Customer feedback is gold in any industry or business that has or wants customers.
Customer feedback can tell you exactly what your customers like, what they do not like, and what they want. The key to marketing and sales is knowing your customers, and customer feedback gives you that knowledge on a silver platter.
Benefits of asking for customer feedback include:
1. Trend spotting
Customer feedback can be affected by far more than just their experience with that business. Customers can be more or less content with what one business offers based on many outside influences. If a business receives customer feedback from a large percentage of customers mentioning a specific request, i.e. online ordering, it is an easy deduction that the trend is going online as opposed to in the store. Being ahead on these trends can be the difference between a company having a huge boost of customers from adapting quickly and a company losing a majority of its customers to someone who did.
2. Improves products, services and staff
Customer feedback can give a business owner insight into their business offerings like no other. If a product is low quality, but the owner rarely actually uses it, they may never find this out without asking their customer, who may use it on a daily basis. This especially translates to service based businesses. Staff will typically mind their P’s & Q’s around their boss but be their normal self elsewise, this is human nature. Customer feedback can share customer experiences with staff and potentially give insight on a bad apple, or praise a good employee. Both negative & positive feedback can be utilized for improving all aspects of the business that you may not even know needs improving.
3. Insight on customer preferences
By asking customer’s for their feedback, particularly unspecified feedback, you open yourself up to suggestions and preferences of the exact people you want to keep, and gain more of. This could be anything from making the lobby chairs more comfortable to not door to door marketing after 7:00. Simply giving your customers an easy portal to reach you and asking, will certainly generate actionable feedback.
4. Shows customers that their opinions matter
All customers have opinions about your business, regardless of whether they are positive or negative. However, most don’t feel as if their single opinion would matter, much less make a difference to a business. If a business makes any strides to collect those opinions and that customer feedback, it shows that customer feedback is a priority. Every business owner knows, there are not enough hours in the day, so few will waste any of those hours on something that is meaningless to them. To really show the customers how much you care, win them over by responding to feedback, or better yet, make the suggested change and you’ll have that customer for life.
Customer feedback is very valuable, not only for the insight it provides, but also the marketing capabilities. Hopefully the majority of your customers would say positive things about your business. Depending on how you receive the customer feedback, positive feedback can be displayed on your website prominently for potential customers. If you use SurveyLocal, that positive customer feedback can also be streamlined to the holy grail of local business marketing, online reviews. Check out the SurveyLocal tool here. There is no greater marketing than that of your own happy customers. Their voice, and their experience, can boost online referral business by 50% in 6 months (wow!) by helping potential customers trust your business.
While the age old phrase, “the customer is always right,” may not be 100% of the time, perception is reality. Typically, one customer does not stand alone on their opinion and experience so seek customer feedback, soak it in, and take action!