Customer Feedback: Uproot Negativity to Churn Better ROI

Originally posted on GMR Website Maintenance Blog.

No business can afford to ignore its customers. Even businesses that have been around with a loyal following must still ask target customers for feedback. Here are some points to remember about market communication to help improve ROI.

Why Customer Feedback holds importance for your Business

Staying in Touch with Customers Keeps Your Business Alive

Communication is the core of every business because it connects buyers and sellers. If you don’t pay attention to how prospects react to your messages, then you may lose track of them once they disappear. No matter what you’re selling, your business depends more on what buyers think than what you think.

Learning from Customers Helps Your Business Evolve

If your ideas do not catch on with your target market, then you will need to make adjustments after carefully studying consumer behavior. Even great ideas can become flops if there is no market ready to buy. You may even need to redefine your target market.

Two-Way Communication is More Personalized

One of the key components of modern marketing is personalization. Traditional marketing involved interrupting people’s day and trying to pressure them into buying items they may not have wanted. Times have changed as consumer loyalty is moving toward business relationships in which individuals feels their personal needs are being addressed.

Publishing Reviews Convinces Other Buyers

A key reason for posting customer testimonials on your site is that online reviews now carry more trust among consumers than commercials or other forms of marketing. Sometimes reviews can be a deciding factor in purchasing. Consumers now use the internet as a tool for finding the best deals and quality, so give them plenty of evidence from fellow consumers.

Negatives Can Become Positives

Running a business is an evolution and an educational process. Even the best marketers have had to rethink and reshape their ideas after getting customer feedback. While not every negative comment will have merit, consider each one a subset of the customer experience and how you can improve it in either a personalized way or a general way for your entire market.

Ways to Get the Feedback From Customers

Customer Surveys

You can easily craft surveys with sites like SurveyMonkey, but keep in mind that only certain types of surveys will generate sufficient responses. Make sure you keep surveys brief so that you don’t bore your customers or give them the impression that you don’t care about their valuable time. Keep your questions open-ended and limited to essential information. Here are some more customer feedback tools for your website.

Feedback Forms

Offering customers a chance to voice their opinions is helpful to both parties. Providing a simple form on your site allows them to send you messages that they may not otherwise bother to tell you about. Experiment with different ideas such as providing a feedback button in obvious areas of your web pages that lead to questions followed by feedback boxes that collect minor details to build buyer personas.

Direct Communication

By directly contacting customers you can fill in the blanks that are not revealed through forms, email and other electronic communication. You’ll gain deeper insight on customer perceptions this way, since they may not always have the time to respond to other methods. It gives you a chance to enhance personalization by learning more about their needs while reaching out and letting them know you care.

Customer Analytics

While most analytics programs just track website activity, more specialized customer analytics programs can tell you about individual user activity. Using such dynamic interaction programs as SAS Customer Intelligence, you can study your target audience in terms of how they react to specific content. You’ll find out a wealth of data on user behavior, which allows predicting and increasing response rates.

User Tests

You can determine how well customers appreciate the usability of your site with continuous user testing. The best way to do this is using pro tools such as UserTesting.com. This tool provides user insights, how they feel about your site. Based on that, you can easily rectify or improve it to give a better user experience.

Getting feedback from unbiased strangers on your site functions, such as a sign up process, will help reveal what new users in general may think about your site.

Converting negative feedback into positive through various channels can be magical for your business reputation. Instead of reacting to criticism defensively, focus on a positive response that builds your story, so that you are spreading positive energy and richer insight of your brand, especially through social networks. A few bad reviews aren’t going to hurt your reputation and may even convey more authenticity than sites with all positive reviews. Concentrate on building bridges so that your market grows organically.

Ajay Prasad is the Founder/President of GMR Web Team, a certified Google Partner Full service Digital Marketing agency in Orange County, California. Ajay is also the author of several eBooks to help small business formulate their web strategy.

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