Gathering customer feedback is a valuable process. And yet it can be completely useless if you don’t do something valuable with that you’ve heard. Here’s the most important thing to do after you get customer feedback.
Once you’ve surveyed customers — and responded to any immediate, critical needs or complaints — you want to use the information so you can improve the customer experience, according to John Sperry, CEO of Mindshare Technologies.
Be even more active with data
Four things you should do:
- Respond. Customers who mention big, relationship-ending issues should be contacted immediately. Any others who comment or take the time to complete your survey deserve to hear you thanking them personally for taking the time to do so. This is enough to help you build a stronger relationship.
- Correlate. As you track customer satisfaction, keep tabs on revenue. You’ll likely see the correlation, and it’ll help gain upper management’s support for initiatives aimed at improving customer satisfaction.
- Promote. Use customers’ positive comments to spread the word about your business. Ask for permission to put their direct quotes on marketing material, on your website or even in advertisements. Also, ask customers who give positive feedback to spread the word in their social media outlets — where the word can spread faster and farther.
- Motivate. Who doesn’t like to hear good things about themselves? Employees take pride in knowing they’ve contributed to a product or service that has had a positive impact on the life or business of a customer. If you get positive feedback about an individual employee, by all means tell him or her immediately, and then spread the word around your organization so others can congratulate the employee on the great work, too.
