Know What Your Customers Want
What are your customers thinking? Combine this information with deep customer demographics and know you can deliver exactly what your customers want.
We Know It’s Important But…
No need to go into how important this is — or should we? Looking at your business model from the lens of your customer needs can make all the difference in your success or failure as a business.
Digital marketing is complicated and requires heavy lifting, so organizations often put understanding their customers on the back burner.
It does take time and uses resources, but it is also so important for success. You wouldn’t open a restaurant and pick what your customers should eat, unless you were In-N-Out Out Burger and even then, they have a “secret menu” of five more choices.
Let’s look at ways to improve on what your customers want.
Start With A Basic Plan
Identify why you are seeking your customers’ input and how it can affect your business. You probably have some basic data or instincts about topics you need answers too.
Prioritize your questions. Do you have one very important question burning a hole in your brain or do you need answers to a variety of subjects? You may need to segment your questions into various customer demographics and create more than one customer feedback plan. Keep it short too! Some feedback is better than no feedback.
This may be the most important tip in this article: only ask questions where the answers can lead to actionable change and a plan of implementation! We’ve seen this mistake frequently where a company will ask 15 questions with zero hope of changing most of the topics on the list. Ask only what can be changed relatively quickly. (This will help with prioritization too of course.)
Now that you have done some homework and planning you can look at various methods for customer feedback.
Schedule Interviews
This is definitely the most time intensive approach, but it can also be the most effective since it’s a one on one with a valued customer. By opening the door to a personalized interview, you create a conversation and get to know exactly what your customer thinks. This approach can definitely provide the most valuable feedback.
Plus your customer will appreciate the fact you are proving they are important. This may increase your business services with this customer. We definitely recommend this technique (and justify it) for B2B businesses where you have a smaller user base but the value per customer is very high.
Using the planning in the first part of this article, you should have a consistent list of questions you can compare across all your interviews for actionable insights. It’s okay to go off script and let your customer speak about other topics but get those all-important questions answered.
Create Surveys
When you have a lot of customers across a variety of products, surveys can be a useful tool to understand your customer needs. There are many survey services out there from one question services for your site like Qualaroo to Alchemer that can expand as your business grows to even free services like SuveryKing.
Avoid leading or loaded questions that try to persuade one way or another. You want the truth!
Try to include one or two open ended questions so customers can provide information they feel is important. The open-ended answers may surprise you and provide insights you didn’t think about.
Consider steering people to a survey after they purchase. You are top of mind with them at that moment.
Use Email
Of course this is an obvious tool for customer feedback, but care should be taken in implementing a plan with your customer lists. Your customers are busy people and sending out random surveys is a sure-fire way to make people upset so they opt out of future emails.
Provide an offer and include that offer in your email subject line which will increase opens as well. Explain how the survey will benefit your customers.
Repeat the reward offer in the body of your email. Personalize your message. (This is a good technique for all your email marketing.) Create a clear call to action to participate.
Embed your survey question in the email. Many email providers (i.e. Hubspot, Mailchimp) have a way to include at least one question and response inside an email.
Meet With The Support Team
This sounds so obvious and it’s simple to do but many company leaders miss out on this opportunity. If your support manager summarizes and groups the data by categories it should make your meetings more efficient.
Use Your Social Media Accounts
Using the “poll” feature in Facebook or Instagram, you can share a multiple-choice question that is included in a post. Share a link if you need more questions answered.
Creating a contest is a good way to ask for survey participation after someone enters your contest. As with the email approach above, make the offer enticing and valuable.
Set Up Site Pages And Use Analytics
An obvious answer but if you combine page usability with the answers you are seeking it can provide great customer feedback from the user behavior.
Using your Support page you can take 3 – 5 support topics that require clicks and see which are clicked on the most. Move them around to test for page position too. Add other links to the list for testing and soon you’ll have your top 10 issues most people want answers to!
How Can We Help You?
Customer feedback has never been more important. The sheer number of businesses that simply don’t do a great job of listening to their customers is going to continue to grow. You can be out in front of this and grow your user base of loyal customers who say “this company understands me.”
And THAT is half the battle you have just won.
