Are you looking for ways to improve your subscription business? Using customer feedback is one of the simplest things you can do to make positive change, increase customer satisfaction, and create revenue growth. Some companies may shy away from asking for feedback because they think it only means negative criticism. This isn’t necessarily true. Feedback, both good and bad, can help you learn what you’re doing right, and where you need to change.
Build Trust
Gathering feedback gives you the opportunity to look inside your customer’s head and find out what’s important to them. It’s your chance to see if you’re hitting the mark with your customers or falling down on their expectations in some way.
Of course, you don’t want to hear negative feedback. That’s obvious. However, if you take this information and build on it, you can make big strides in your success and improve your customer relationships. Your customers are with you because they trust you and using the feedback they provide, both good and bad, will build even more trust in your brand — your customers will know you really care about them if you implement their suggestions. This recognition is a critical part of building a long-term customer relationship.
Feedback shows you what you’re doing right, and where you need to improve.
Improve Your Customer Experience
Getting feedback will also help you improve your customer or user experience. You may think UX only applies to SaaS or other technology companies, but it’s part of any subscription business model. For instance, it applies to your customer service team and how they interact with customers. Are they answering inquiries quickly and resolving the issue? Customer feedback will give you this answer.
Sending out survey emails after an inquiry is a great way to gather feedback that you can quickly implement to make improvements. If a large part of your feedback is about the same topic, this is your opportunity to educate your team and help them come up with a helpful answer that will quickly solve the problem. It’s also a cue that you have some improvements that need to be made in your subscription offering. All those customers can’t be wrong. Take this feedback and run with it to make the necessary changes.
Deepen Customer Relationships
With so many people on social media, it’s natural that people will want to buy something if they see other people buying and using products or services from that brand. It’s a kind of online peer pressure — we’re wired to want what other people have. The next natural step then is to leave feedback online after engaging with a company. Feedback isn’t just what your customers say on surveys or contact forms, it also means what they say about you on social media. When someone comments on your page posts or messages you directly, they are giving valuable feedback. By responding to them openly, you will improve engagement and deepen your customer relationships.
The huge benefit of using customer feedback is that it allows you to see patterns in the customer’s subscription experience which you can use to make improvements to your subscription business. Don’t pass up this valuable opportunity for growth. Most subscription companies ask for feedback, but only a few take that feedback and use it productively to build trust and strengthen their customer relationships.
Get Valuable Development Insights
Listening to what your customers expect from your business will also help you determine what new products or services you should be offering. If there’s a gap between what you provide and what you customers are telling you they want, this is a clear signal that you need to change. You should take customer feedback into consideration every time you develop a new product or service. It doesn’t matter what you subscription business sells, listening to customers and implementing their feedback is a great way to create something that will be in demand, which will improve retention and boost sales.
Recover From Negative Feedback
Brands that don’t take customer feedback seriously can have problems with their
reputation – bad news always travels fast. Negative feedback can mean lost customers and lost revenue, but you can turn even the most unhappy customer into a learning opportunity that will help your subscription business improve and grow if you act on their suggestions.
Meet Expectations
If you were to survey your customers today, one thing every customer would want is a smooth, frictionless payment experience. It’s a given that customers expect their payment to go through without a hitch month after month. That may not actually be the case though. A study by Visa showed that 24% of recurring payments are declined. These declines aren’t due to credit issues with the customer, however. They are caused by problems in the payment system ecosystem that rejects payments it mistakenly thinks are fraudulent. These failed payments are not caused by the customer at all.
The Cost of Failed Payments
Subscription businesses can’t afford to lose almost a quarter of their monthly recurring revenue (MRR), but traditional payment recovery methods put the customer on the defensive, which can cause them to cancel their subscription. You can imagine the negative feedback those customers will give after getting off the phone with a representative who just blamed them for their failed payment. A problem they didn’t cause.
As a subscription provider, you can ensure customers have a positive experience with your company by using a failed payment recovery solution that overcomes payment-related snags. A good example of this is FlexPay’s platform, which uses Invisible Recovery™ as part of its strategy.
The Invisible Recovery™ Solution
Invisible Recovery uses AI and machine learning to create a unique strategy for each failed payment, adapting to the hundreds of reasons a payment could have failed, delivering the highest rates of payment and customer recovery.
Invisible Recovery improves recovery rates by up to 70% over other methods without engaging customers in the recovery process. And because the recovery is invisible to customers, the customer lifecycle averages 45% more billing cycles following recovery. Customers are recovered faster and stay customers longer with Invisible Recovery™.
If you’re looking for a failed payment recovery solution for your subscription business, learn more about Invisible RecoveryTM or contact us today.
