Do you know what your customers think about your products and brand? Do they connect with you and your offerings? Is there anything they would change or improve? If you don’t know the answers to these questions you may be losing sales—or worse—heading down a trail of customer dissatisfaction and disloyalty.
You can’t rely on guesswork and hunches when it comes to your customers. Knowing exactly what your customers like, dislike and feel or think about your business is essential to not only scaling but also creating loyal brand ambassadors who can spread the word about your brand. Knowing your customers intimately, you can provide them with solutions that meet their deep needs, the solutions they are looking for and are willing to pay for.
How do you get this valuable feedback from your customers? Here are some strategies:
Start Listening
Whether you’re in an online or offline store or both, your customers are likely online and they may or may not be talking about your business. Social media sites are the perfect platforms for customer chatter and conversation since people love to offer their opinions and do so in front of as many people as possible.
Enact social listening and discover when your brand is being talked about on social sites like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Listening to your customers’ social conversations can give you valuable feedback on what they are saying “behind your back.” Also, social listening can also alert you when a customer has posted an unsatisfactory comment about your brand so you can deal with it quickly.
To automate your social listening, use tools such as Hootsuite, Google Alerts and Social Mention.
Customer Interviews
Though we live in a digital world, there is still a high value on speaking directly with people face to face. If you own a physical store, take the opportunity to talk with your customers to get feedback. Not everyone will be interested in giving you their time, though, so offer an incentive to encourage participation.
If your store is strictly online, use live chat software to do the same. Set popups to fire for specific scenarios. For example, let’s say a website visitor is stuck on the same page for a longer-than-normal period of time. Use this opportunity to insert a live chat popup to ask customers if they need assistance. Monitor the live chat feedback over time to glean trends and gain overall feedback. There is also a feature that allows you to ask several poll questions to the customer after the live chat concludes.
Conduct Phone Surveys with an IVR Solution
Phone surveys are a quick, easy and cost-effective way to gather valuable feedback from your customers. Couple that with interactive voice response (IVR) and you will have a seamless experience for your customers that will encourage participation. With an IVR solution, your survey participant can answer questions using a simple keypad press, making the experience easy.
With CallFire’s IVR solution, you can get started sending messages right away, track your results and export the data. CallFire is one of the oldest and trusted providers of this technology, and we love assisting small businesses with their needs. To get started, take a look at our pricing plans here. We have various plans that will match your unique business and you can even get started for pennies a minute.