Nowadays you can’t go anywhere or do anything without being asked to leave feedback. It is important to make sure you, as a customer, provide it. It is even more important to make sure you, as a business, use the feedback.

Some businesses ask for feedback as part of their business process. ‘Tick’, yes, we’ve asked for feedback. Yes, here is the feedback. No, we’ve not investigated it or done anything with it, but we have it. So, what’s the point in acquiring it?

The whole purpose of gathering feedback is to use it. Your customers have come into your business, they have interacted with your team members, used your resources and have left with that service in their memory. They may or may not have bought anything from your company, but they certainly would be the first to say whether they would use you again or not. The voice of the customer is a powerful thing.

Why Ask?

  • Asking for customer feedback is key to understanding how your business is perceived. It’s very easy to try and adopt a customer attitude when walking through your business, but you never truly get to see how customers are dealt with. Cut out the middleman and go straight to the source.

  • Reviewing customer feedback is key to understanding the experience your business has offered. Some people may have had an incredible experience, 10/10 would recommend and others may have had an awful experience and would never come back. But why is there always such a drastic difference?

  • Drilling into the data and the feedback received helps understand business failings, opportunities for improvement, areas of excellence, your invaluable team members, those who require additional training and support, as well as many other useful insights.

You need to ask, investigate, and use the customer feedback gathered to allow you to keep your business current and to have an idea of exactly how your business is perceived to continually improve. Use the feedback to develop a training plan, identify your team members who are over or under performing, to help pave the way to a better business.

Don’t just gather feedback as a tick in the box exercise, ask and listen. Take it in and use it as an opportunity to improve and make sure that future customers leave even better feedback.

You can gather customer feedback by conducting CATI Surveys, Customer Satisfaction Surveys, Customer Interviews or even Customer Panels. You can run Focus Groups to gather feedback on new products or services to get a better understanding of feedback face to face. You could even have researchers positioned outside your business to speak to customers as soon as they leave to gather immediate feedback.

Any method of customer research is ideal to hear the voice of the customer.

Do you need support gathering feedback and undertaking any customer research activity?

Get in touch and our team will advise on what method would best suit your business to maximise your customer feedback.