The Power of Customer Feedback: The Secret Weapon for Business Growth

In today's competitive business landscape, anything you can do to get an edge and keep customers satisfied is a valuable strategy. That's why it's so important to collect customer feedback. Input from happy and dissatisfied customers alike is vital for refining your business practice and building a better customer experience. Below, learn about some of the reasons you should regularly ask for customer feedback and how to implement surveys more easily.

Why Customer Feedback Matters

Monitor Customer Satisfaction

Happy customers are the core of your business--they support your endeavors with repeat visits, and can help grow your presence through word-of-mouth. However, it can be hard to gauge when you have unhappy customers--many people are too polite to say something face-to-face. Instead, they may harbor a negative impression. A simple customer satisfaction score can help you identify when your loyal customers are becoming unhappy.

With a brief anonymous survey, you can get honest customer insights into the areas where your business is thriving--and struggling. Whether it's long wait times, a complicated billing process, or another factor creating a sub-optimal customer experience, you can quickly identify areas that are harming your business with a customer feedback survey.

Retain Loyal Customers

Happiness drives customer loyalty, and that loyalty can pay off in customer retention, business growth, and positive social media reviews. When customers feel like they have a say in your business--through feature requests and other measures to meet customer needs--their customer journey becomes much smoother. They'll be more likely to stick around and recommend your services to others.

When you improve customer service, it doesn't just build customer loyalty. It also paves the way for new customers to solicit your business and build your stream of revenue. And when these new clients provide solicited customer feedback, you'll have even more data at your disposal to improve your business flow.

Get Actionable Feedback for Improvement

Collecting customer feedback can result in affirmations of the areas you're succeeding in--but it can also help you target areas for improvement effectively. This gets even easier with aggregate data--if multiple customer surveys point out a pain point, you know where you need to make changes. Customer feedback helps you target the most important changes to improve customer satisfaction.

Save Time by Focusing on Vital Areas

As mentioned above, feedback helps you find customer pain points and make effective changes to address them. Instead of engaging in a lengthy business audit or bringing in an outside consultant, you can rely on your customers for actionable feedback. Don't take shots in the dark as you try to improve customer service--listen to the people you're serving and use their insights to refine your practice and build the best business you can.

Drive Online Traffic & Positive Reviews

Building a social media presence is key for any business looking to succeed, and one key area to focus on is online reviews. Studies show that 98% of people use online reviews as a metric to determine whether they should solicit a business. In particular, customers look for the presence of negative reviews to determine whether they'll be satisfied.

To give your business the best chance to succeed, managing your online reviews is critical. With customer feedback surveys, you can encourage happy customers to leave positive reviews on your business pages, and address customer complaints before they spill out into an angry review. When you're proactive about collecting customer feedback, you're helping to improve your business practices and your online image.

How to Gather Customer Feedback Effectively

Your business is competing for attention in a busy digital landscape. If your surveys are hard to access or too long, customers are likely to skip them, and you'll lose out on valuable qualitative feedback. Here are a few ways to implement customer feedback surveys to optimize response rate.

Keep It Quick

Customers are doing you a favor by providing vital feedback--so you don't want to take too much of their time. The ideal survey should be no more than a few questions. For example, the commonly used Net Promoter Score survey asks customers to rank how likely they would be recommend this service to a friend, on a scale of 1-10. Once customers have completed the first question, they're given a chance to provide the reasons for their numerical ranking.

This approach to surveys doesn't take more than a minute or two, and it provides both quantitative and qualitative feedback for your business.

Make Sure It's Optimized for Mobile

Most of the time, your surveys are going to be reaching customers on their smartphones. It's important that the survey is well-integrated with mobile devices and easy to navigate. When customers can get through a survey with a few quick taps, they're more likely to complete it and provide you with a customer satisfaction score.

Time It Well

Survey feedback is most accurate within a day after customers have visited your business. Any longer than that, and their mind will have already moved on to other topics--their feedback might be too general to be of much use. With an automated appointment reminder software, you can automatically gather customer feedback within 24 hours of their visit. With their visit still fresh in their mind, customers can provide accurate, helpful feedback that you can put into action.

Gather Customer Feedback With Ease...

...when you sign up for a free trial of Reminderly. This automated software makes it simple to send appointment reminders, share special offers with customers, and collect customer feedback, all from one easy-to-use interface. It integrates with most common scheduling software, and it's easy to get started. To view all of our capabilities, visit our website, or learn more about how we can drive Google Reviews and improve customer feedback collection on our blog.