There are two major things a consumer takes away from a brand or a business. The first is the quality of what the brand has to offer - either a service or a product. The second, and our focus, is how the brand makes them feel. This isn’t about the brand offering, it is simply about them, the consumer. If you randomly ask a business owner how they think they can grow their business, they would probably talk about publicity, marketing, increasing product lines, and about a hundred different things. One thing they’d probably leave out is customer happiness, which is derived from the excellent experience the business provides. Everyone thinks there will be some crazy untapped secret that would transform a business, and while there might be, it is right under their noses but nobody seems to be rushing to make Ted talk about it. Keiningham and Vavra (2001) found that for every percentage increase in customer satisfaction, there is an average increase of 2.37% of return on investment.
Start with a growth mindset.
The concept of a growth mindset was developed by Stanford professor, Carol Dweck. It basically means approaching everything with the belief that there is always room for improvement. Every business has a goal it sets out to achieve. That is the endgame of business plans and strategies. If a business is unable to realize these goals, then the purpose is defeated. Customer Surveys help a business facilitate said growth by providing the needed value to bring it closer to its goals but you would need to start out with a growth mindset. There is always something that could be done better. There is always progress to make. There is always room for improvement. A fixed mindset does an entrepreneur no favors. With a growth mindset, you can properly maximize customer surveys.
Cultivate a habit of listening with constant feedback.
Customer surveys give the average consumer the opportunity to express their pleasure, displeasure, and every other thing. Hurrah for studies, figures, and statistics but nothing ever beats getting your information directly from the horse’s mouth. The information is there, you simply need to have them speak and you need to listen. You can collect the information and other useful feedback from all of your digital touchpoints using Useforms. Do you want to grow? Listening shows you how.
Put feedback into action.
Surveys and feedback give you direct insight into what your consumers want. You cannot create a perfect product, but you can take care of a great ton of imperfections and even add a bunch of improvements you might not have considered without customer surveys. In fact, the whole point of requesting feedback is to discover opportunities for improvement. As a business, you’re going to need to take it very seriously and act on it.
Monitor the outcome.
You have done everything you are supposed to. You have a growth mindset. You listen to your customers. You execute the feedback. The icing on the cake is how you handle the outcome. Listening to, and executing feedback should have a positive outcome. It could be sales increase, social media post engagement increase, or profit increase, etc. You can find out by monitoring the outcome. This would also shed light on how you can better streamline your feedback collection and utilization structure. A lot of the time, there is no such thing as a well-kept secret. There are only the mundane and overlooked aspects of the business. These aspects, when exploited properly become goldmines and before you know it, you are experiencing an exponential growth that would have only seemed possible with divine intervention, or the intervention of a million-dollar marketing budget.
Carry out a customer survey. Listen to what your consumers have to say. They have the answers.
