Customer feedback is a great way of gauging if your current clients, or customers, are satisfied or dissatisfied with your product or service. This is a vital tool as it allows you, as a business owner, to know where you need to make changes to improve your customers experience and to adjust your actions to meet their needs.
There are two forms of feedback, prompted and unprompted, these are self-explanatory, but an example of prompted feedback would be sending a feedback survey to all your customers. Whereas unprompted feedback would be if a customer posts a comment on social media.
Prompted Feedback
We recently undertook a customer feedback process and we thought we would share some of the benefits that we have discovered from the process:
- Adapting your service
We pride ourselves on providing a tailored service and having a close relationship with our clients, so allowing them to advise us on how they feel their service is going, as well as providing feedback on areas where we could improve, has helped us to create a better overall service and experience for them. It has allowed us to understand and identify the areas clients feel are more important and allowed us to adapt to their needs.
- New customers read reviews.
After receiving feedback from clients on our prompted survey, we also followed this up by asking them if they could leave a Google review for us. This is a great way for our current and new clients to see how we are doing and what we have done for our existing clients.
We would advise that you should discover how customers are finding your business. Once you know this you can prioritise where you ask your reviews to be put. For example, if your business gets all of its enquires from Google then it is best to get your existing customers to give you a review on Google as this would impact your SEO and Google ranking.
If, however, you gain more interest through Facebook, then Facebook review may be a better way for your business to be seen by more potential customers. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a Google review also, but you want to make sure that you are publishing your reviews on the channel where you get most interest.
- Customer retention
A satisfied customer is a loyal customer! If you carry out a yearly or quarterly customer feedback survey this demonstrates to your existing customers that you care about their opinion and contribution to their service experience. When you have then listened and implemented these changes to the service you provide, you are more likely to increase customer retention and recommendation.
The tool we use for gathering this information is Survey monkey; it’s a great way to compose a survey. It suggests questions that are frequently used by others, and provides a link to your survey for you to add into an email.
Survey monkey is also free so it will not impact your marketing budget, allowing you to carry out this as many times as you would like for multiple services that you may offer or throughout the year.
Data
Another great tool this provides is data graphs from your survey results, enabling you to collate all of the information to easily digest and implement in your business.
Unprompted Feedback
When you do receive unprompted feedback, for example, Facebook comments or Twitter post whether it’s positive or negative you need to react promptly. By either thanking the client for giving you positive feedback or trying to resolve the problem as quickly as you can. This way of reacting then shows that you have noticed there is a problem, and you are quick to react and resolve this.
With positive unprompted feedback, you can also re-post this into a new social post and tag the customer into the message to show not just your customer’s what feedback you’ve received.
In Summary
Price is not the main reason for customer churn; it is actually due to the overall poor quality of customer service. Getting feedback on your service is vital to understand if your customers are truly happy.
