Customer feedback can help you understand your customers and improve your business. But, you must collect qualitative as well as quantitative data to have a complete understanding of your customers.
Qualitative data helps you understand things like customer empathy and loyalty. It also enables you to make data-backed decisions when creating product strategies.
It Gives You Insights
While quantitative data is measurable and can be compared over time, qualitative feedback is more subjective. Qualitative data can give insights into a customer’s thoughts and feelings and is often more helpful than just numbers alone.
For example, if you qualitative customer feedback and find that customers indicate high satisfaction with your product, you may want to dive into their reasons for such satisfaction. This can help you determine their satisfaction because they feel your product is a good value for its price point.
While numbers are easy to see and analyze, qualitative data allows you to create implications and recognize patterns that might be difficult to discern with just a graph. This can help you make better decisions for your business and improve your overall customer experience. Qualitative data can be collected in various ways, from interviews to Artificial Intelligence technology. To gather this type of feedback, you need to know what you’re looking for and how to ask your customers for it effectively.
It Gives You Direction
While quantitative data is important, qualitative feedback gives you a more detailed picture of your customers’ thoughts and feelings. It can also help you identify areas for improvement that might need to be more obvious from a survey question alone.
For example, if one of your customers tells you they were happy with your product overall but not so much with its color, consider making some changes to make the product more appealing. Qualitative feedback can help you determine what’s happening and make the right decisions for your business.
There are a few different ways to collect qualitative feedback, but the most common is to use surveys. When using surveys, include open-ended questions that allow respondents to write in their own words. This will give you more meaningful responses and the best insight into your customer’s feelings. You can also find qualitative feedback through heatmaps, showing how often your customers interact with various elements of your site.
It Helps You Understand Your Customers
While quantitative feedback is great for determining where your product is today, qualitative data can help you see where it needs to be. Qualitative feedback can also reveal your customers’ needs and desires, guiding the features you include in your product.
Qualitative data comes from open-ended survey responses, email conversations, and social media feedback. Analyzing and synthesizing can be difficult, but it is incredibly valuable. It can help you determine the “why” behind your quantitative results, like customer satisfaction scores.
It can also uncover new ideas that your team should have thought of. For example, when you ask customers what they want to see in your product, open-ended feedback can often provide suggestions that your product managers should have considered. These insights can be the key to turning a good product into an incredible one. With the right strategy and tools, you can keep collecting quality feedback that will help you grow your business.
It Helps You Address Issues
Unlike quantitative feedback, qualitative feedback gives insights into your customers’ thoughts and feelings. This helps you pinpoint the areas where your product needs improvement and make changes accordingly.
Qualitative customer feedback also allows you to focus on the “why” rather than the “what.” For example, if you receive qualitative feedback like, “I found the user interface confusing,” it can help you identify a specific problem your team needs to address.
You can also use qualitative feedback to improve your customer service. For example, if you receive positive feedback like, “The customer service representative was very helpful,” you can thank the rep and use this to motivate them.
Quantitative customer feedback is easy to analyze and lets you make data-backed decisions when creating your product strategy. It can be collected through surveys and metrics like website bounce or conversion rates. It also identifies areas where you need to improve and makes it easier to develop customer-centric products. Using quantitative and qualitative feedback is the best way to get a full picture of how your customers feel and interact with your product.
It Helps You Build Trust
The most obvious benefit of qualitative data is that it helps collect more open-ended customer feedback. Quantitative numerical data is easy to gather, but getting more in-depth insight isn’t easy.
Qualitative data can help you identify specific issues, trends, and patterns that you can use to make improvements. It can also reveal things that may take time to be apparent, like why people hesitate to use your product or service.
Getting qualitative data can be harder than collecting quantitative numbers, but it’s well worth the effort in the long run. You can use a qualitative survey tool that allows users to type in their answers. You can even use a low-node natural language processing tool like Lumoa to analyze your verbatim feedback and uncover qualitative insights automatically. This makes it much easier to sift through your feedback and find the most important insights you can take action on, closing the loop with your customers as you do so.