Using customer feedback to improve service

What does it take to improve your products or services? If you’re not sure if (or where) your products or services are falling down, one of the easiest and fastest ways to get an answer is to collect customer feedback. Customer feedback is the quickest, surest way to identify current issues and opportunities to improve.

Why you should invite customer feedback

Improving products or services should be your primary goal. Improvement should always drive changes to your products and services. Feedback is not only good for identifying improvement targets, but also measuring the impact of the tweaks you’ve already made.

Knowing the customer experience is always valuable. When you know what your customers experience, you know what’s going on in your business. The customer experience is what keeps customers coming back. It’s also what drives new customers through your door. If your customer experience is good, your business will survive. If not, you’ll need to move quickly to keep your doors open.

Customer feedback is a free, valuable source of data. Collecting customer feedback is an inexpensive yet invaluable activity. It costs next to nothing to ask your customers about their most recent visit, or what they think of your products or services. Since you can only get that information from your customers, it makes sense to collect it regularly and use it accordingly.

How to collect customer feedback

Collecting customer feedback can be very simple. You can use a variety of free or low-cost online survey tools, or you could create your own form to collect data online. Provide access to the survey tool to your customers, and allow the feedback to roll in. If you have an email marketing program, you can easily invite your customers to participate in the survey.

Offering an anonymous feedback option is a good idea. Sometimes customers won’t leave negative feedback if they also have to leave their names. Ideally, your customers are comfortable enough with your business to let you know when there’s a problem, but having customer input is more important than knowing who left it. People don’t usually leave fake negative feedback, but that’s a risk you should be willing to take for the sake of recognizing and addressing problem spots.

If you’d like more information about designing and implementing a customer feedback system for your website, please contact our Creative Director, Dave Ramsell or give Dave a call at (330) 243-0651 to set up a consultation.

Photo Credit: Dominik Gwarek, via FreeImages.com