Sales and Marketing - Jen Jordan
Jen Jordan brings a wealth of life and leadership experiences to her writing. After 10 years creating a variety of content for a nonprofit, Jen decided to establish her own writing business. She specializes in creating high quality blog and website content for small businesses. When she's not writing, Jen is a competitive triathlete with a goal of completing a triathlon in all 50 states.
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Leveraging Customer Feedback to Improve Your Small BusinessCustomer feedback is one of the most powerful tools in a small business’s marketing toolbox. Feedback can help you better understand your ideal customer and what they want. 48% of consumers expect a response on social media, demonstrating a need to be heard. Leveraging customer feedback is an opportunity to communicate, build stronger relationships, and retain customers. Additionally, up to 82% of customers never return to a business after an unpleasant experience and almost 50% of them share it on social media. Opening a line of communication can not only save a sale, but also your organization’s reputation. Customer feedback can also help you pinpoint areas where you can improve your products or services. What your customers tell you can also help you generate new ideas and improve existing processes. There are many methods to collect customer feedback. Reading reviews, sending out surveys, examining analytics, and social media are just a few. You want to ensure you have a system for listening in place. Once you’ve collected the feedback, the greatest ROI can come from using it to make improvements. Discover the Customer Feedback Data and Use It Wisely One of the first steps is to comb through the feedback. Feedback offers you a firsthand look into the strengths and weaknesses of your small business. Look for trends, frequently repeated comments, and specific information that helps you identify patterns. Consider performing a sentiment analysis to tap into customer feelings about products, services, or your business. This is free with a Google business profile. Knowing how customers perceive your brand helps establish what needs to happen next. After identifying key areas for improvement, create some SMART goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to help guide the process. From there, you can construct a plan on how to address those weak areas. Create a plan with action steps and continue to collect feedback along the way. Using ongoing feedback will let you know how well your efforts are working and what adjustments need to happen as you move forward. Target Weak Areas - Aggressively Working on your business’ weak areas should be a priority, as it limits the opportunity for harmful negative comments. With nine out of ten consumers relying on reviews to guide their purchases, you can’t afford to ignore comments.Responding on social media, sending personal emails, making phone calls, and practicing empathy can help limit distractors from taking over your social media and reviews. Replying to negative comments helps demonstrate attentiveness and empathy to the original poster and anyone reading the interaction. Google also measures these replies as customer service points, boosting your search engine ranking. Build Strengths with Purpose The process of customer communication is known as churn prevention, which focuses on keeping customers as long as possible. Once key component of churn prevention is having a customer engagement plan. Choose a few key areas you feel will allow you to strengthen customer relationships, engagement, and loyalty. Prioritize these areas to make your customers feel valued and heard. As you strengthen your customer service and product quality, this will bring about innovative approaches and processes. These changes can even create a new customer service culture within your organization. Don’t forget to gather feedback from your customers to identify what they value most. This information helps you determine when to use incentives, personal communication, promotions, and events geared to retaining your ideal customers. Providing high quality customer service can also incentivize lapsed customers to return. Identifying Success As you implement changes and monitor progress with continuous feedback, be sure to:
Organizing customer feedback into usable folders to implement change can be a powerful tool for your small business. Leveraging feedback to make sure your customers feel valued, heard, and appreciated will yield solid returns. Works Cited: https://www.business.com/articles/how-to-use-customer-feedback/ https://www.seoreseller.com/blog/maximizing-business-success-with-customer-feedback-in-2023 https://surveypal.com/blog/6-tips-to-create-a-successful-customer-feedback-process/ |
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