Tag: customer feedback

5 Benefits Of Customer Feedback

Scott Asai1 Comment

As business owners, managers, or employees, it’s often easy for you to describe what your company offers. It’s important, however, to know how your customers would describe your company. That’s where the benefits of customer feedback come in. Does their perception of what you offer match what you intend to offer? Are they satisfied with your customer service? The only way to know these details, and a whole lot more, is to reach out and ask.

Customer feedback can be invaluable to just about any company. It can help you fine-tune your business. It can also help you ensure the experience you’re providing your customers matches your values.

Here at Praiseworthy, feedback means a whole lot to us. We recently asked our most frequent users which five words they would use to describe our offerings. Their most common responses were that we are informative, helpful, efficient, easy, and insightful. Talk about compliments! It’s gratifying to know which areas we’re thriving at, and to use that feedback to improve every day.

The most interesting thing about those words is that they also describe the top benefits of customer feedback. (How fitting, since feedback is our specialty!) Below, let’s take a look at five of the top benefits of customer feedback.

To elaborate on the 5 words our users gave us to describe our service, Praiseworthy can help increase your customer retention with the following characteristics:

1. Informative

Unbiased customer feedback is an important tool for gathering information about your company. Yes, sales reports, market research, and other forms of information gathering are also important. However, receiving information directly from your customers provides you with much more actionable information. After all, nearly all of your research and effort stems back to making customers happy and increasing satisfaction. There’s an easy way to find this out: by asking them.

With a platform like Praiseworthy, you have real-time access to customers’ responses and open-ended comments. This cuts through confusion to give you a clear, direct picture of how your clients are feeling. That means you can take the steps you need to make them happier. You can also use that information to praise employees that have done a great job with customer service. When customers are happier, so is your team, and everyone wins.

2. Helpful

There are few things more helpful than knowing exactly how customers feel and what they want. Attempting to guess customers’ needs is difficult. Creating company policies based on assumptions and guesses is even more difficult. Attempting to improve without an accurate gauge on where your customer base stands is tough. It’s like throwing spaghetti at the wall and not knowing what will stick. This can be a huge waste of time and resources. Furthermore, it can damage employee morale.

The simple solution to this problem? Direct customer feedback. With feedback, you can assess what is and isn’t working without any guessing. Particularly when using a tool like Praiseworthy, you can break down your responses into actionable information. Praiseworthy’s dashboard turns results into data—the kind of data that’s actually easy to understand.

Knowledge is helpful.

Knowledge is power. Knowing how customers feel immediately after a phone call with them enables you to do even better in the future.

When business owners and managers have the ability to pinpoint problem areas through this feedback, they can reach out to at-risk customers. They can improve interactions with these customers before they choose to take their business elsewhere. Feedback can be the difference between increased churn and turning unhappy customers into satisfied, loyal customers. Solutions like this make for great word of mouth. This can bring you even more customers over the long run.

3. Insightful

Customizable survey questions let you decide what you want to know most. In fact, one such question helped one of our clients boost their sales by an average of 8 extra tablets per store, per month! Insight goes a step further into general stats and basic information. Insight explores what really makes a company move.

With Praiseworthy’s dashboard, you can break down your survey responses and other feedback into categories and themes. You can understand exactly what a certain number of responses in either direction means so that you can quickly respond and improve.

This makes for increased insight into your customers’ feelings and needs. It also allows for more insight into your company’s day to day functions. The feedback gained from insight operates like a “peak under the hood” in which you can see the inner workings of your company up close. Which employees are best at solving customers’ problems and deserve extra praise? Which policies are turning off customers rather than the intended action of bringing them joy? With increased insight, all these answers are available at your fingertips.

4. Efficient

There’s no way around it: customer feedback makes your team more efficient. Customers are able to take a look at your organization with outside eyes and see the things you miss. They can point out what their surface impression of your company is, as well as what it’s like to work with you as a customer firsthand. This information is simply invaluable, and gathering it through survey responses is about as efficient as it gets.

Of course, the more efficient your feedback platform is, the better. Praiseworthy is a great option because it incorporates details like customer feedback, employee rankings, statistics for multiple locations, reporting, and email updates in one single platform. That means you won’t have to waste your time fiddling with numbers or trying to guess what certain data sets mean. Instead, you can immediately start improving as soon as you receive responses. You can also use the precise detail of the responses to know exactly where to offer praise, and to whom. (After all, high employee morale equals high customer morale. Regularly praising employees for their great work benefits everyone!)

Access to data makes your team more efficient.

Whenever you need to access your survey responses and data, it’s all available to you on Praiseworthy’s dashboard. You can also check out additional reports and charts that pinpoint your customers’ most frequent complaints. Every employee can access their own personal dashboard, where they can parse through results and sort out exactly where things stand. That makes for a lot less wasted time spent trying to just guess what would make their customer interactions better. It also makes the employee feel more in control of their workplace habits and their personal feedback stream.

All of this helps to improve—you guessed it—efficiency. When your team is on the same page about where the company is thriving and where it could improve, you’re already miles ahead. When your entire team has direct access to customer responses, rather than it being funneled through a select few employees who are part of the feedback experience, everyone has a more clear understanding. All of that equates to a precision-oriented, goal-focused team that can reach achievements together. And they can get it all done with a glowing morale and a positive sense of teamwork.

5. Easy

One of the best parts of customer feedback is that it’s easy! Many companies shy away from getting started with the process of collecting feedback because it seems overwhelming. Often, they see choosing a platform as a hassle, and aren’t sure how to utilize any feedback they might receive. This can leading to seeking roundabout ways of attempting to improve the company. Often, these methods that seem faster are actually much more difficult and wasteful of time than simply getting started with seeking feedback.

In reality, getting great customer feedback is incredibly easy. It all comes down to asking illuminating questions and making the process easy for customers to engage in. Praiseworthy can help you do that.

The earlier, the easier.

The earlier you start seeking customer feedback, the more use you can make of it. Because the process is so simple, it’s helpful to get started as soon as you can. This way, you can track trends in customer responses over time and look for changes and patterns. This is just as helpful for a company that getting off the ground and shaping its customer policies as it is for massive, long-standing organizations.

Getting started is easy too.

Thankfully, set-up is simple. Getting ready to go with Praiseworthy is as easy as selecting a few settings and getting things rolling. From there, you’ll be privy to a massive series of game-changing insights about your customer base. This is a whole lot easier than playing years-long guessing games about what customers might want or how employee morale might be improved.

When you start collecting feedback, you’ll have all the information you need in an easy, user-friendly platform. If needed, you’ll be able to update or adjust the questions you ask customers over time to best fit your goals. In the process, you’ll easily build a happier, stronger relationship with your customers. After all, nothing makes a customer feel more valued than creating a dialogue with them. When they know their opinions and their business matter to you, they’ll be all too excited to keep coming back and to help you grow.

Besides being an entrepreneur, Misa Chien is an asian model and cooking show host based in Los Angeles.  Her other blog, Nom Nom TV, a dinner ideas blog, posts articles everywhere from top items to buy at 99 Ranch market to the best way to prepare soba noodles.

This One Simple Survey Question can Drive Massive Growth

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Wondering how to drive massive growth? Your solution may be through one simple survey question.

Aamir Noorani has found such method. Noorani is the Chief Operating Officer of Dr. Cell Phone, a leading and innovative electronic repair store. Noorani and his brother worked at launching the store and empowering it to thrive since 2006.

Noorani needed insight from customers but wasn’t exactly sure how to make that happen. Noorani knew that to boost sales, he needed to connect with those whose experience really mattered. They needed a way to measure how likely a customer would recommend their services. This is known as NPS, or Net Promoter Score. (Read more about NPS here.)

Thus, Noorani started working with Praiseworthy, to begin to collect customer feedback, and measure his NPS score in real time.

For any business, customers are essential for it to succeed and grow. (Click here to watch this section of the interview)

“Your customers are the lifeline of your business,” he says. “Your referral and repeat business should make up the majority of your customers.”

Customers, faithful and happy, form the business. “You really need to make them fans of your business,” he says. “A business that people say, ‘wow, that service was so incredible, I’m definitely going back to them next time and tell all my friends and family about them.’”

That recommendation from happy and content customers are what makes businesses like Dr. Cell Phone thrive.

Noorani credits his team for the success in bringing referrals in from positive customer experiences. “They’re the ones that are on the front line, taking care of all these customers and making sure that they’re delivering world class service,” he says.

Extending beyond just point of sales reports and tracking repeat customers, customer feedback can inspire and encourage employees to continue to provide a great customer experience.

“Seeing customer comments was just incredible,” he says. “Instead of just guessing if our customers were happy, they were giving us feedback about what we could do better and positive things, too. That told us, let’s do more of that.”

Those reviews, whether opportunities for improvement or praise for what they were doing well, brought positive change to how Dr. Cell Phone operates.

For negative feedback, they address issues right away, contacting the customer to make whatever was wrong, right.

“All those customer comments that we were seeing, all that feedback has made our business a lot better and more customer-centric,” he says.

In training employees to focus on providing a great customer experience, there must be a balance between being not too pushy but also ensuring to get that referral.

“First and foremost, it needs to be the right person,” he says. Recruiting the right person leads to the opportunity to create that great customer experience.

The Influence of the NPS (Click here to watch this section of the video)

Customer feedback often centers around one very important question, a question that is captured in the measurement of the net promoter score. The net promoter score survey is the question of ‘how likely would you recommend the business?’

So what happened as a result of Dr. Cell Phone’s use of Praiseworthy customer feedback surveys?

The results Dr. Cell Phone has seen: an increase of 24 points since their involvement with Praiseworthy. Their score of 72 is very high in the retail field. A lot of people are being recommended to visit the store.

Reconnecting with negative reviews has improved their NPS in that by reaching out to customers to remedy whatever issue arose, customers appreciate that attention. And they’ll tell others.

“More and more we’re relying on the recommendations of our friends and family,” he says. “What a lot of customers are doing now is asking their friend, ‘where’d you get your phone fixed?’”

The magic words of “Would you recommend this service to your friends and family” can help boost recognition and popularity. “It’s a question that our company talks about every single morning. It’s going to be the engine that brings the business 10-15 years from now,” he says.

Like what Dr. Cell Phone has witnessed, an increase in NPS means an increase in sales.

Besides being an entrepreneur, Misa Chien is an asian model and cooking show host based in Los Angeles.  Her other blog, Nom Nom TV, a dinner ideas blog, posts articles everywhere from top items to buy at 99 Ranch market to the best way to prepare soba noodles.

Quality Customers and How to Get Them Onboard

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Collaborative post – may contain affiliate links

Every startup is looking for the same thing; a steady flow of customers to bring them some much-needed revenue and success. Unfortunately, this isn’t something that will necessarily just fall into your lap and you’ll have to work to keep those first few important customers onboard.

Luckily, there are tried-and-tested ways to do this so that they don’t flock over to your competitors instead. Here is a handful of excellent ways to make sure your customers stay put where you need them, happy and content with the service you’re providing.

Communicate with them

It goes without saying that you won’t be able to deliver exactly what they want and need without actually keeping in touch. How you do this, however, will also have an impact on how receptive they are. Casual conversations through social media are excellent ways to do this but don’t forget to deliver great customer service when they approach you as well.

Since you’re a startup, it’s not always easy to find the resources to hire an entire team of customer service professionals to help you out. One solution is to outsource it instead; that way, you’ll actually gain a whole team of professionals without really having to pay for their training.

You could also look into getting customer success software instead. You’ll be able to deliver personal service without having to train and hire a team – and the software will take care of most of the hassle for you.

Lure them in with rewards

A loyal customer should be rewarded – and if they won’t be rewarded by you, they’ll be quick to head over to one of your competitors instead. It doesn’t have to be too grand either as you’ll just have to make sure that sticking with it’s worth it for them.

Have a look at this article for some great tips on customer loyalty rewards to make it a bit easier for you.

A free test of a new product is always a good idea or a heavily discounted service in the future when they’ve been with you for a while. It’s the kind of stuff that makes it a bit better to be a customer at your startup.

Take their complaints seriously

Finally, it’s important to realize that each and every business will experience some negative feedback too. It’s how they learn, after all, and how they’re able to grow as a business and deliver the kind of service that their customers are looking for.

Make sure that you do not only make it easy for them to give you feedback but that you’re also taking anything negative to heart. That way, they’ll feel a bit more listened to and won’t suspect that this is the way your business is normally operating.

It’s the kind of stuff that brings good customers in and keeps them there for the long run.

Steps You Can Take To Revive Stalling Sales

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Have your sales slumped? Are you struggling to entice new customers? Have you noticed that existing clients seemed to have slipped off the radar? If your sales figures have stalled, it’s time to take action.

Analyze and evaluate your marketing strategy

There’s no use in having the most brilliant idea or the most fantastic products if you don’t market your business effectively. You need to get your company noticed and ensure that consumers are aware of exactly what you do. If your sales have slowed and analytics show that your campaign isn’t having the desired effect, it’s time to think about how you can improve your strategy, reach your target market and encourage them to take the all-important next step and place an order. If you don’t have expertise in marketing, it’s worth seeking advice and assistance from an experienced firm with a proven track record, such as Rapid Growth Marketing. Marketing experts can identify issues with your current campaigns, suggest improvements and add features that will enhance your performance and deliver results. If you’re falling short, you may be missing the mark when it comes to targeting the right consumers, or you might be relying on the wrong techniques and platforms.

Get people talking

Many businesses find it difficult to maintain the interest of their clients after a product or website launch, a corporate event or the introduction of a new service. At the time, there’s a buzz around the business, but all too often, everything goes quiet quite quickly. To keep sales buoyant, you need to keep people interested. One of the best ways to do this is by offering deals and discounts. Share details of special offers and promotions on your social media, and encourage your followers to like and pass on your posts. Dropping prices or offering a freebie with every purchase, for example, could be just what you need to bring in new customers and keep those who have shopped with you before on board. If you do plan to run a promotion, make sure you’re ready. If you’re giving away products, for example, ensure you have plenty of stock, and make sure your adverts and social media posts specify that the offer is only available until stocks last.

Make improvements

Nothing is perfect, and in business, there’s always room for improvement. Use customer feedback and reviews to make changes to your products and services. If customers at your restaurant have suggested opening earlier and serving brunch, for example, and you’re keen to go ahead, trial the service at the weekends, and advertise it online, on your website and in the local community. Even simple changes, like offering a new flavor or a different size of a best-selling product can make a huge difference.

If you’re having trouble making sales or there’s been a lack of interest in your products or services of late, now is the time to start trying to turn things around. Focus on improving your marketing strategy, drum up interest by running promotions and be prepared to make improvements to impress new and existing clients.

The Importance of Accountability Within Your Business

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The world going digital has provided a huge amount of benefits in all sorts of areas. Whether you run a small business or simply work for a larger one, the way that people spend their days has changed entirely since the advent of modern computers. One of the key areas to be impacted by this worldwide development is accountability, with every aspect of this part of business becoming easier to manage, even for those without huge amounts of resources. Why exactly is accountability so important, though? To help you out with this, this post will be exploring some of its features, along with the tools which can be used to help you to keep track of your company.

Recognition: There are a lot of roles being performed which are very hard to monitor without the help of a computer. In these cases, ensuring that people are properly recognized for their hard work is almost impossible. Warehouses, for example, can have their performance drastically impacted by one or two people, even when they have very large teams. Without the tools to monitor where the work is being done, though, it would be impossible to make sure that the right people are rewarded for it. Nowadays, most businesses like this will use computer systems to track and monitor the work of individuals to keep an eye on their personal performance.

Theft Prevention: Along with making sure that you can give people the recognition they deserve, having systems in place which make it hard for people to avoid accountability will also help to prevent theft. In the very same warehouses, people won’t be able to remove products without recording it on a database which also stores their name. When things go missing, it will be easy to figure out who is responsible, and this can help to reduce thefts by a huge margin. There are loads of companies around the world which have suffered huge losses thanks to inadequate ways to monitor their employees.

Other Crimes: Of course, not every business works like a warehouse. Offices, for example, won’t have items which can be stolen, and this takes a lot of weight off of the shoulders of the owners. Bullying and abuse can still be issues, though, and this is another area which is benefited by accountability. CCTV, employee attendance records, and other digital recording methods make it significantly easier for a manager to make sure that people aren’t being treated badly by their fellow workers. If you receive a complaint, it shouldn’t take long to figure out the big picture, as long as the right technology is in place.

Accident Responsibility: Accidents are simply a part of life, and most businesses come with some sort of risk in this area. In a lot of cases, though, employees will lie when they get the chance, attempting to cover their backs to avoid getting in trouble. For instance, if you have people driving trucks, having a member of the public hurt could result in your business facing lawsuits and other complications when the driver claims that they couldn’t have done anything. Tools like fleet fuel cards can solve this issue, making it much easier to track and monitor where people have been driving. They could have been somewhere which they shouldn’t have been, making them responsible for the accident, rather than your business.

Unhappy Customers: Some people simply aren’t built to interact with the general public. This can be very hard to see until they’ve been working with you for a very long time, with small annoyances often triggering explosive behavior in the workplace. If this is aimed directly at a customer, it could make them very unhappy, with people shouting at them down the phone or face to face being very unprofessional. Having a record of the communications your employees have won’t make this better for the customer. Instead, it can make it easier for you to hold the perpetrator responsible, while also making it impossible for them to do it again.

Unhappy Employees: The level of protection which employees have in the eyes of the law is very good, nowadays. Ensuring that everyone is treated correctly, the world has changed a lot in this area over the last few years, making it very hard for companies to do as they please. Of course, though, people aren’t always honest, and being fired for something completely reasonable could be taken to court under the pretense that they haven’t anything wrong. All of the various methods you have for keeping track of your employees can solve this very quickly, offering definitive proof of their poor work.

Improving Practice: Accountability doesn’t always have to be about proving when who is in the right and who is in the wrong. Instead, there are a lot of companies out there using tools like these to improve the work which they do on the whole, and this is a huge benefit as you’re growing. For example, when you are keeping a detailed log of the work which people are doing, it will be very easy to see which stages are slowing them down the most. Using this information, you can alter the way people work to make their jobs easier. This is a great way to make sure that your company is always on top of the work it has to do.

With all of this in mind, it should be much easier for you to start improving accountability within your business. When you have the tools available, it’s always worth keeping a record of as much as possible within business, as this sort of effort can have an array of benefits which will always keep you on top. In some cases, you don’t have a choice in this area, and will have to follow rules which force you to keep these records. In others, though, this is something you will have to do for yourself. It could take a little bit of investment, but the value you will get in return will make it well worth it.

Modern Ways Of Pleasing Today’s Customer

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Pleasing a modern target audience can be tough for any business. The market is always changing, and your company needs to work hard to stay on top of its game. You need to keep rethinking your business strategies to make sure that you’re appealing to the modern consumer. If you’re struggling on that mission then here are some modern ways of pleasing today’s customer.

Rewarding people.

If you start rewarding your customers then you’ll probably notice more repeat purchases. Discounts, vouchers, and even giveaways are a great way to get people buying from your business in the first place, but such rewards can also keep customers returning to your business. If customers see they’ll get 50% off their second or third purchase, for example, then they’ll be more likely to buy from you again. You really have to appreciate the power of word of mouth marketing, too. Happy customers will tell their friends and family about you. In fact, you could even use rewards as an incentive to get people talking about your brand. If you offer discounts to customers who refer your company to their friends then you’ll probably notice a bigger influx of new clients. Rewards are definitely a good way to build a long-term bond with your client base.

Creating an enticing online presence.

Another great way to satisfy the modern-day customer is to create an enticing online presence. Most people search the internet for the things they want to buy. If your digital marketing game isn’t up to scratch then you’re missing out on potential sales. You might want to read about conversion rate optimization because the goal of digital marketing is to gain paying customers. Boosting traffic on your website is a good start, but your company isn’t going to improve if none of those visitors actually buy anything from you. You need to find ways to improve your website’s design and content to impress people who visit your homepage. With an enticing site, your business could see a much better conversion of traffic to sales.

Listening to them.

Finally, the best way to please today’s customer is to simply listen to them. This has always been the case, but it’s something that many modern businesses neglect to do. Giving the consumers what you want to give them isn’t going to get you the sales you want. Like it or not, the customer is always right. If you want your business to do well then you need to meet the needs of the market. Do your research to find out what your target audience wants. You could run polls on Twitter or invite people to leave feedback online.

Find out what clients like and dislike about your business, and ask them for their opinions on rival companies in your industry. That’s the best way to gauge the current consumer mentality in your marketplace. Once you start listening to customers, you’ll have a better understanding of what they want. And, in turn, you’ll be able to deliver a service that pleases today’s customer. You might even be able to find gaps in the market that your competitors have missed. It could be a chance for your brand to really stand out in its industry.