How can customer feedback help you grow?

Your e-commerce business’s storefront. It’s where your customers make buying decisions, assess your brand, and share honest, unfiltered opinions on what you sell.

Every review, comment, and question provides useful insight into how your business is faring in the marketplace; from product content feedback to someone’s experience with your customer service team. Maybe you’re even collecting NPS scores.

But here’s the question. Is your business really listening to customers?

Why customer feedback is key to product page success

As we’ve already started to touch on above, customer feedback isn’t pure noise; it’s valuable intelligence for your business and brand. It’s insight that can be leveraged to help improve products, product content, and the overall customer experience.

Through customer reviews and feedback, you can identify the specifics behind what’s working and what’s not.
To take some quick examples, customer feedback may uncover that:

• A product description requires better assembly details.
• Key sizing information is missing from a listing.
• There aren’t enough images to help someone visualize the product in use.

Customers aren’t confident enough to click ‘buy’ or make a repeat purchase in these scenarios, and, left unchanged, they hinder your conversion rate.

By contrast, acting on the customer feedback gives your brand a useful ‘roadmap’ for fixing issues and optimizing product listings. Showing your customers that ‘you’re listening’ not only boosts sales, but also provides a boost to brand trust, buyer loyalty, and customer satisfaction.

Common mistakes brands make with customer feedback

Customers expect seamless, personalized experiences with brands, and across every touchpoint, from reDespite the obvious case for acknowledging and acting upon incoming customer feedback, it’s often overlooked — or mismanaged.

Here are three of the most common mistakes that even the most established of brands can make:

1. Not investing the right time and resources in analyzing incoming customer feedback. Whether it’s a lack of team members or the right technology, without clear ownership and investment in managing feedback, valuable insights will slip through the net daily, costing your business powerful growth opportunities.
2. Not taking action promptly. Understanding what needs to be done to fix issues and make product content enhancements is great, but not responding to feedback quickly enough means that you lose the chance to make a positive impact on your customers’ future shopping experiences.
3. Customer feedback is received in separate, unconnected places. Customer feedback can be received from many different sources, including via email, review sites, your website, and more.
   When you look at different sets of feedback in isolation, it means that the ‘bigger picture’ can be missed. It’s only when you consolidate all of this feedback data that you’re able to start spotting the important trends and themes.

Useful tools for gathering actionable feedback

The analysis of customer feedback needn’t be completely manual. There are plenty of tools out there that can help.

Utilizing the right technology means that your business can collect customer feedback into one centralized location. In turn, this can make identifying customer trends easier and empower teams to take quicker action in response — e.g. updating and enhancing product content for all sales channels.

A Product Information Management (PIM) solution acts as a hub for centralizing all product content, with the added advantage of access to integrations relevant to your business (e.g. Saleforce, Optimizely, SAP).

Brands can also use a PIM platform like Inriver to, for example, pull feedback data from multiple sources and directly connect each piece of feedback to a specific product family or SKU.

As well as having a robust PIM platform in place, consider these other tool types for your martech stack:

• Social listening tools can help your teams monitor trends, keywords, and sentiment in real-time; allowing you the chance to better understand your customers and the wider marketplace.
• Dedicated customer service chatbots allow brands to collect prospect and customer data. This often contains useful snippets of feedback that can be leveraged for making improvements to product content.
• Survey building tools are relatively inexpensive to adopt as part of your product sales strategy. They empower businesses to create bespoke questionnaires and surveys that help gather, for instance, post-checkout or post-purchase insights.
• Customer marketing tools are invaluable for brands that need help with devising and implementing a strategy for nurturing their customers. With access to features that help motivate and incentivize customers to make referrals, leave reviews, and repeat-buy, businesses can automate much of what were once very time-consuming tasks.
• User Experience (UX) tools provide businesses with data relating to how a user interacts with their webpages, from page bounce rates and form analytics to heatmaps and video recordings of visitors’ web sessions.

How to test and improve product pages based on feedback

This type of tech gives digital teams the heads up on what’s working well on the website, and which aspects might need improving to spark better shopping experiences and higher conversion rates.

Here are some simple ways to test and improve your business’s product listings:

As mentioned earlier, the ability to identify patterns and trends in feedback can be a real game-changer. Small changes made on the back of this type of analysis can make a significant positive impact on future sales revenue.

Utilize A/B testing. Consider creating variations of product content elements like titles, descriptions, and CTA wording to see which versions gain more traction with your web visitors.

Keep a close eye on user metrics. Beyond A/B testing, general metrics like bounce rate and add-to-cart rate should be monitored closely to help you identify where enhancements and edits could be needed.

With Inriver PIM, working through the tasks above can be accomplished far more quickly, as it enables teams to:

• Roll out product content updates in a synchronized manner while adhering to sales channels’ differing product page criteria.
• Keep brand and product information consistent across omnichannel.
• Monitor and track the history of content changes from one place.

Success stories: Brands that boosted conversions by acting on their customers’ feedback

Here are just a small handful of brands that have benefited from acknowledging and then acting upon customer feedback.

ASOS, a well-known online fashion retailer, addressed a recurring customer concern about sizing by integrating more detailed size guides and customer reviews on their product pages.

In the case of ASOS, this helped to reduce customer uncertainty around product ‘fit’, and led to an uplift of 20% in their conversion rate.

Under Armour enhanced its webpages to provide a more comprehensive view of its products, adding rich content like 360-degree views. This straightforward enhancement served to reduce friction in the buying process.

Over time, PerfectLocks customers had told the brand that they wanted a more personalized shopping experience on its website. This prompted a website redesign, which incorporated this feedback as part of the UX strategy. Ultimately, making well-informed improvements increased PerfectLocks’ conversion rates by 20%.

Smart brands are turning customer feedback into sales conversions — with a little help from Inriver

Your customers will always be happy to share what’s working and what isn’t with your brand, but it’s up to your business to respond to their feedback, and as promptly as possible.

Brands that take a proactive approach to customer feedback by utilizing a robust PIM platform are more likely to build and strengthen customer loyalty, encourage customer advocacy, and find long-term business success. And, with Inriver PIM embedded into your business, you can move from collecting customer insight to taking action much more quickly.