Growing a business involves implementing strategies that focus on learning about what your customers want so you can give them solutions they will buy and buy again. The way to facilitate this learning is to gather feedback directly from your customers. The more feedback you can get, the more you can apply their feedback to your products and services and avoid wasting money on unnecessary improvements and poor decisions.

Here are three ways you can start getting feedback from your customers:

1. Website Analytics

If you want to know what your customers think of your site and your offerings, watch them interact with your site in real time.

Tools such as Hotjar allow you to observe your visitors’ behavior, where they focus their attention, and what they prefer. These tools offer heatmaps that display the areas of your website which visitors focus on the most. Use this feedback to discover which part of your website people are using and how often, and which products or features they may or may not gravitate towards.  

2. Customer interviews

Sometimes the best way to get feedback from your customers is to ask them. Use customer interviews to get further clarification on the information you glean from your analytics and surveys.

For example, from your website analytics, you may find out that your customers do not like one of your products. Maybe they click on it but they never add it to the shopping cart. Or you may have a product in-store that people ask about but when they get into your store, they do not end up purchasing it. If it’s a product you put a lot of time and effort into creating, before you remove it from your inventory, interview your customers to find out what it is about the product they don’t like. It could be something simple to improve, but without talking directly to your customers, you would never know it.

Tips: When conducting interviews, think deeper than product features. Instead of asking your customers if they would like your product in red better than blue, ask questions that will allow you to understand the attitude or impression they have of the product. This will give you a better idea of why your customers like or don’t like your products and allow for greater insight into what your customers want and need.

3. Phone Surveys

One of the quickest and easiest ways to get feedback from your customers is to conduct phone surveys. Phone surveys are easier for your customers to participate in because they require less effort than a typical online form survey. And with a technology like interactive voice response, your customers can answer your questions easily by simply pressing a number on the keypad. Interactive voice response allows for a seamless experience which will boost participant response.

If you use an interactive voice response provider, you can also track your results and export the data. This data will provide valuable feedback you can use to improve your products and better meet your customers’ needs. If you would like to see if voice surveys using interactive voice response would be a good fit for your growing business, sign up for a free account here. You can get set up in minutes with no commitment required.