Customer feedback is everything. If you don’t ask your customers to tell you what they think, you’ll never know and if you’re doing stuff wrong, the way you’ll going to find out is by going out of business with no customers.
If you’re doing stuff right, you’d like to know about it so you can do more of it and please more of your customers and get more demand, more sales. How about that? So, pad, pen, write this down.
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Weekend Challenge
#1 — Use email. You have to ask people that use email contact forms and if you do, enable people to give you feedback, ask them to give you feedback then enable them to actually do it and tell them how.
So, when they go to your email contact form, it will say something like first name, last name, email address and then subject. And in that subject, have a list of drop downs, make it short and in that, it maybe general accounts, sales, inquiries, something like that and how about, feedback, suggestion, something like that.
Give them an option, make it easy for them, make it easy, right? Remember, you want this from them so you have to make it easy for them.
#2 Get Reviews. Another way of getting feedback is to ask for reviews. Now, this for most is very scary because when someone’s written a review, they are sharing what they think of your service.
If you ask for reviews from people, once they tell you what they think, it’s there and most of us are very scared of hearing what others think of us.
We think, “What if people don’t like what we do?” It’s a natural reaction but just believe me, if you’re in business, you’ve got customers, they like what you’re doing.
When we did it… I mean our rating is we’ve got something like at the time recording 1,500 reviews on our Trustpilot one which is totally independent. We cannot edit them and we cannot get rid of them once they are there. And we are at 9.4 or 9.5 out of 10 and that’s pretty good.
We ranked very, very highly in our categories, very highly. There are people who write down there and I think, why do you have reviews if you’re so low and there are others I’ve see, they used to have really bad reviews and now have good ones.
They’ve improved their service, but we do a good service and so we weren’t scared and just out of interest, we also have reviews on our website and we’ve got 2,000 out of them on our website as well but the independent ones on the ones that Google recognizes.
So, ask people to review you and then deal with it. If they say something bad, contact them, and apologize, right? They gave you money, apologize, apologize publicly.
People will be impressed because that’s kind of people they want to deal with.
#3 — Have your customers take a survey. You can use surveys such as SurveyMonkey and Google Docs with Google Docs or Google apps account. You have free Google surveys and SurveyMonkey is free.
There are others, other free ones and paid versions and of course then is this little things from Qualaroo and Kissmetrics.
If you’ve ever been on the website, a little black box pops up in the bottom right hand corner generally with a couple of questions so something like, “Did you enjoy your service?” or “How did you arrive here?”. Those instant little pop-up questions are excellent for feedback and for testing.
When you want to ask someone if you’re doing conversion testing, you want to ask of what they think of the page. So, don’t forget when you’re asking for feedback, you can ask for feedback about specifics.
It doesn’t have to be general, “what did you think of us?”. You ask for something, ask them a question, they’ll answer in your surveys. We talked about surveys before, just go into the marketingforowners.com website and put in the search box down on the right hand side, that’s somewhere survey and you will find articles explaining how to do a good survey because you do not want ask too much, very important.
The more you ask, the more bold they get, and the more rubbish the answers are. Just keep it short and sweet and ask them what they want. Make sure when you are asking things, the feedback you are inviting, make sure that it is something that you will be able to improve things from so ask the right questions, just don’t ask general fluff that means nothing.
#4 — Ask them face to face or over the phone. Yes, customers are real people. It doesn’t matter what you do. Some you will meet but some in my case in the Fire Protection Online site, we don’t meet customers ever, but we still can speak to them on the phone and we ask them specifically what they think of things.
We are very, very active with our customers. It has a good effect. So, plenty of ways to gather them.
#5 — Monitor feedback from your customers. The other one is to monitor feedback is people also give feedback without you asking. Social media, blogs, comments on other sites, forums, and just things like that.
So, how do you monitor? You can use Google Alerts. That’s the easiest way. Google Alerts is free. Again, just enter into Google the term Google Alerts and they will explain how to use it. Just simply monitor for phrases so phrases that you should be monitoring for your company name, your name.
So like mine, I should be monitoring for Marketing for Owners, marketingforowners.com, Jon Butt, et cetera. My name is spelled Jon but I would monitor it for John as well because some people may not know how to spell my name.
I want to find out when people mention about me. Google will then email you either everyday or every week, every single mention that it finds in its index online including all the new ones.
There are other ways of monitoring through social media, Twitter. Twitter is the best for this. There are many tools. Again, the best thing is to Google because they are all generally free but you can do Twitter Alerts as well.
Then, there’s software for these things such as Zendesk or Help Scout or Groove HQ. If you are in a business that you got a lot of feedback or you have tools or software something like that, you probably need software to monitor it.
These things are great for monitoring your feedback. It’s dead easy, all the stuff, by the way.
#6 — Set targets for your feedback. Set targets to reduce complaints, reduce problems, reduce returns, and increase the speed of response, things like that. Again, make the experience for your customer better.
It’s not about you. It’s about your customer. So, your feedback is best to be monitored and dealt with to make it better for them, not for you because make it better for them, it becomes better for you.
#7 — Respond honestly and quickly every single time. Respect your clients, respect them taking their time to give you information about you. Your client pays you their money, their hard-earned money.
You’re not entitled to anything. You don’t deserve a thing. It’s their time, thank them for it, respond respectfully. If they have an opinion and want to express it even if they are having a bad day, respect them, do not get into an argument, take the feedback, deal with it, speak to others, ask if others have the same issues, improve things, and that’s what we ask.
It will improve your business. If you’re not monitoring feedback, you’re scared, you’re on a slippery slope. Please do it. It works. You won’t regret it and you were ought to have a fabulous weekend. I hope it’s sunny. I hope the weather is nice where you are and I will see you next week on Monday.
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Are you monitoring your customer’s feedback?
