7 benefits of collecting, analyzing, and implementing customer feedback

You need to understand your business and customer goals for collecting feedback to make the most of the ideas and opportunities you get from buyers to boost loyalty and revenue alike.

This guide lists the top benefits of collecting customer feedback, and includes relevant examples and tips, so you can delight customers and help them achieve their jobs to be done.

7 customer feedback advantages for your business and customers 

Whether it’s positive or negative, customer feedback helps you improve your product and create a customer-centric business—especially since 70% of customers are more likely to shop with brands that understand their needs. 

Use our list of customer feedback benefits below to find out how your own customer feedback strategy can improve the customer and product experience (PX) alike:

1. Deeply understand your customers 

Gathering customer feedback helps you acknowledge and improve the customer experience of your product or service. It lets you reach customers wherever they are in the customer journey by giving you visibility into crucial touchpoints or missed opportunities. 

Collecting customer reviews, sentiments, and criticism across channels also helps you populate your CRM and product backlog with nuanced insights, so you can better understand and meet customer needs—and create robust user personas and customer profiles. 

For example, if you're a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business collecting feedback to improve cross-functional collaboration among teams with your product, segment feedback based on your ideal customer persona (ICP), like an ops manager, to determine which of their specific needs aren’t being met and which features you should prioritize to positively impact sales. 

Then, you might include your findings (i.e. ops managers would like a feature for file sharing) within the 'Ops Manager' persona or customer profile, for more granular details of their experience or desires for future reference. 

Here’s how to apply your customer feedback to deeply understand your customers:

• Create and continuously discover your ICP: collect customer feedback through surveys, feedback forms, customer interviews, focus groups, and testimonials to iterate your ICP and keep user personas up to date. This ensures you're always meeting customer needs across different segments. For example, after collecting B2B usability surveys, you might discover an increase in product purchases from marketing managers, so you know to add them as a user persona.

• Cross-reference feedback from popular customer touchpoints (like landing pages or CTAs) with unobtrusive feedback widgets—and determine how you can improve the customer experience on their most-used channels or entry points

• Respond to customer feedback on social media and review sites to form a rapport with your customers, update them on the status of their requests, or contribute to their success. By administering and acting on social media polls or reviews, you’re showing your customers that you are proactive about their feedback and suggestions. 

2. Make customer-centric decisions 

Customer feedback lets you make people-centric decisions that drive product and customer success. It gives you direct insight into what changes customers want to see, how they use your product, what they expect from you, and how well your product fits into the current market. 

How to apply customer feedback to make customer-centric decisions and create customer delight: 

• Spot and categorize trends or patterns in your feedback to determine which features, products, updates, or services will have the most impact on the customer experience. For example, let’s say you ask customers to rate their experience after downloading your new project management software and provide a reason for their score. After collecting their feedback, you might discover you need to create an iOS-compatible version of your product to appeal to a larger audience. 

• A/B test your hypothesis about your product, website, web design, or user experience and let feedback drive your entire product and customer experience 

3. Boost cross-functional collaboration 

When cross-functional teams have access to customer feedback, everyone gets the freedom to act on urgent customer requests or issues that negatively impact the customer experience. 

It also gives you a holistic view of customer-facing and non-customer-facing teams’ understanding of the user experience—leading to unique internal insights that help your business better meet customer needs. 

So, how do you apply your feedback to boost cross-functional collaboration? 

• Educate team members on how to analyze feedback: if you’re using tools or dynamic visual dashboards to interpret your feedback, make sure everyone involved knows how to analyze the data and glean actionable insights. 

• Keep teams aligned and prepared to navigate popular customer complaints, concerns, or questions. If you’re using Hotjar, you can integrate it with Slack to instantly share incoming feedback across teams. This keeps product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams—as well as stakeholders—on the same page.  

4. Improve your products and services 

Customer feedback is an invaluable resource that helps you improve your product or service—especially since customers use it to complete daily tasks and accomplish their goals.

How to act on customer feedback to improve your product or service: 

• Update your product roadmap: use your customer feedback to inform your product plan and how it will be updated over time. For example, after collecting results from a product-market fit survey, you might have better insight into when to release your product based on market demand. So, you’ll need to update the timeline on your product roadmap to keep product teams on the same page, which helps you improve your service.

• Improve your product backlog management based on common customer requests (or market demand) for product features or updates, bugs, and infrastructure optimizations. Use your feedback to help manage and prioritize your product backlog, so you can create relevant products your customers will love. 

• Maintain a positive feedback loop and ask for feedback every time you update your product, roll out a new feature, or release a new product, so you constantly learn, improve, and meet customer needs. 

5. Build customer trust and loyalty 

Close to 55% of customers say they trust brands less than they used to—so, it's now more important than ever to build customer trust and loyalty. Collecting and acting on customer feedback lets you do just that. 

Customer feedback helps you continually check in with your customers so you can spot areas for improvement before they churn, and show them you’re proactively searching for solutions to their problems. 

How to implement your feedback to build customer trust and loyalty:  

• Share glowing reviews and testimonials of real customer experiences with your product or service across digital assets, including on social media platforms and your website. Using customer feedback as social proof boosts your credibility and wins you more (repeat) customers and sales. 

• Be transparent about your progress in implementing customer feedback. This tells your audience you’re taking responsibility for their experience, no matter how long it takes to roll out. 

• Learn how to navigate negative reviews: removing any and all signs of negative feedback isn’t enough to build customer trust. Instead, focus on being honest and upfront about your mistakes, and tell your customers how you plan on learning from them. For example, after spotting a negative review from a customer who received the wrong order from your ecommerce store, use the review platform to publicly apologize and reimburse the customer—and regain their trust. 

6. Increase customer satisfaction and retention 

Feedback helps you determine new ways to satisfy and retain your customers over time. It gives you direct visibility into what your customers want and need to fulfill their jobs to be done (JTBD)—and what they expect from your product and brand. 

You impact your customers' expectations of your brand through your communication with them, how well you automate your processes, the quality of your product or service, and your customer service resources. 

💡Remember: customer expectations can change in a day or over time, so you need to keep your finger on the pulse of how well you meet their shifting needs and expectations. 

How to apply your feedback to increase customer retention and satisfaction: 

• Provide top-rated customer service: use your feedback to identify ways of improving the resources, onboarding process, communication channels, and accessibility of your customer service software and teams

• See what loyalty programs customers respond to: reward loyalty with programs your customers want to participate in. For example, if you receive overwhelming feedback about the ineffectiveness of your referral program, you know you need to improve it to keep loyal customers engaged. 

• Cater personalization and outreach levels: the right amount of personalization and outreach, like well-timed promotional emails or post-purchase pop-ups, entice customers to do business with you. Use Hotjar CSAT Surveys to ask your customers about their communication preferences from the start, or administer overall customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, to find out how to satisfy them long term.

7. Attract the right customers 

Solid customer feedback helps shed light on which customer types use your product the most (or least)—and how they use it to achieve their goals. 

These types of customer insights let you tailor your marketing content and campaigns to directly speak to user needs, and better position your product to the group of customers who get the most value from it, and ultimately, buy it. 

So, how do you apply your feedback to attract the right customers? 

• Use customer feedback to inform conversion copy on key website pages, like product or landing pages. By using the same language your ideal customer uses to describe your product, you appeal to and attract more of the same type of customer. 

• Highlight customer reviews and ratings on product and checkout pages: use customer feedback as social proof on key decision-making pages—like product and checkout—to convince customers of your product’s ability to solve their problems

• Place customer interviews and testimonials on your homepage and landing pages: include videos, quotes, case studies, and testimonials on your website’s homepage and relevant landing pages so potential customers can determine whether your product is the right fit for them—and increase your ability to retain customers.

Reap the rewards of implementing customer feedback

The way you collect and apply your customer feedback impacts your ability to improve your product and customer experience. 

Use our guide to customer feedback benefits to help you: 

• Deeply understand your customers 

• Make customer-centric decisions

• Boost cross-functional collaboration

• Improve your products and services 

• Build customer trust and loyalty 

• Increase customer satisfaction and retention 

• Attract the right customers 

By focusing on reputable and actionable feedback, you create products better suited to fit real customer needs.