The Biggest Asset You’re Not Using: Customer Feedback

Meetings, ideas, collaboration. All of these can help improve a company, but they’re not the most valuable tool you have in your arsenal. No, that title belongs to the people who make your business what it is: your clients and customers. If you can focus your ear enough to listen to them, you’ll find bags of benefits that you simply can’t get from anywhere else. Below, we take a look at how and why you should be prioritizing your customer’s opinions above all else.

How To Get Feedback

Customers want to give their opinion, but all too often they find that there’s nobody around to hear what they have to say. Make gathering your clients’ opinions a priority, and give them a platform to give you feedback. If they’ve recently bought something from you or used your service, you should be sending a follow-up email asking them to share a few words about their experience. If you’re listed on TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, and other review sites, search for your business and make a record of every line of feedback. For more general comments, you can create a free survey and ask people on your mailing list to spend a couple of minutes filling it out.

Improving Your Service

Small businesses can spend many a night thinking of new products and services to add to their company, not realizing that the answer can be found through their customers. Customer feedback can remove the guesswork of a company’s future; instead of trialing ideas that may or may not work, take a look at what your clients are telling you what they want to see, and incorporate them into your service. Business doesn’t have to be so complicated: just open your ears, and you’ll get answers.

Finding Faults

You can learn just as much from bad reviews as you can from good ones. The problem is that most companies tend to get defensive, or try to limit the damage, whenever a customer has a bad experience. Instead, be open to receiving less than stellar feedback. It’s what the biggest companies do; Peninsula business complaints form part of the company’s ongoing strategy to improve their service. It’s no great mystery: if a customer is telling you that they had a bad experience, and then tell you what that problem is, then you’ll know exactly the area in which you need to improve.

Building Trust

There’s another aspect of being open to receiving feedback, both good and bad, from your customers. It builds trust. If you have page after page of good reviews, then that will go a long way to establishing yourself as a trustworthy company who can deliver what you say you can deliver. Even bad reviews can be used to build trust, so long as admit your errors and work hard to resolve them.

Improving Staff

Finally, customer feedback can also be used to improve your employees and help you to identify any weakness. If your team are routinely praised for their politeness but criticized for not calling back when they say they will, you’ll know what you need to improve.

Start encouraging customer feedback, and use what your customers say to propel your company forward.