6 Reasons Customer Feedback Is Invaluable To Community Engagement 

May 3, 2022

6 Reasons Customer Feedback Is Invaluable To Community Engagement 

Here at Six Circles, we love hearing from our customers. 

Feedback helps us to grow our product, grow our business and grow our community. 

Put simply, customer feedback is invaluable to the success of our community engagement. 

Today, we’re offering up 6 reasons any brand hoping to build a thriving customer community should always be seeking customer feedback to learn how to better serve their audience. 

(And you can find exactly what you need to learn from your audience right here).

You learn who your customers are 

We hope you have already have a pretty good idea of your target audience and who your customers and community members are.

But customer feedback enables you to go deeper than generic customer profiles and top-level data insights.

Feedback enables you to discover who your customers really are – what makes them tick, how they interact with your product or service, and what they expect from you as a brand. 

As a result, you’re able to make worthwhile updates to your strategy – from your brand voice and message to your product or service development – to better align with your audience.  

This all leads to a targeted and ultra-effective community engagement strategy that will rapidly expand a loyal following of brand enthusiasts who subscribe to your values and message.

You receive honest insights

Customers don’t have an incentive to lie. 

This means the feedback you receive is likely to be impartial and honest, making it far more valuable than the input and opinions of family, friends and anyone with a vested interest in your brand.

The result? It’s far easier to obtain an accurate understanding of customer satisfaction, including what you’re doing right and wrong with your sales, marketing and community engagement strategies.

This all amounts to efforts that are more closely aligned with the wants, needs and expectations of your customers – the pillars of any successful community building endeavour.

You improve customer retention 

Customer retention is at the very heart of community building – after all, it’s those returning customers that form your devoted community.

Unhappy customers are, of course, unlikely to return – unless you can demonstrate a willingness to go the extra mile, that is.

Customer feedback provides you with a valuable opportunity to make amends with dissatisfied customers by addressing their grievances and improving their perception of your brand. 

Get this right and you might just turn an unhappy customer into a prospective community member – 70% of unhappy customers whose problems are resolved are willing to shop with a business again.

That’s not to say customer feedback only aids in mending damaged customer relationships. Those satisfied customers also need an incentive to keep coming back for more, and feeling unappreciated is the leading reason customers switch products and services

With this in mind, encourage feedback to strengthen your blossoming customer relationships and turn satisfied customers into enthusiastic community members.

You gain customer service experience 

The quality of your customer service has a major impact on how customers perceive your brand and how likely they are to join your community.

In fact, 65% of customers have switched to another brand after a poor customer service experience.

Regularly requesting and addressing customer feedback exposes you and your customer service team to an array of real-life customer issues.

Understand how to deal with different customer types by utilising feedback as a learning experience that can strengthen your customer service team moving forward. What are the common problems customers are facing and what can be done about them?

With this customer service experience, your brand will be better equipped to provide an above-and-beyond service that strengthens customer trust and increases your potential to grow a loyal customer community.

You identify brand ambassadors

Brand ambassadors are invaluable assets to any brand community. 

That’s because customers trust other customers – often far more than they trust your brand. It’s why 76% of internet users say they’re more likely to trust content shared by ‘normal’ people than by brands.

This only becomes more effective the more authentic your brand ambassadors are – and what better place to find genuinely enthusiastic customers than via audience feedback?

Encouraging customer feedback means you can avoid the big-name social influencers who do a little for a lot and instead recruit authentic community members proud to be associated with your brand.

This will send positive trust signals to your audience, reaffirming your brand’s trustworthiness to the benefit of your community engagement.

You appear more transparent and trustworthy 

Brand transparency and trust have become more than just a consumer preference – they’re an expectation.

It’s why 70% of consumers say trusting a brand is more important today than in the past – a belief shared across all age groups, genders and income brackets.   

A further 81% of consumers need to be sure they trust a brand before doing business with them (even once!), meaning trust must be successfully earned before community building can even begin.

Demonstrating that you value audience input by encouraging customer feedback is a sure-fire way to send your audience positive trust signals. 

But, like most things, actions speak louder than words. With this in mind, it’s not enough to simply say you value customer feedback – you need to prove it.

From actioning suggestions to addressing common complaints and pain points, to earn your audience’s trust and increase the likelihood of them becoming budding community members, regularly show how you’re embracing and valuing the input of your customers.

Whether it’s positive or negative, customer feedback is gold dust for any brand looking to unlock the power of community building. Begin leveraging your audience’s thoughts, opinions and perspectives today to begin implementing a more effective and targeted community engagement strategy.

Oh, and if you’re a Six Circles customer, we always welcome any suggestions around what you’d like to see on our market-leading community engagement platform. Send any ideas to support@sixcircles.co.uk – we can’t wait to hear them.

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