Maintaining and building a customer base is the key to good business. While acquiring new customers is more difficult than maintaining existing ones, it is still crucial to keep existing customers while enticing new ones. Surveying customers is a great way to do both.
Research has found that simply by doing a customer satisfaction survey and asking the customer how a business was performing is a great way to keep current customers satisfied and earn new customers as well. Surveying customers can help a business keep abreast of what customers need both now and in the future.
The Psychology behind Surveys
Survey participants are often more loyal and committed to a company than non-participants. Why? Customers like being part of a community around the products and services they love and surveying customers can reinforce that need and make them feel like their opinion matters. Those are also great Reasons to Convert Your Customer List into an Insights Community.
Many customers like to connect with a company and sales surveys are a great way to do that. It gives them a measure of comfort to know that the company cares about what they think. This can reinforce the customer’s commitment to a company or product and they may ultimately share their passion for the company or product with others.
Surveying customers is also a great way for customers to share their thoughts about your product or services. If customers have an issue with something you can address it promptly. This might even help avoid a social media rant at some point.
Build Awareness of Your Products or Services
Online surveys are both a means of data collection and information sharing. You’ll want to do this carefully because there are some laws about selling through research.
A good way to stay legal and transparent is to have a survey disclaimer on the survey. When surveying customers, simply inform customers that you will be telling them about new products and/or services while collecting their opinions, not only will they be understanding, you might actually find a level of enthusiasm there as well. This is a great way to get information about your business out to current and potential customers and showcase new products, services or other interesting features.
Surveying customers will drive opinions about you
When you ask people their opinion, you can sometimes cause them to think about something they otherwise may not have. Perhaps a potential customer didn’t realize they needed your product or service until you asked them what they thought about it.
You would be surprised at how many of your existing customers aren’t aware of all the different products and services you provide — and surveying customers just makes them aware in a very soft way without heavy selling.
Uncover areas for improvement with online surveys
Online surveys are a great way to find out how well your company is performing. Are customers happy with current products and services? Are there things you could do to make their experience better? The survey may even point out problems you didn’t know existed.
Sharing results of a survey is a great way to reinforce customer loyalty as well as employee focus. Knowing what the customer likes and dislikes is a big part of knowing what priorities to put into place.
In conclusion, surveys are great tools for obtaining critical information for your business and establishing a good relationship with customers. In today’s world of technology, it is easier than ever to put together and distribute surveys. Email, websites, and CRM tools are all options for getting surveys out fast. This makes it easy to keep up with customer opinions regularly.
