The Customer is Always Right – Using Surveys to your Advantage
Ever wonder why companies care about your opinion and feedback? It’s because they want to constantly improve their products and customer service as a whole. Customer feedback helps companies figure out what exactly is most important to their customers. With this feedback companies are allowed to follow certain market trends or change their products when need be. These surveys also allow companies to improve upon any customer service issues. Although this is the case, not many people actually partake in surveys. It’s important to note that answers found in voluntary surveys are going to have extremely emotional answers. The customer will either be very happy or very upset. This high level of emotion will trigger their response to actually partake in the survey itself.
When acquiring customer feedback, it’s important to understand where your customer lies within the “Buyers Journey”. There are 3 types of potential customers:
People who visited the website.
In this case you would ask them questions such as “How did you hear about us?” or “How did you get here today?”
People who signed onto your email list without purchasing.
If this is the case you would want to know why they signed up for emails and went through your page without purchasing. Questions such as “Why haven’t you purchased anything yet?” would be asked.
People who purchased from your website.
Nothing is better than having a customer leave you feedback following a product purchase. You get to find out what worked and what didn’t work. Questions such as “Why did you choose to purchase?” would be asked.
There’s plenty of services out there that will help you obtain feedback from customers. Type Form and Survey Monkey are free services that allow you to gain data collection through a landing page. There are different ways that you can get your customers onto this landing page by emailing them or even including it on your website. If you are consistently sending out emails 2-3 times a week I would suggest sending one email a month that asks for your recipients to take a survey. Incentives could be offered to your customers in order to get them to fill out the survey. An example of an incentive would be to enter their name in a raffle for a chance to win a large amount of store credits for your business.
Survey Monkey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/
Type Form: https://www.typeform.com/
Surveys are not the only way to obtain feedback from your website or product. There are a few services out there that review your website to ensure that it is most effective by analyzing your page visits and headlines. Website Doctor is one of the few services that compare your search engine traffic and page visitors to your competitors. These services can prove to be beneficial but can cost several hundreds of dollars. If you are more of a bootstrapped business owner I would suggest asking friends and family to peruse your website and give you some constructive criticism of what could be improved. As a business owner you must use your resources without spending any unnecessary revenue.
Website Doctor: https://www.websitedoctor.com/