A thought for the week ahead
Although it is natural to disregard negative feedback as an “annoying customer” or a “one off mistake” looking deeper into the unhappy customer’s problem is something which could give you the scope to greatly improve your business, especially the customer service you offer.
Whether you like it or not, customers are publishing feedback on your products and services on the internet and via social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. What your customers say is incredibly valuable. Positive feedback boosts business whilst negative feedback can be more damaging than you think… we all know bad news seems to travel further and wider than good news!
So this month why not take the big bold step to survey your customers and ask them to feed back to you (warts and all) why they buy from you (you could easily turn these into testimonials) and what they dislike about your company. You could also ask them what they need that at the moment you don’t provide, that could be a product or service. Just by putting together a simple questionnaire you will gather an enormous amount of information that you could use, after all criticism can help you to improve your offering.
Once you have got all the data then do something with it, publish the results and then document what you are going to do to improve your services based on your customer suggestions – share it with the people that took part so they know they have helped you.
To help you with this process we love the tool SurveyMonkey which is free up to 10 questions and 100 responses (at time of posting anyway!) and is extremely easy to use, or you could pay to get a bit more functionality.
Improving what you offer not only makes you more attractive to new customers but it retains the existing ones as they can see the changes you are making and considering their thoughts in developing your brand. Remember
If you want help putting this together or if you are getting customer complaints and you are unsure how to best use them to your advantage why not get in touch.