Business

How to Stay Connected With Your Customers and Improve the Feedback Loop

Written by Chloe Harwood

The feedback loop is a powerful idea that can have an incredibly positive effect on your business. In simple terms, the feedback loop is when someone gives you information and you act on that information to improve your services, products or software. A basic example of this would be when you’re bug testing a piece of software. You give the software to a group of testers, they test it thoroughly and give you feedback based on their experience. Any problems they find are then passed on to your development team and the next iteration is pushed out with the appropriate fixes.

This is a basic internal feedback loop, but it’s even more powerful when used with your customers. Customers are, after all, your main source of feedback because they are the ones that will ultimately determine your success, which is why you need to take them seriously.

Give your customers a way to contact you

Most companies have some kind of social media accounts set up where customers can contact them. They might also have an email, a phone number and perhaps even an address where they can send snail mail (uncommon, but still used sometimes). However, few companies actually take the time and effort to hire a community manager that is solely focused on improving the customer experience and sorting feedback for the rest of your company to process and integrate into your business or product.

The customer experience is important and part of it involves giving your customers a way to provide feedback on their experiences with your services and products. You can learn more at www.lanla.com if you’re looking for more ways to improve the customer experience using a variety of software tools, analytics and strategies. If you take your customers and their feedback seriously, then they’ll be more inclined to use your products in the future knowing they’ve contributed to improving something they use.

Utilising social media in your feedback loop

There’s no set-in-stone method of establishing a feedback loop. More often than not, feedback loops are naturally created as a result of trends and how your business presents itself. For example, if you’re exclusively an online business, then most of your feedback is going to come from online sources such as social media. This informative post from www.businessinsider.com explains this more in detail. In short, social media allows more and more people, regardless of age, background or location, to contribute to your feedback loop, creating more opportunities for you to improve your business with the help of your customers.

Without a dedicated social media manager, however, this is going to prove difficult. You have to constantly stay connected to services like Facebook and Twitter which can take a lot of time, and you’re not going to get far if you don’t spend time responding to messages over social media. Hiring a social media manager can be tricky because it’s not really a skill that you can learn without ample amounts of experience using the internet. However, with the right person managing your social media accounts, you can create a fast and responsive feedback loop that will help grow your product and your business.

About the author

Chloe Harwood