The Importance of Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is the information, insights, issues, and input shared by your community about their experiences with your company, product, or services. This feedback guides improvements of the customer experience and can empower positive change in any business — even (and especially) when it’s negative.

Asking your customers for feedback is crucial for the success of your auto shop. However, it goes further than just collecting this feedback and calling it a day. Unless you’re taking this feedback and paying attention to it — in other words, listening to what your customers are telling you — you’re simply wasting your time and theirs.

Feedback Identifies How to Better Serve Our Customers
We’re nothing without our customers. That’s a literal fact: if no one comes to us for their regular vehicle maintenance or repair issues, we’re all out of a job. This makes customer loyalty the key to our success. The only way to ensure our customers are loyal is to ensure we’re solving their problems better than anyone else — and the only way to discover that is to not just ask for feedback but pay attention to that very same feedback.

Looking for trends in feedback over time identifies places where we can change the way we do business for the better. Sometimes all customers need to feel appreciated is simple; if enough say it would be nice to have a more comfortable waiting room, it’s a clear indication that investing in some comfortable seating and offering free coffee and WiFi could be what brings customers back again and again.

Acting on Feedback Shows Customers They Are Valued
Just as important, though, is showcasing to customers that their feedback matters.  Taking into account their recommendations and then adopting some of those recommended changes speaks loud and clear to our customers that we hear them, we pay attention to them, and that we value what they have to say when it comes to how we can better serve them.