Listening to your customers can dramatically change your business.
Asking your customers for feedback allows you to get deeper insight into how they feel about your business, and what you can do to make it better.
Here are 5 different ways of getting feedback from your customers:
Internet Surveys
Make it a part of your regular routine to offer a sincere appeal for feedback from you customers. Internet surveys tools like Survey Monkey or Zoomerang are simple and affordable ways of requesting feedback via email.
The fact that you want to make sure your organization is doing what it should and want to get better will be well received by your customers and will result in thoughtful responses because it shows your customers that you value their satisfaction.
The two main purposes of surveys are: identifying what you are doing right and often more importantly, what you are doing wrong.
Employee Feedback
Ask your customer-facing employees for feedback. Be it customer service agents or point of sale agents; plan to meet with them regularly to talk about their observations and the customer experience from their perspective. Discuss solutions and action plans for improvement. This discussion group can be a great way to also seek ideas for new opportunities to delight customers.
Focus Groups
Focus groups involve bringing together your best customers to talk about your business and product. This is a great hands-on way to get direct feedback. With online conferencing tools such as Webex and Instant Teleseminar, focus groups have become more affordable.
Focus groups give you more in-depth insights than surveys. There are qualitative rather than quantitative. They answer the question ‘why’ or ‘how’ a product or service works or doesn’t work.
Social Media
Take advantage of social media. Because social media is inherently all about building relationship, pay special attention to your customers concerns and feedback, see what they makes them happy, what they ‘like’, ‘share’, ‘re-tweet’, ‘re-pin’, etc.
Social media is a treasure box, if you are intentional about listening and doing something with the feedback you get.
Observation
Observing your customers is an excellent way to find out why they’re buying — or not buying — your product. It also helps you better understand their buying habits.
In an online business, it involves looking at your metrics regularly to learn more about your customers, their demographics, buying decisions, spending habits, spending limits, etc. In a brick and mortar business, this could involve tagging along with them while they’re shopping and asking them questions as they go.
How are you listening to your customers? Comment below — I’d love to know 🙂
At your service,
Karen