When you are in business for yourself, it is imperative not only to pay attention to your website and monetising it, but also to ensure that your customers are satisfied. One way to do this is to listen to your Customer Feedback.
After all, without customers, your business will never make money. And without satisfied customers, you will lose repeat sales and your reputation will be damaged. For each client you lose, it will take ten more to make up for the loss in revenue and goodwill.
Getting Customer Feedback
All the advertising and promotion in the world isn’t going to fix your website if you do not pay attention to the Customer Feedback you receive. Sometimes getting feedback is the hardest part. Too often a customer who has a dissatisfactory experience simply vows never to return and you have no idea what went wrong. The reverse is also true. If you’re doing something right, it helps to be able to identify it and use it to grow your online business.
The key to encouraging feedback is to give your customers a variety of easy ways to contact you. Ensure that your website provides an email address, a telephone number, and a mailing address so that customers can choose the method of contact.
You have the best chance of receiving honest opinions if you allow a user to give their feedback anonymously. This can be accomplished cheaply via a contact form on your site (be sure that you don’t require too much information; perhaps just a first name and email address). However, if you can, purchase a contract with a third party or software that allows you to send an email link to an online survey where participants can truly be anonymous.
Another option is to send an email to each customer immediately following a purchase. Make this message a form letter of sorts that asks for feedback regarding specific issues such as ease of ordering, timeliness of receiving the order, whether the product or service met the customer’s expectations, etc.
What to Do With Feedback
It can be hard to accept negative criticism. None of us wants to believe that we are doing something wrong. Yet negative comments can provide the impetus to change in a positive way.
It is important to not only listen to your customers, but to take action on their feedback. If you find that visitors to your site are becoming frustrated because they cannot read the font on your pages, then take steps to change it immediately. After you have made the change, let your customers know that you listened and used their comments to provide them with a better site. They will appreciate learning that their feedback initiated a change for the better.
Not all feedback will be negative, at least it shouldn’t be or you may want to rethink your business model. Positive Customer Feedback is just as important as negative. If you are getting compliments on a particular aspect of your website, then make sure that all of your pages incorporate this aspect.
You may want to keep track of all the feedback you receive with a spreadsheet. This lets you see the bigger picture and determine the main issues most often referenced.
You will never know how well your business is doing or what opportunities there are unless you obtain feedback from the people you serve. Make sure you get feedback on a regular basis, and then do something about it. Providing top level customer support is a great way to make your company grow.
