Getting To Know Your Customers
To provide the most effective customer service to your customers, it’s absolutely necessary that you understand them, i.e., know them individually. The availability of online survey apps means that anyone can create an effective survey that helps you get to know your customers.
It’s important that you see your customers as relationships and not just numbers. And relationships require two-way communication. Asking questions by way of surveys and feedback forms give your customer a chance to voice their opinion and thus feel valued. It will also enable you to segment them into buckets in order to direct the more personalised messaging and offers, via channels they prefer.
Surveys to get to know customers
Online surveys, especially on your business website, allow you to gather information about your customers, and even those who just happen to be visiting your website. You can learn any number of things about your “audience” with surveys, such as:
- Feedback about your products, services, marketing, website and events
- Learn market trends or product ideas that your creative customers may want to suggest
- Customer service feedback-positive or negative
- Measure employee satisfaction, guide new business decisions
- Evaluate competitors and alternatives and what customers may have liked about them
Where do you get online surveys?
There are many free survey tools on the internet as well as those which require a paid subscription, and each of these come with its own advantages and disadvantages. These survey tools give you templates, questions, answer summaries, and other various related services.
Researching these tools will help you determine which is the best fit for your situation. Look into these well-known, highly-rated and easy-to-begin options:
Consider the standard tools they use to gather information from contacts, then look at how they help you analyse that data. Some are best used online, while others work better in mobile apps, or even hard copy clipboard printouts.
Ask questions.
Once you’ve decided on a survey tool, include questions or ask for feedback that will help you to design your services in the future.
In order to “know” someone, you might have to ask them questions about themselves. What do they like? What do they read? Where do they go for information? Who do they hang around with?
In business terms, these bits of information are more related to the relationship you have with them. Therefore, these questions become something like:
- What do they like about dealing with you?
- What do they read to find the information they need?
- How easy is it for them to get information from you?
- What other groups do they affiliate within their business niche?
- Have they gone to your competitors and how do they evaluate them?
By gaining insight into these important individual business relationships, you can convey more convincingly how much they need your services.
Automation and beyond…
Once you’ve decided on an app to build your survey, and compiled your data-gathering questions, you’ll want to go one more step. Consider how you’re going to send the survey out and how to follow up with people who’ve responded to it. Finally, the data from the answered surveys is not useful unless it’s analysed.
Anything from thank you emails, follow up responses, and data analysis is easily automatable.
What about a “Customer Feedback” form?
Customer feedback is an invaluable tool to include on your basic website. Contact information in order for your web visitors to get in touch with you is always a standard rule-of-thumb.
Create a form, such as an event registration, or product registration, or customer feedback form. No special developer coding is needed, and the data can be tracked in a collection that is easily evaluated.
However, what if the web visitor doesn’t notice it or feel sufficiently motivated to write out a paragraph, or more, in a feedback form? Here are a few tips to get them engaged with your survey:
- Create a link to your survey
- Embed your survey on a page
- Create a pop-up window
All these options can indeed seem overwhelming. And it can very well be that way, especially for the business owner who is responsible for various duties in and out of the office.
But, be aware: do-it-yourself marketing is a dangerous way to waste your money. Outsourcing your marketing ideas is an efficient way to let a professional handle the options described here, while you do your many jobs.
MyMarketer is a personalised marketing service that supports New Zealand’s small-to-medium businesses. An experienced marketing professional joins your business team, and aids you in the process of planning and then gets busy and executes that plan. Everything we do is focused on helping you get new customers and of course keeping your existing ones happy!
Collectively, MyMarketers have over hundreds of years of experience in a vast variety of industries and service business. MyMarketer is an outsourcing answer to your business’s marketing goals.
Check out how we do it here
The team@MyMarketer.
