eROI Days Email Agency

Customer feedback is quite powerful and the ways in which it can positively shape your business are countless. Feedback gives you valuable insight to your customers’ attitudes, desires, and frustrations. Feedback lets you make smarter, more informed business decisions – from the direction to take your marketing campaigns, to the angles you use in sales/new business discussions, to where you place the focus in product development, to your approach to customer support, and so on. By listening to your customers, and making decisions based on what you hear, you quickly become much more relevant to them.

When giving the option to make business decisions around assumed customer profiles or actual ones, the choice should be a no-brainer.  Don’t just assume you know what value your customers place on your service or product, actually know. Don’t just assume you know what you customers are happy with and what they are frustrated with, actually know. And then, once you actually know, maximize the value of that information. If you haven’t already, it’s time to embrace customer feedback and here are 5 tips to get you started…

1) Have a strategy and be committed to it. There are three main pieces to any good feedback program:

• Asking for feedback. First and foremost your strategy should NOT start with, “If we get customer feedback we will …”. Waiting around for customers to contact you with feedback is not a strategy; you need to go after it and do so on an on-going basis.
• Planning how you will use the feedback. This not only helps you generate the type of feedback you seek, but helps ensure that it doesn’t just disappear into a black hole. You need to know what you are going to do with the feedback once you receive it. Who will it be shared with? What business decisions will it influence?  Knowing these things are critical for any feedback program, no matter how big or small.
• Using it (and letting you customers know that you did). The entire point of generating feedback is to aid in the ongoing success of your business. Make sure that you not only have a plan for how to use it, but actually use it. And don’t forget to let your customers know that they do have a voice, that they are influencers of your brand – the more they realize that the more loyal to your brand they will become and the more open they will be to sharing with you in the future.

2) Be timely with your requests. Use key points of interaction to solicit feedback from your customers. This ensures that you receive it while their experience is still fresh and/or most relevant and results in more specific feedback. The less timely you are, the more general the feedback will be.

3) Be relevant with your requests. Don’t ask your customers to provide feedback on every part of your business all at once. Collecting feedback is an ongoing process and should be requested at many points of interaction (see #2), so keep each request short and relevant to the corresponding interaction. Want to know how you can improve your newsletter, link to a survey within your newsletter. Want to know if customers are happy with their in-store experience, use point-of-purchase cards or place a request on their receipt. Want to know how they like your new product, contact them shortly after, but give them enough time to have used it. Be selective in what you ask and when you ask it.

4) Keep it simple. The easier it is for your customers to give feedback, the more likely they will be to give it. Provide various ways for them to answer- online, by email, by phone, in-person, etc. And keep it brief with simple, direct questions.

Your customers are your businesses’ most valuable asset and listening to what they have to say is a win-win for you both. With the information in hand to make better informed business decisions that will improve your business in the ways that are most important to your customers, the results will be happier, more loyal customers and, ultimately, a happier thriving business.

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If you are up and about and wandering the streets of Portland contemplating the businesses you watch come and go you may want to peek at the August 2010 Oregon Business Magazines article titled “The New Deal” written by Ben Jacklet. Yes! There are people working behind the scenes of Portland’s start up ventures and they are working hard to secure Portland’s economy in more ways than one.

These guys know small businesses drive the economy and in Portland that is just what we need now, being known as a pretty slow start up scene when compared with fast runners Seattle and San Francisco. They may not seem so glamorous to the naked eye but these small start ups need investors to get them off the ground and angel investors in Portland have not been so quick to spread their wings.

Oregon Business Magazine has just published the article to explain who is out there and what they are doing to get these small businesses and startups funded and on a steady growth pattern. The young business leaders featured here bring with them a wealth of new ideas to “ignite the startup scene”. These are the guys who are investing in Portland’s small startups not only financially but with new ideas and dynamic views on how to succeed.

Find out who they are and what they have been doing.