No digital business can be successful without a well-designed, functional, and user-friendly website or app. The end-user says the final word no matter how brilliant your design and UI solutions are. Thus, if your designs are unclear or non-intuitive, you can easily lose the vital customer base or popularity in the online space.
To make their resources user-centric, most businesses go to the online and offline space and ask people what they like and dislike, what they miss on their digital resources, and what an ideal interface should look like. Every professional SaaS design agency conducts user research on a regular basis, as it’s the only guarantee that it moves in the right direction to satisfy customers and deliver stellar UX.
Here is a deeper review of why customer feedback matters, how it affects your business, and what questions you should ask to get valuable insights into web design.
What Is Customer Feedback?
Some time ago, online businesses pursued a model of their products’ active promotion, envisioning customers as passive recipients online. It was believed that an aggressive, memorable marketing campaign is the golden recipe for success.
However, the modern online space is regulated by the end-user to a large degree. People are free to decide whether to buy products or services from a particular provider or a dozen of its competitors. With this changing reality in mind, businesses have started listening to people more attentively. They send out surveys and organize online interviews to learn whether customers are satisfied with the obtained product/service and whether they had a positive user experience on the website.
Credit: IMPACT Branding & Design
Why Ask Customers for Feedback?
A dissatisfied client typically abandons the company for a competitor, thus causing the business KPIs to dwindle. You can stop this process by understanding what went wrong and what people don’t like or miss on your website. It’s highly possible to remedy the situation with timely corrections. Here are some essential benefits of listening and reacting to customer feedback on time.
#1 Promotional Content Improvements
For many online businesses, a website or app is the only source of information that customers can get about their products and services. Thus, making all promotional content relevant, valuable, and engaging for users is vital. This content should communicate the product’s key benefits and value for the customer. In this case, a reliable UI/UX design agency like Zensite may help guarantee higher sales and lower the churn rate.
Listening to customers – those who bought the product and abandoned the site before the purchase – is a precious source of information about what’s right or wrong with your promo content. Ask people about what they lacked and what went wrong; you can boost sales and conversion rates even with a couple of simple tweaks.
#2 Better Customer Support
Once you analyze your customers’ inquiries and see with what problems they turn to live chats and hotlines, you become much better positioned to ensure better UX. It may be done with a FAQ section or a Wiki-like database where the users can find answers to their issues in no time.
Research suggests that user satisfaction rises, and the volume of support inquiries falls once the business launches a community database. Thus, you can try this method to satisfy your customers and optimize the expenditures on support representatives.
#3 Product/Service Enhancements
Once you see that the demand for your product or service reduces, it’s time to ask people what went wrong. Maybe they found a more feature-rich substitute or something went wrong in the process of its use? Since customers are those who pay you money and let you thrive, you should find out what exactly they lack. It’s the only effective way to develop relevant products and ensure stable sales.
#4 Real-Time Measurement of Customer Satisfaction
As a rule, things change not immediately. Customers may grow dissatisfied with the lack of updates, rising prices, or irrelevant content, thus abandoning your business. To avoid this outcome, you must always keep your finger on the pulse of customer satisfaction. Don’t wait until everything gets bad; organize regular surveys to track the satisfaction dynamics and correct issues early. This way, you can retain customers, saving tons of money and time on new client acquisition.
#5 Customer-Centric Service
Last but not least, a range of customer feedback tools is always a great sign of a customer-centric business. People like it when they are valued and respected as clients and stick with businesses that listen to their opinions. Thus, you can maintain a good reputation and increase your loyal customer base by asking for and incorporating user feedback in business operations.
How to Elicit Valuable Feedback?
To get the right answers, you need to ask the right questions. Thus, it’s always recommended to hire a capable, experienced UX researcher for feedback collection. This way, you can rest assured that you target the right target audience and get the data that can be applied to design solutions.
Here are a couple of questions businesses typically ask to understand whether the design is right:
● How do you feel about X [any design element of your resource]?
● What made you feel this way, in your opinion?
● What do you find the most appealing about X?
● Do you think something is missing? What do you lack in design?
● Do you think this design helps you achieve the goal with which you came to the website?
● If it were your website, do you think your clients would like it?
Don’t Remove the Customer from Design
As you can see, asking people what they feel about your current design and what they would like to improve can move your business forward. First, end-users are more positive about businesses that listen to their needs and continuously improve their services and design. Second, customers like to see their remarks addressed, knowing that the business is truly customer oriented. Thus, we recommend going out to ask people what they need and implementing that feedback in UX/UI to maintain and increase your loyal customer base.
