How 8 brands turned customer feedback into business success
Michael Kovac // Getty Images for Lulus
How 8 brands turned customer feedback into business success
Customer feedback is one of the most important resources for a business owner. Who better to highlight what your business is doing well and how it can improve than the people interacting with it on a regular basis?
Customer feedback can help improve your products and services, spark new ideas, uncover weaknesses in your operations, influence your marketing strategy, boost customer satisfaction, and more. And considering that 80% of businesses expect to compete mainly based on customer experience, according to data from business research and advisory firm Gartner, going straight to the source can help ensure you’re providing an experience your customers love, return to, and tell their friends about.
So, where do you begin? Shopify talked to founders about how they collect customer feedback and use these insights to uplevel their businesses.
Evolving with the customer
When Grace Lee Chen first launched Birdy Grey, her target audience was millennial brides seeking affordable but fashionable bridesmaid dresses. As trends continue to change and her target demo shifts to Gen Z brides, Chen lets customer feedback guide her product strategy.
“Our customer loves to give us feedback,” Chen says on “Shopify Masters.” “Whether it’s color, silhouettes, fabrics, wedding vibes—whatever it is, they’re not afraid to reach out and tell us what they want.”
Chen and her team welcome it all, putting systems in place to collect insights and analyze trends. They gather this information through formal surveys, Instagram polls, and feedback from product reviews, third-party sites, and the brand’s Facebook brides group and Instagram broadcast channel.
“We really analyze feedback so that we can serve the customer,” Chen says. “Surveys are a really early indicator for what the bride wants because oftentimes, when we hit her with a survey, it’s about six months to a year before her actual wedding.” This helps ensure Chen and her team have what the bride wants when she’s ready to order.
Establishing a niche
There’s a reason Guru Energy has been around for more than two decades. The natural energy drink company has drilled down on customer feedback to better understand who its core demographic is and why they choose Guru. This, in turn, allowed the brand to home in on its niche and take a more thoughtful approach to product development and marketing, positioning itself apart from synthetic competitors.
“I think, from a brand standpoint, it’s really being clear on the communities we go after, and then being very strategic about which events, partners, or pop-ups where we want the brand to appear,” says Shingly Lee, Guru’s vice president of marketing.
“One of the first things I did coming into this role was combing through our consumer DMs and understanding a clear [usage] occasion,” she says. Seeing how popular the beverage was in people’s pre-workout routines, the brand partnered with one of Quebec’s largest run clubs to “effectively sample, get community feedback, do VIP drops with their community, and almost co-create with [them] from there,” says Lee.
Guiding product development
One of the best ways to fine-tune your products is to listen to what your customers have to say about them. Making adjustments based on recurring, constructive feedback can help you build not only a better product but also consumer trust.
Marcus Milione, founder of Minted New York, has been very transparent about his entrepreneurship journey, documenting the highs and lows on social media. That vulnerability has created space for an ongoing dialogue that influences product development. In one instance, he and his team made a design tweak to a tote bag based on suggestions people were sharing online.
“If you’re blinded to that constructive criticism that can make your product better just because you don’t want to change your product and you think it’s perfect as is, it’s dangerous,” says Milione. He adds that listening to your customers helps them feel more connected to the product.
Leah Marcus and Yasaman Bakhtiar, the founders of Good Girl Snacks, changed their core offering in response to customer feedback. The brand is best known for its Hot Girl Pickles, which originally was made with large pickles. During the brand’s soft launch, Marcus and Bakhtiar gathered feedback through email surveys, social media polls, and DMs from anyone who tried their pickles.
“Due to this large community that we’ve built, we were able to garner a lot of customer feedback, and we decided to switch to smaller gherkin cucumbers for pickles,” Marcus says. This swap changed the flavor profile and allowed the snack brand to offer more pickles per jar, which customers love.
Adjusting pricing
When setting your prices, you want to find the sweet spot that attracts customers and still ensures your business is profitable. But if your prices are too high, it could box you out from potential sales. Claudia Snoh, who cofounded premium coffee brand Kloo, used a customer feedback survey to land on a more appealing pricing point.
“We did have a lot of abandoned checkouts during our soft launch period—not abandoned carts, abandoned checkouts, which means that they had the full intention of purchasing, but they probably saw the shipping fee that we used to have and then abandoned checkouts happened,” Snoh says.
In response, Kloo dropped its bottle price by $3 and eliminated the shipping fee for subscribers. It also offered subscribers a $7 discount per bottle to help motivate people to sign up for scheduled deliveries, while also increasing the minimum order quantity to two bottles. This led to more sales and greater profits.
Building community
Hummus brand Little Sesame has always looked for opportunities to directly engage with its audience—both for valuable product feedback and to build community, which cofounder Nick Wiseman acknowledges can be difficult in the consumer packaged goods space.
“I think ‘community’ is thrown around loosely a lot, but I think the power of community is when you create this real opportunity for dialogue and conversation and engagement,” says Wiseman.
One such opportunity that Little Sesame created was its Hummus Club, which offered customers a seasonal delivery featuring a special flavor. Wiseman reached out to some of these top subscribers to thank them for their support and ask for candid feedback. The brand also has a flagship restaurant in Washington, D.C., and most recently embarked on the Summer of Hummus, a cross-country van tour to host hummus happy hours, panels, and product demos.
“There’s not many advantages of a little brand out there in this big hard world we live in, but I think one is that if you do build community and this group of loyalists from the early days, they can really be a catalyst for a lot of growth,” says Wiseman.
Fueling growth and expansion
Customer feedback can do more than just validate your business idea—it might also inspire you to invest in growth. That’s how the story went for the multimillion-dollar fashion brand Lulus. The company ran a series of pop-up experiences to get a feel for how to best serve its growing community. Its customers made it clear that a brick-and-mortar store was what they wanted, which inspired Lulus’ first flagship store in Los Angeles. Customer insights are continually driving their retail direction.
Crystal Landsem, CEO of Lulus, sees pop-up experiences as a way to get feedback from real customers before expanding into new retail locations. “If we had a pop-up, let’s test it. Let’s get her feedback. Let’s have focus groups, talk to her about what she wants and what she doesn’t want, and then figure out what the next logical geography is,” she says.
Spinning the negative into opportunity
Debuting your business to a lukewarm reception—or worse, receiving criticism—might leave you feeling defeated, but negative feedback can also be an opportunity to course-correct and come back stronger than before. When Debbie Wei Mullin was launching Copper Cow Coffee, she made it a point to be visible wherever her target demographic was spending time to collect as much feedback as possible.
“Develop as thick a skin as possible, as soon as possible, and just get feedback, because everything is iterative,” she says. “I think that if you have a product that you think that the world needs, go and show the world and see what they say.”
When Mullin and her team were trying to figure out why customers were only placing orders a couple of times a year despite saying it was their favorite coffee, she called them up and asked. Learning that customers considered Copper Cow their special occasion coffee, she strategized how to make it an everyday ritual—and the brand’s ground coffee line was born to immediate success.
This story was produced by Shopify and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
