You can be on Entrepreneur’s cover!

4 Ways to Use Customer Feedback for Business Innovation Innovation is as much about understanding customer needs as it is about passion, and customer feedback is essential to entrepreneurs. Here are four ways to use customer feedback to improve businesses.

By Frederik Bussler

entrepreneur daily

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

A common word of advice for entrepreneurs is to build what they personally want, but this can prove to be a path to failure. After all, it's said that 90% of startups fail, and the number one cause of those failures is that there's no market need.

From Facebook's metaverse folly to the downfall of Juicero, the story of failed projects is littered with tales of companies that just didn't understand their markets well enough. While passion is, in the words of the late Steve Jobs, "the only thing that keeps you going" when it comes to the long journey of entrepreneurship, it isn't enough. It's equally important to understand the wants and needs of your customer base.

This means that customer feedback is essential for entrepreneurs. With in-depth customer feedback, entrepreneurs can better understand their markets and innovate smarter. It can help them develop products that customers actually want and need, rather than products that founders think they need.

Here are four ways that entrepreneurs can use customer feedback to improve their businesses:

Related: This Is Why You Should Never Ignore Customer Feedback

1. Use customer feedback to inform product development

It's also important to use customer feedback to inform product development. This means that entrepreneurs need to take the time to read customer feedback and implement changes where necessary.

For instance, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said that many of the company's product priorities are based on customer feedback. This means that the team is actively listening to customers and making changes based on their feedback.

One early feature that helped Robinhood differentiate itself was a "Fractional Shares" option, which allows customers to buy partial shares of stocks. Another more recent example is Robinhood's decision to provide up to a 4% interest rate on customers' uninvested cash deposited in their accounts. This was based on customer concerns about the impact of inflation on their investments.

By actively listening to customer feedback and incorporating it into product development, entrepreneurs can ensure that their products remain competitive and meet customer needs.

2. Leverage communities for direct communication

An obvious question for entrepreneurs is how to collect customer feedback and hone in on what's important. Social media platforms like Reddit, Twitter and LinkedIn can be great places to start. For instance, Twitter Spaces is a feature that allows users to create a chatroom-like environment with a group of people.

This serves as a great way to get feedback from users. Entrepreneurs from Elon Musk to Neil Patel have leveraged such communities to get feedback from their customers. However, entrepreneurs can go further by establishing their own dedicated communities.

One strategy is to build a Discord server, which is a chat application perfect for connecting with customers and building a community. This works especially well for games and software products, as the format makes it easy for customers to provide feedback. This was the approach taken by Utkarsh Sinha and Siddharth Jain, the co-founders of Martian, a Web3 firm that recently raised $3 million. Sinha notes that their Discord server has more than 150,000 members who are providing valuable feedback.

Another strategy is to host online events, such as webinars. This allows entrepreneurs to get feedback from customers in real time, as well as to showcase their products and services. One challenge with this approach is the relatively smaller size of the potential audience, but it can be a great way to build a loyal customer base. Even if the turnout isn't huge, the feedback received can be invaluable.

3. Quickly ship products based on feedback

Another important way to use customer feedback is to ship products quickly. By moving quickly, entrepreneurs can get feedback from customers about their products and make necessary changes or improvements.

If your business is taking in that valuable customer feedback, but failing to act on it quickly, you might be missing out on a big opportunity. This was something that was highlighted by Siddharth Jain. Jain said that working closely with an engineering team was a big advantage for the firm, as it allowed them to quickly ship products and features whenever customer feedback was received.

In other words, while your sales and marketing or customer support teams may be more closely in touch with customers and their feedback, the engineering team needs to be able to act on that feedback in order to make real change.

Related: How to Really Hear and Use Customer Feedback

4. Use customer feedback to pivot

Customer feedback can also be used to pivot. Pivoting is a term used to describe the process of changing the direction of a business. It's a strategy that some entrepreneurs use when their original product or service isn't succeeding as expected.

For example, when the team behind the video game Fortnite found they weren't getting the traction they wanted, they used customer feedback to pivot. They created a version of the game that was free to play, and the rest is history. Today, Fortnite is one of the most popular video games of all time.

The lesson here is that customer feedback can be used to pivot a business, and it's important for entrepreneurs to be open to using it. That doesn't mean blindly following customer feedback, though; it's still important to use your own judgment and expertise to make the best decisions for your business.

Customer feedback should be an essential part of any business's innovation process. By understanding customer feedback and using it to inform product development, leveraging communities for direct communication, shipping products quickly and pivoting when necessary, entrepreneurs can create products that customers actually want and need. This can lead to greater success for the business in the long term.

Related: Growth Hacking With Customer Feedback

Frederik Bussler

Marketing Consultant

Frederik Bussler is a marketing consultant for a wide range of businesses from startups to F500. Bussler is a published author and contributes to publications like VentureBeat, Forbes, Hacker Noon, and more. As a public speaker, he’s presented for audiences including IBM, Nikkei, and Slush Tokyo.

Want to be an Entrepreneur Leadership Network contributor? Apply now to join.

Editor's Pick

Business News

Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced to 25 Years in Prison for Multibillion-Dollar Crypto Fraud

Southern District of New York Judge Lewis Kaplan said that the loss amount to the victims of Bankman-Fried's crimes surpassed $550 million.

Side Hustle

This Mom Started a Side Hustle After a 'Shocking' Realization in the Toy Aisle. Her Product Was in Macy's Within the Year — Seeing Nearly $350,000 in Sales.

Elenor Mak, now founder of Jilly Bing, didn't plan to start a business — but the search for a doll that looked like her daughter inspired her to do just that.

Growing a Business

To Achieve Sustainable Success, You Need to Stop Focusing on Disruption. Here's Why — and What You Must Focus on Instead.

Instead of zeroing in solely on disruptive innovation, embrace a pragmatic approach to innovation, recognizing and leveraging the potential within ongoing industry shifts.

Marketing

5 Ways to Get on the Media's Good Side (and Stay There)

When you're trying to make a name and a mark for yourself and your business, it's really important to get on the media's good side — and stay there.

Business News

Mark Zuckerberg Told Meta Engineers to 'Figure Out' Snapchat's Privacy Protections: 'We Have No Analytics on Them'

Recently unsealed court documents detail "Project Ghostbusters," Meta's project to work around Snapchat's end-to-end encryption to intercept data.