much it costs to retain an existing customer? Almost 7 times, that’s how much! So many organizations overlook their existing customer base in search of new opportunities, and forget that it’s their existing customers who have been kind enough to give you their business.

Now nobody’s suggesting that seeking out new customers is a waste of time, but focusing on increasing your existing customer spend is definitely something you can use customer feedback to achieve. When the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, as opposed to 5-20% for new customers, you would be mad not to.

4. Reviews can make or break you

The sad but interesting truth about online customer feedback is that for each negative review of your service you receive online, this review will reach around twice as many people as compared to a positive review.

With this in mind, you need to make sure you’re using customer feedback to pre-empt negative reviews about you online. The customer feedback you receive needs to be acted upon; otherwise, you’ll be facing a growing amount of negative feedback you won’t be able to manage.

However, it’s good to keep in mind that if someone does post negatively about you online, 51% of these people will react positively to you if you directly address their feedback.

5. Make use of your opportunity

Did you know that 79% of people who provided negative feedback to a company had their feedback ignored? Ouch, that’s a lot of grumpy customers. As an organization, this is a major opportunity for you to outplay your competitors and provide a far greater service.

Sure the aim is to avoid negative feedback, but that will come when you listen to your customers through regular email based surveys, use of a customer feedback tab on your website, and implementing a strong website conversion review across your site.

6. It takes time to get those sales

Surprisingly, only 30% of first-time website visitors make a purchase on e-commerce sites. This may shed light as to why this user group only spends around 2.5 minutes on a site, whilst returning visitors spend over 5 minutes.

Nevertheless, don’t get discouraged if you notice your website visitors are not making a purchase the first time around.

If you’ve got things right, there is a strong chance they’ll be back and will make a purchase if your check-out process is easy to navigate. With drop-out rates during check-out generally going through the roof on most sites, this is a major point of focus where customer surveys and usability studies can help out.

7. Use your collected data

It’s amazing to see that so many organizations do the right thing and collect customer feedback, yet fail to use that feedback data in their businesses.

Sometimes it can be unpleasant or costly to recognize what you’re doing is not quite right, but remember just how much of a difference a small change can make to your bottom-line.

Regular customer feedback is an affordable business tool you can use to bolster your marketing and service offerings. So next time you see something negative happening with your website performance, sales, or online reviews; ask yourself, how can I change this trend and offer a better service to my customers?

The answer? Listen to what your customers are saying and act on that feedback as soon as possible.