Use Customer Feedback to Grow Your Business

Customer feedback is essential to growing your business. It’s the way people can express their satisfaction or vent a complaint. It’s a clear and direct path to finding out the strengths and weaknesses of your business. What are you doing right? Where can you improve? Receiving feedback validates your products, services and your processes and shows you where changes need to be made.

Asking for this feedback tells your customers that you value them, you want to please them and their voices will be heard.

Feedback comes in two different forms; negative and positive.

Positive Feedback

This generally means you’re doing things right. If you’re receiving praise, word of mouth should be a given, which is integral to new and small businesses. It should also bring you referrals and repeat business.

When positive feedback is given, make sure you relay this to the right department to boost morale and maintain your high standards. Maybe you received great feedback about the quality of your products (let your suppliers know), perhaps you have a staff member who impressed a customer (let them know) or perhaps they were impressed by the ease in which they could use your website (take note of this to ensure as technology grows, you continue to evolve).

While positive feedback is rewarding, don’t get complacent. Let it keep you on your toes and always strive to continue to enhance your customers’ experience.

Negative Feedback

This might be less enticing to read, but it will prove to be an important ingredient in the success of your business. It will give you pointers on where and how to improve and develop.

Negative feedback, while it might seem unpleasant, is a very useful tool. If something in your business isn’t translating, some feedback might just give you the answers that you need. It doesn’t mean that your business failing, it might just mean you need to tweak certain aspects.

It’s important to follow up on negative feedback, and let the customer know that they have been heard and that you are going to act on their advice. When changes have been made, let them know. When negative feedback is handled correctly, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have lost a customer. You may well be able to turn them around, and it might save you future customers too.

Getting Feedback

Receiving feedback in a written or video format is key to leverage the benefits. There are many ways to offer avenues for customers to provide feedback. This needs to be time effective and simple for the customer.

Case studies, testimonials, surveys, feedback questions, video testimonials, via third party review websites and social media are all effective forms.

If a customer has taken the time to give their feedback, it’s important to say thank you. If feedback is provided online, via a survey or questionnaire etc, include a pop up at the end that says: “we value your feedback”. Remind them how valued they are.

Feedback acquisition and analysis should be part of your overall marketing and operations strategy. Each time feedback is received, it should be assessed and allocated to a task which helps improve or grow the business. For example, positive feedback could form part of your marketing collateral and be clearly communicated to prospective customers.

Digital technologies allow for the process to be streamlined and incorporating this type of strategic digital solution into your website is a great way to keep your business relevant. As technology develops, make sure your business is adopting these changes. Don’t get left behind. An integrated website solution that includes data capture forms, a CRM and an email marketing platform created by a professional website development company will ensure the strategy can be seamlessly integrated into your business. You can then focus your attention on your business and customers.

Building a website is not just about having a presence online – it’s about the whole package. And the only way to achieve the whole package successfully is to listen to your customers. Understand what they want, implement improvements to maintain the standards your customers expect. At the end of the day, customers are the backbone of any good business. 

Web Force 5 offers website design services and a content management system which makes it simple to add content, videos and imagery to your website. It also has a fully integrated CRM and email marketing system, allowing you to capture your customers’ feedback efficiently and easily.

Speak to a specialist consultant for a free, no obligation chat today.