Superior products and exceptional customer service is important to the success of any business, but you’re still prone to failure as a company if you don’t know how to listen to your customers.

Making an effort to reach out to your customers and effectively listen to their feedback can have a positive affect your profits and revenue.

How you choose to listen and interpret customer feedback is essential to improving customer experience and contributing to the success of your business.

Check out these tips to learn about the importance of listening to your customers and ways you can reach out to your patrons.

1. Recognize Customer Individuality

Each one of your customers is a unique individual with distinct needs, wants, socioeconomic backgrounds, household sizes, etc. and your job is to fulfill those basic human needs with your products.

In order to supply the types of products that will be in demand by each customer, you have to recognize that each of your customers has a voice and an opinion they want to share.

When you have the right technology to listen to these customer experiences and conduct business in a way which shows you truly listened, your customers will feel more satisfied and your service will surpass that of your competition.

2. Encourage Active Listening from All Employees

Every employee in every department has a different interaction and relationship with your customers which means each of those employees has an opportunity to actively listen to what your customers are sharing.

Encourage all of your employees, from the sales team to your IT support, to be taking in customer feedback and reporting findings.

Research suggests that we remember between 25 percent and 50 percent of what we hear, teaching your staff to actively listen by paying full attention, engaging in discussion with customers, and even mentally repeating to themselves what customers are sharing will improve their active listening skills.

Because of this, trends will be identified quicker and customers will feel happier with their consistent treatment and service from employees.

3. Offer Various Ways for Customers to Provide Feedback

Customer touchpoints can be all over the board which infers that customers prefer various different ways of communication.

In order to gain feedback from as many customers as possible, take time to build a strong outreach campaign offering multiple ways for customers to answer your questions.

Some ways to do this are:

• Handwritten or online surveys are great for collecting quantitative data from those willing to participate. Consider offering incentives like coupons or discounts for completing the surveys to encourage more participation.
• Focus groups where you get your best customers together to discuss future services and products to allow for in-depth feedback.
• Build feedback gathering into every customer interaction. Disney trains their employees to constantly ask questions which gives them a better understanding of the customer’s needs and wants throughout every interaction which creates immediate customer feedback.
• Technological and social media feedback opportunities allow customers to conveniently share their feedback. Whether it is through online review, voice comments, or a video message to your brand, having the appropriate technologies in place to take and analyze this type of feedback is essential to how you listen.

How your business listens to its customers, matters. The more you invest in listening to your customers, the more feedback you will receive to make educated strategic decisions for your company that leads to success.

Author Bio: Brooke Cade is a freelance that enjoys learning more about InMoment.com—her CX platform of choice, as well as reading books/articles on industry news, engaging on twitter, and exploring her local neighborhood coffee shop.