The Ups and Downs of Customer Feedback Surveys [ Importance, Ways ]

Customer feedback will always be essential in every business. The reason being that every business owner needs to know what their customers want to ensure maximum profit. The happier the customer, the more likely that the customer will continue to do business and may even bring in other potential customers.

Aside from customer satisfaction, it can also help out other parts of the business. By receiving feedback from the customers, businesses are able to assess problems that they wouldn’t have been able to find on their own. With that, they are able to fix these problems so that both them and the customers can benefit from it.

6 Ways to Gather Feedback From Your Customers

The best way to stay ahead of your competition is to gather as much information from your customers as possible. So here are six ways for you to gather information from your customers.

• Try asking them. This is a very direct approach, but it is also the most simplest. It’s one of the best way to gather information as you are asking straight from the customers themselves.

• Act as your own customer. This is another method that is very under utilized, yet still effective. It’s a method where business owners try to experience what customers go through by acting as one. This will let the business owner understand how their business treats these customers, as well as how each and every customer experiences dealing with the business.

• Initiate focus groups. Having a focus group means gathering representatives from your customers that will let you know about what they do and do not want. Doing so will give you vital information such as letting you know the different types of customers that enter your store on a daily basis.

• Usage statistics. While it is important that your sales are high, you also have to determine your customer’s level of satisfaction. Just because people are buying from you does not mean you are their first choice. It could be that you are the only person supplying the product within the area and there are no other alternatives, so you are going to have to find a way to keep sales high while satisfying the customers with your products and services.

• Questionnaires and surveys. This is a method that is most common for just about every business and the one we will be discussing more about. Having customers answer questionnaires and surveys in written form will help managers organize and assess all of the information that can help bring success to the business. Considering that they are easy to make, it is one of the most cost effective methods of trying to gain whatever you need to know from your customers.

• Have your front-line staff engage with your customers. This is a good way for you to gain information as your front line staff can directly stay in touch with your customers. By building stronger relationships, they’ll be able to properly evaluate each customer as well as getting to know them better considering that customers are more willing to share about how they feel.

Importance of Customer Feedback Surveys

It is one of the first step in helping business figure out how their customer react to their products and services. You’ll be able to see any complaints that a customer might have and rectify them as soon as possible. So if a customer provides a feedback on a product showing that it has several problems, business owners may then figure out these problems and improve upon them to ensure that the customers are once again satisfied.

Using surveys can help you figure out the much  needed improvements your business needs to ensure growth and success. So be prepared to gain information that could change certain parts of your business such as policies or even a complete overhaul of certain processes. If you would like to create your own customer feedback survey, then we have a bunch of customer feedback in DOC form that can help you.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Customer Feedback Surveys

Making use of customer surveys can have its benefits as well as its drawbacks. So if you would like to use this method to gather information to ensure that your customers are happy, then here are the advantages and disadvantages of using customer feedback surveys:

Advantages

• You will be able to gather the current thoughts of your customers about your business. Every business has to evaluate their customers on how satisfied they are. So knowing what they are satisfied and unsatisfied with will tell business owners how their customers feel about what the customers are being offered, thus helping them make important decisions based on how to supply these wants.

• It can help you track changes.  Considering that a survey can be reused as many times as one needs, you can use this as a method to compare how customers answer these surveys between different periods of time. For example, your survey reaches a score of a perfect 5 within a particular month, but the previous month shows that you only had a score of 4. The information within the survey will tell you that something positive has changed within the business.

• It will show the customers that you care. Most customers appreciate the fact that they would be part of the feedback process. It shows the customers that you value their opinions and that you want them to become a mainstay in your business.

Disadvantages

• Sending too many surveys can be rather tiresome for the customer. Some customers don’t mind answering one or two surveys, but bombarding them with a lot might just infuriate them. So sending them too many might make them not want to answer you, or you can expect a lower response rate and lower satisfaction scores.

• Privacy issues. There have been many instances wherein customers questions the anonymity of these surveys. The reason being that there is much debate regarding a customer’s data being tracked and misused. And because of that, these people become wary in handing out information for fear of receiving too many unsolicited phone calls or emails.