The ins and outs of Customer Feedback

Why is customer feedback so important? Yael Warman, Content Manager at Leverate, takes a look.


Yael Warman, Leverate

Yael Warman, Leverate

In business, customer feedback is your bread and butter. It is the way in which you know whether you are doing things right or you need to adjust to improve your business, products or customer experience. It is a key component of the success of your business. Lucky for FX brokerages, because of the nature of the trading industry, your company is in constant contact with your clients, therefore creating constant opportunities to obtain feedback.

Why is customer feedback so important?

In today’s competitive world, delivering products and services that your clients actually want and that fulfills their needs is key in guaranteeing the success of your brokerage. By listening to your customers, you can design and develop your service according to the traders’ needs and exceed their expectations.

Constantly measuring customer satisfaction can help you monitor whether you are doing things right and your clients are happy before you incur the expensive cost of losing them. Use rating-based surveys to keep a finger on the pulse of your clients, be it over the phone or via e-mail.

The process of acquisition and retention is becoming harder and harder for brokers. One way in which you can guarantee your customers will remain loyal and not run to your competitors with the first bonus offered is to provide them with an amazing and personalized customer experience. By gathering feedback from your traders, you can determine what they want and deliver it in a personalized way.

Customer feedback can get you accurate, tangible data that can help you make sensible business decisions based on hard facts, not gut feelings. Data obtained from customer feedback can provide real insight into what your customers think about your services, allowing you to make decisions on new products, services or features that will satisfy your customers’ wants and needs.

Now that you know why it is so important to gather your customers’ feedback, let’s see how you can gather it:

E-mail is a speedy way of gathering feedback, but many customers are reluctant to being proactive about giving feedback they don’t believe the information will have any effect. When asking for feedback via e-mail, there a three elements you should consider: a) assure your customer that you will address their concerns in a speedy manner, b) create an organized system to manage feedback collected, and c) thank you customers for their time.

Surveys are not necessarily easy to craft, but they can provide answers to questions specific to your immediate requirements. To ensure that you make the most out of a survey, keep in mind some guidelines:

  • Keep it short. You probably want to ask a million questions since you are already at it, but how many questions is too many questions? When preparing a survey, keep it short
  • Limit your questions to those that will help you fulfill your end goal
  • If using rating scales, keep them consistent
  • Avoid leading questions

Usability tests are outstanding methods to gather insight about things customers didn’t even know they were thinking about. Letting your users test the new features of your trading platform for example can allow you to see your product through a different lens and uncover little things that could make a big impact.

Eavesdropping isn’t always a bad thing. Listening to the conversations taking place on social media and online forums about your brand can help you obtain particularly useful feedback since those users are not pressured to answer questions, but are rather volunteering it.

Taking a look at how your clients interact with your brand (your content, your social posts, your website and most important, your trading platform) through analytics. In regards to tracking user activity in your trading platform to determine how traders interact with your product, you might want to start by tracking your active users to see which features they use the most, which they don’t, where they seem hesitant, etc, but don’t limit your research to active users. Track also those users who did not sign up. You may be able to discover weaknesses in your sign up process, which turns people off at the time of registration.

As opposed to live chats, which often interrupt the user’s flow of activity and require an employee on the other end, comment boxes placed strategically at the bottom of each page of your website can help you measure customer satisfaction in a non-intrusive way.

After you help a client resolve an issue, sending a follow up survey to see how you did can not only provide great feedback but also show your clients than you care about their business.

So you’ve gathered your feedback. Now what can you do with it?

Although knowledge IS power, the main benefit of collecting data is not merely knowing what your customers think, but how you act on it is what truly makes a difference in your success. In order to establish a course of action and get your organization involved, Whitney Wood, managing partner of the Phelon Group, a consultancy that focuses on helping companies better relations with customers, recommends dividing feedback into three categories: Immediate tactical adjustments, actions that impact revenue over the course of the year, and game-changing ideas for the long term. Once you have categorized the feedback, you can prioritize it and begin defining a plan for change. Test your possible solutions against your budget and resources and ask your best clients what they think.

Once you implement your solution, benchmark it over a period of time to assess its success and finally, close the loop by getting back in touch with those customers who provided you with feedback to let them know that their feedback was heard and changes were implemented based on it. Share with them your success story and thank them for their input.

Customer feedback provides you with valuable insight into what your customers think about your product or service. This insight can help you create a product that customers want to buy and create an experience that exceeds expectations and keeps customers coming back for more.

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