How to make more sales? How to grow your revenue and increase loyal customer base? The answer is simple – make your customers happy. Satisfied customers lead to business growth and to make sure your customers are satisfied you need to run regular customer satisfaction surveys.
Gathering customer feedback does not only mean adjusting your prices after customer has complained and you’ve had several missed sales or ordering more inventory cause customer has said there is not large enough selection. Gathering customer feedback requires more effort from online and telephone surveys to written comment forms, from focus groups to customer roundtables but how to make this data work for you? Very few companies can make the data received from their customers to work as competitive advantage.
Here we are going to reveal how to use customer feedback to grow your business.
1. Find out what your customers are unhappy about
Your highest priority is to find out the areas that your customers are not satisfied with. By identifying the weakest areas in your business will allow you to act fast and make adjustments and improve.
2. Find out what can you do better to serve them even better
If you find out that your customers are not unhappy but quite satisfied with your service, ask them what they value most in your service or product. Ask them what they think and what can you do to make their experience better. Where could you add more features or services that they could benefit from?
Customers feel more connected to businesses that value their opinions and ask them questions. The getaway for your business – you will increase retention and loyalty.
3. Find out your strengths and use them for your advantage
By conducting customer feedback surveys you will also find out your business’s strengths. You don’t always need to make an actual change but knowing your strengths through customers’ eyes will help you with your promotional efforts. If your customers point out that they love your customer service, you can brag with this and use it as competitive advantage. If your customers are happy with short timeframes and fast delivery, you can use this as your USP.
4. Monitor the changes by repeating the surveys
It’s very important to know that you need to run customer satisfaction surveys on a regular basis. When implementing changes after your first customer survey you need to measure the improvement. By conducting the surveys over time will allow you to notice differences from one survey to the next. You want to see improvement over the time. If you don’t see improvement and get the same feedback it means something did not go right and you have to review your action plan. By tracking the changes over time you can also find out more detailed information about different satisfaction levels. Maybe your customers are not unhappy but the satisfaction level has just changed compared to the previous time. Only by having multiple surveys to compare you can see the changes and compare them with the changes you’ve made in your business during the time (what could have resulted this small change).
5. Use survey results for public reviews and improve your reputation
When running surveys or asking customer feedback, you can encourage satisfied customers to leave their thoughts on public review pages or you can ask your clients if you can use their positive reviews as testimonials on your company website. Good testimonials from customers on your website increase the trust of your potential clients. 65% of customers are more likely to make a purchase on a site which has user reviews.
On the other hand customers who are not that happy might be less likely to post their negative comments online if they feel you are listening them and ask them directly what they are not happy with.
Having better reviews and testimonials will also improve your reputation. The more satisfied customers, the more referrals and buzz around your brand.
6. Find new sales opportunities
By tracking customer satisfaction over time you can easily identify when your customers are most happy with your business. This is the best time to approach your customers with a new sales opportunity and make most out of it.
7. Help your employees to understand customers better
Your customer service representatives who directly deal with your customers have direct impact on the results. So share the results with your team so that they understand how their job directly impacts your business. Ask opinion from your employees how they think you can improve and create better customer experience together. Your employees will also feel more connected to your business. If your employees know that you have received a lot of positive feedback from customers, they are more likely to be happy and more fulfilled at work – they feel they are doing their job well and put even more effort in it. If there is something to improve discuss it with your team, make them aware of the negative feedback but encourage them to help to find solution together – do not accuse.
8. Win back lost clients
Although it might seem impossible you can also win back lost clients. When you have lost a client you want to know why. Clients who have left are quite often willing to say why they left cause they know the reason already. Prevent your current customers from leaving for the same reasons. When you have fixed the issues that caused the customer to leave, let them know and encourage them to come back.