As business owners, managers, or employees, it’s often easy for you to describe what your company offers. It’s important, however, to know how your customers would describe your company. That’s where the benefits of customer feedback come in. Does their perception of what you offer match what you intend to offer? Are they satisfied with your customer service? The only way to know these details, and a whole lot more, is to reach out and ask.

Customer feedback can be invaluable to just about any company. It can help you fine-tune your business. It can also help you ensure the experience you’re providing your customers matches your values.

Here at Praiseworthy, feedback means a whole lot to us. We recently asked our most frequent users which five words they would use to describe our offerings. Their most common responses were that we are informative, helpful, efficient, easy, and insightful. Talk about compliments! It’s gratifying to know which areas we’re thriving at, and to use that feedback to improve every day.

The most interesting thing about those words is that they also describe the top benefits of customer feedback. (How fitting, since feedback is our specialty!) Below, let’s take a look at five of the top benefits of customer feedback.

To elaborate on the 5 words our users gave us to describe our service, Praiseworthy can help increase your customer retention with the following characteristics:

1. Informative

Unbiased customer feedback is an important tool for gathering information about your company. Yes, sales reports, market research, and other forms of information gathering are also important. However, receiving information directly from your customers provides you with much more actionable information. After all, nearly all of your research and effort stems back to making customers happy and increasing satisfaction. There’s an easy way to find this out: by asking them.

With a platform like Praiseworthy, you have real-time access to customers’ responses and open-ended comments. This cuts through confusion to give you a clear, direct picture of how your clients are feeling. That means you can take the steps you need to make them happier. You can also use that information to praise employees that have done a great job with customer service. When customers are happier, so is your team, and everyone wins.

2. Helpful

There are few things more helpful than knowing exactly how customers feel and what they want. Attempting to guess customers’ needs is difficult. Creating company policies based on assumptions and guesses is even more difficult. Attempting to improve without an accurate gauge on where your customer base stands is tough. It’s like throwing spaghetti at the wall and not knowing what will stick. This can be a huge waste of time and resources. Furthermore, it can damage employee morale.

The simple solution to this problem? Direct customer feedback. With feedback, you can assess what is and isn’t working without any guessing. Particularly when using a tool like Praiseworthy, you can break down your responses into actionable information. Praiseworthy’s dashboard turns results into data—the kind of data that’s actually easy to understand.

Knowledge is helpful.

Knowledge is power. Knowing how customers feel immediately after a phone call with them enables you to do even better in the future.

When business owners and managers have the ability to pinpoint problem areas through this feedback, they can reach out to at-risk customers. They can improve interactions with these customers before they choose to take their business elsewhere. Feedback can be the difference between increased churn and turning unhappy customers into satisfied, loyal customers. Solutions like this make for great word of mouth. This can bring you even more customers over the long run.

3. Insightful

Customizable survey questions let you decide what you want to know most. In fact, one such question helped one of our clients boost their sales by an average of 8 extra tablets per store, per month! Insight goes a step further into general stats and basic information. Insight explores what really makes a company move.

With Praiseworthy’s dashboard, you can break down your survey responses and other feedback into categories and themes. You can understand exactly what a certain number of responses in either direction means so that you can quickly respond and improve.

This makes for increased insight into your customers’ feelings and needs. It also allows for more insight into your company’s day to day functions. The feedback gained from insight operates like a “peak under the hood” in which you can see the inner workings of your company up close. Which employees are best at solving customers’ problems and deserve extra praise? Which policies are turning off customers rather than the intended action of bringing them joy? With increased insight, all these answers are available at your fingertips.

4. Efficient

There’s no way around it: customer feedback makes your team more efficient. Customers are able to take a look at your organization with outside eyes and see the things you miss. They can point out what their surface impression of your company is, as well as what it’s like to work with you as a customer firsthand. This information is simply invaluable, and gathering it through survey responses is about as efficient as it gets.

Of course, the more efficient your feedback platform is, the better. Praiseworthy is a great option because it incorporates details like customer feedback, employee rankings, statistics for multiple locations, reporting, and email updates in one single platform. That means you won’t have to waste your time fiddling with numbers or trying to guess what certain data sets mean. Instead, you can immediately start improving as soon as you receive responses. You can also use the precise detail of the responses to know exactly where to offer praise, and to whom. (After all, high employee morale equals high customer morale. Regularly praising employees for their great work benefits everyone!)

Access to data makes your team more efficient.

Whenever you need to access your survey responses and data, it’s all available to you on Praiseworthy’s dashboard. You can also check out additional reports and charts that pinpoint your customers’ most frequent complaints. Every employee can access their own personal dashboard, where they can parse through results and sort out exactly where things stand. That makes for a lot less wasted time spent trying to just guess what would make their customer interactions better. It also makes the employee feel more in control of their workplace habits and their personal feedback stream.

All of this helps to improve—you guessed it—efficiency. When your team is on the same page about where the company is thriving and where it could improve, you’re already miles ahead. When your entire team has direct access to customer responses, rather than it being funneled through a select few employees who are part of the feedback experience, everyone has a more clear understanding. All of that equates to a precision-oriented, goal-focused team that can reach achievements together. And they can get it all done with a glowing morale and a positive sense of teamwork.

5. Easy

One of the best parts of customer feedback is that it’s easy! Many companies shy away from getting started with the process of collecting feedback because it seems overwhelming. Often, they see choosing a platform as a hassle, and aren’t sure how to utilize any feedback they might receive. This can leading to seeking roundabout ways of attempting to improve the company. Often, these methods that seem faster are actually much more difficult and wasteful of time than simply getting started with seeking feedback.

In reality, getting great customer feedback is incredibly easy. It all comes down to asking illuminating questions and making the process easy for customers to engage in. Praiseworthy can help you do that.

The earlier, the easier.

The earlier you start seeking customer feedback, the more use you can make of it. Because the process is so simple, it’s helpful to get started as soon as you can. This way, you can track trends in customer responses over time and look for changes and patterns. This is just as helpful for a company that getting off the ground and shaping its customer policies as it is for massive, long-standing organizations.

Getting started is easy too.

Thankfully, set-up is simple. Getting ready to go with Praiseworthy is as easy as selecting a few settings and getting things rolling. From there, you’ll be privy to a massive series of game-changing insights about your customer base. This is a whole lot easier than playing years-long guessing games about what customers might want or how employee morale might be improved.

When you start collecting feedback, you’ll have all the information you need in an easy, user-friendly platform. If needed, you’ll be able to update or adjust the questions you ask customers over time to best fit your goals. In the process, you’ll easily build a happier, stronger relationship with your customers. After all, nothing makes a customer feel more valued than creating a dialogue with them. When they know their opinions and their business matter to you, they’ll be all too excited to keep coming back and to help you grow.

Besides being an entrepreneur, Misa Chien is an asian model and cooking show host based in Los Angeles.  Her other blog, Nom Nom TV, a dinner ideas blog, posts articles everywhere from top items to buy at 99 Ranch market to the best way to prepare soba noodles.