6 Reasons Why Your Customers Don't Provide Feedback

Customer feedback matters. It's at the core of every successful company. Feedback captures the expectations, likes, and dislikes of your customers. To build a strong relationship with their customers, companies must listen to what they say, act on it, and close the feedback loop by notifying them.

Although customers nowadays are far more vocal and forthcoming, you'd still have to put in a lot of work to capture their thoughts and ideas because they're not keen on contributing back.

Most companies don’t hear back from their unhappy customers. Why? Many customers are willing to leave feedback but must be assured that it is valued and that they will get a response.

Why is Customer Feedback Important?

The main reasons why customer feedback is important for your company is because:

• Listening to the voice of the customers helps measure customer satisfaction, reduces churn, and improves customer retention.
• User feedback helps companies to identify areas of improvement, create better customer experiences, and build customer loyalty.
• Satisfied customers provide good reviews and support brand advocacy.
• Customer feedback helps make informed business decisions about their marketing campaigns and sales strategies.
• Customer feedback provides valuable insights into how customers perceive the company's products or services, which helps with product development.

Reasons Why Customers Don't Like Giving Feedback

Here are some of the reasons why customers loathe the idea of giving product feedback to companies:

1. Customers Think You Don’t Care

When a customer reaches out, how long does it take for you to reply? Are you making your customers feel appreciated? Do they feel good about your product?

Whenever you ask customers for feedback,  listen, even if it is negative. Listening and responding play a crucial role in customer satisfaction and customer retention.

Customers would be enthusiastic about providing feedback if they see it making a difference. Ignoring feedback, responding slowly, or not involving customers in a product's roadmap would be the ultimate recipe for failure. There's no point in asking for customer feedback if you don't plan to address or respond to it.

According PwC report, 59% of customers will leave a company after a series of negative experiences.

Customers desire transparency and action. When you don't heed their suggestions, they often feel like you're turning a deaf ear. They feel abandoned & unheard and feel wary of providing any feedback in the future. And to put salt in the wound, your customers might jump ship if they can.

2. Feedback Surveys Feel Very Long

Taking long feedback surveys is a pain; you wouldn't want your customers to go through them. A study found that 60% of users don't want to take a survey that takes longer than 10 minutes. Narrow your focus while taking surveys.

Understanding your customer's persona when collecting feedback is vital to making informed decisions about the survey's number and type of questions. Customers can have different motivations for providing feedback, with varying attention spans and tolerance for lengthy surveys.

According to SurveyMonkey, as surveys grow in length, survey abandon rates increase for surveys and completion rates drop from 5% to 20%.

People are busy. The more questions you ask, the less time they spend answering each question, giving you incoherent answers. Customers like nothing less than a long, drawn-out survey, which they won't even complete or will provide random answers to get over the finish line.

3. Feedback Emails Seem Too Messy

Email is probably the best channel for soliciting customer feedback and also the messiest. Since email is the best channel for marketing, there is a high chance that your email survey will be marked as spam.

According to Hubspot, 40% of users say they have at least 50 unread emails in their inbox, since they are not branded and feel like spam.

Even if it goes through, most feedback-seeking email surveys sound so formal, joyless, and automated that the intended recipient rarely hits the reply button. On top of that, managing emails is a nightmare.

Customers appreciate companies that care, but sending a feedback email with a "Feel free to let me know what you think?" doesn't scream customer engagement.

It is easier to overlook collecting and analyzing customer feedback, but it is vital to understand customers' needs. Collecting email feedback feels like you could do with or without their feedback; why would they even bother to reply then?

4. Live Chats Are Not Designed For Feedback

Chats enhance customer experience and clarify their doubts whenever they are stuck somewhere, not to collect their feature requests or any product-related insights.

Chats answer customers' queries on the spot, making them essential for customer support and customer satisfaction. Live chat is an excellent real-time interaction tool but is horrendous for collecting feedback.

Keeping track of which customers asked what becomes extremely hard with chats and becomes unmanageable in duplicate entries and requests. That's the #1 reason customers hesitate to request anything on chat.

Also, chats take valuable time to collect feedback and troubleshoot any problems simultaneously, making this process cumbersome. But tools like Intercom when combined with customer feedback software, help build better relationships with customers by collecting feedback and feature requests.

5. Product Feedback Boxes and Pop-ups Are Annoying

Feedback pop-ups that emerge from nowhere asking unrelated questions are a big turn-off. It annoys the customer, and they might leave your site altogether.

Poorly designed feedback boxes and pop-ups with lots of questions might get on the nerves of those customers who want to give positive feedback. An intricate feedback pop-up design makes giving feedback hard.

Think of the experience you're subjecting your customers to. They open the app to get things done, and you show them the feedback pop-ups that go off and on, repeatedly interrupting their whole flow.

A popular study describes pop-ups as the most hated advertisement technique on desktop.

Simple, intuitive UI with minimal complexity is practical and more comfortable to attract great feedback from users, which is offered by feedback widgets.

6. Using Social Media for Feedback Isn't Feasible & Too Transparent

Social media feedback isn't targeted or public, so it's instantly visible to almost everyone. It's hard to discover and, most of the time, gets lost.

It requires staff hours to search with a hashtag or keywords to identify those specific comments relevant to your product, making it a super complicated job for product managers.

Managing feedback from different social media accounts is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and requires dedicated resources. Social media makes it even harder to follow up with the customer to address any issue, leaving them hoping for replies and frustrated.

And also, you're right in front of everyone. Your competitors can see your reason through and say NO to building features their potential customers want.

How to Collect And Manage Customer Feedback?

Customers love giving feedback. They like the software they pay for to improve and add useful functionality.

It's the way we collectively solicit feedback that annoys them. And that is probably why they hate giving feedback already.

With Rapidr, our primary goal is to help product teams like yours stay on top of the incoming feedback and truly understand what your customers want. That, too, without live chat, pop-ups, Slack, and god-forbid emails.

We're building a feedback management system your customers enjoy using, where they can speak their hearts out and find what they need but don't know. And for you to understand how your customers use your products at a deeper level, paving the way for customer-led growth. Managing your feedback on a robust feedback management tool like Rapidr will help you to:

• Consolidate different types of feedback into one organized place with a wide range of integrations.
• Collect, manage, and prioritize product feature requests with confidence without any guesswork.
• Help retain and grow the customer base by listening to them and automatically keeping them in the loop about the progress with various features.
• Feedback management is a team sport. Include your teammates without paying extra, and track internal feedback well.
• Maintain a public roadmap to inform all stakeholders.
• Changelog to keep your customers updated on new features or product releases.

Rapidr helps companies set up a dedicated feedback portal to track different customer feedback types, improve their product while listening to customers, and build customer-first products at a competitive price.

We offer a 14-day free trial so you can see if we're a good match. No credit card is required, and you're not obligated. Take Rapidr for a spin today.