Why should you survey your customers? Read below to find out.
1. Surveying helps preserve your brand on social media review sites. Surveying is a customer early warning system. If you are getting timely feedback, you are able to react before customers leave negative comments on social media sites. Customers now have the upper hand. It is a totally new ball game. You can fight back. Use surveys to push self-qualified loyal customers to your social media review landing pages. Fight back and preserve your brand with all the positive things you do!
2. Your team will react better to objective feedback from customers versus a manager or owner saying “Customers want us to turn estimates around faster.” The more effective thing is to show them the 20 responses and stating the #1 reason for dissatisfaction is timeliness of estimates. That’s objective!
3. Surveying customers shows you care. There is something about receiving a well thought out survey, delivered properly. It shows you value customers and doing the right thing to serve them the best you can. It is even better when you get a call after sharing something of importance.
4. It validates your hunches quickly. Customer research is much easier to do now with online surveying versus the old ways of phone calls and mailings. You can validate your hunches within 24 hours versus waiting for the call campaign to gear up or waiting weeks for the mail to get returned.
5. There is no better way to make sure you will have demand for new products and services. You are able to use customer feedback as a roadmap for investments. As an aside, I worked for a Fortune 500 company where the engineering lab designed a product that was the thinnest and lightest in the industry. They did it in a vacuum without asking customers or the sales team. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what customers were looking for. The sales team just gave the blank stare when engineering unveiled it at our national sales meeting. They invested in plastic injected molding equipment, tools to mass produce. The lab was so excited and felt they were onto something. We tried for three years and were never able to sell enough. The plastic casings were trashed and the line closed down. It was such a waste.
Okay, so I digressed a bit on #5. Sorry. Good luck with your quest for excellence!