But how can you make sure your customers’ voices are heard? In this article, we offer practical advice on how to turn customer feedback and conversations into actionable insights that help scale the loyalty, advocacy and experiences that drive today’s high-growth, customer-centric companies.

Customer reviews have the power to make or break a business – especially for challenger brands. Failing to deliver risks your business losing out to your competitors – with customers more likely to share their negative experiences online or talk with their feet.            

To attract and retain customers, you have to not only be better than your competitors, but you have to deliver the best customer experience, too, quickly establishing an emotional connection with your customers.                                                        

So, what are the secrets to success?

Firstly, take the time to listen

Entrepreneurs that have grown from a startup to scaleup to a unicorn in the past few years have all embedded customer-centricity into their DNA. That is, they’ve prioritised the ability to listen to their customers and focused on creating a positive experience based on their feedback.

Customers should always be the number one priority – making them happy by listening to their needs is key to understanding what’s working and, more importantly, what isn’t.

Customer perceptions are also shaped each time a customer interacts with a brand, so by gathering this feedback, you can pinpoint touchpoints that need improvement to reduce churn. Customers will also notice your efforts to listen and improve, making them more likely to recommend your company to others.

Turn customer conversations into actionable insights

So, you’ve listened. But to truly find out what your customers think and feel about your business, you need to deeply understand customer reviews and conversations. This not only includes understanding your reviews but actually doing something about it  – analysing, adapting and using these reviews to drive positive change.

For most businesses, it is impossible to manually deal with customer feedback and conversations at scale – even small-scale startups with less initial data.

This is where technology steps in – utilising tools that can help rapidly analyse customer data and deliver meaningful intelligence you can then act on. Useful tools can integrate all your existing customer data sources across every team to build a single, unified and unique view of your customer experience.

Unified Customer Intelligence (UCI) collates all customer feedback and conversations under one hood and then uses artificial intelligence to analyse them at scale to deliver truly unified, actionable customer insights.

Using unified customer intelligence to drive loyalty

So, you’ve got the data and the means to analyse it, but what next?

To drive customer loyalty, you need to understand why fans of your products and services love what you do. But you also need to understand what’s detracting them. UCI enables you to see both and make positive changes that will positively impact your long-term customer loyalty. As we know, this is critical to growth. 

Likewise with advocacy. You need to understand your customer feedback (particularly public-facing feedback) to learn what it is about your business that customers are willing to put themselves forward to publicly advocate for your brand. UCI enables you to see this. And it’s this intelligence that will enable you to double down on what’s working.

Scaling customer experience for growth is ultimately about better understanding your customers and delivering experiences that resonate with them. UCI enables you to see exactly what will resonate based on previous feedback and conversations, and track all future changes you make in response – ensuring that every decision is measured, analysed, and understood based on what matters most – what your customers actually say, think, and feel.

Listen and react. From the first to the last customer touchpoint, pipe in every piece of feedback data across multiple languages, channels and tools. Then bring your customer feedback to life and start taking action from insights. Understanding how every customer truly feels about their experience is critical for any startup that wants to stand out from the crowd.