Your customers are the lifeblood of your business, and their honest feedback can help transform your approach to sales, marketing, business planning and more, creating a stronger customer experience in all areas. Here are some tips to help you use customer surveys to capture the feedback you need to improve your business and keep your customers coming back for more.
Set a Goal
If you’re going to establish a customer feedback program, you need to start with clear goals. What are you hoping to achieve with the program? What will your key performance indicators or metrics be? What is the ultimate goal of the program? (e.g., Improve customer sentiment by a certain percentage, reach a certain number of positive customer reviews by a certain date, etc.
Beginning with the ‘why’ behind your feedback program will help set you up for success by establishing clear goals that you can work towards. It’s very easy to collect a bunch of feedback from your customers, and far more difficult to use it effectively to improve your business. Setting clear goals from the outset will give you a huge advantage on this front.
Develop a Program
Once you’ve made your plan, you need to actually create the program for collecting customer feedback. It doesn’t have to be a single-option approach. You can collect feedback at the point of sale, via follow-up emails, through purchase and contact forms, and via email and social media campaigns to collect broader brand impressions.
You should plan and lay out a program that is relatively quick to implement and easy to make updates to as needed. The more flexible, the better when it comes to collecting customer feedback. After all, part of the feedback might relate to how you capture and respond to customer opinions today, and you want to be able to move with agility to make changes based on that feedback, as well as the feedback of your employees as the program starts rolling.
Coach Your Team Up
Getting your team’s buy-in from the word ‘go’ will be essential for your customer survey efforts. Work with them from the very start to establish the goals and program plan. Talk to them about their experiences with your customers and ask for their opinion on the best windows and channels in which to deploy feedback collection efforts.
Your employees work with your customers constantly. Put their experience to work for you, and use their knowledge as a means of helping create a customer feedback program that is targeted, robust, customer-centric and ultimately a useful tool to help you build on and improve real commentary from your real customers. You may just discover that your business gets a big boost on many different fronts when you start implementing feedback straight from the source and delivering on your customers’ real expectations.
