If Your Small Business is Failing, You Aren’t Prioritizing Customer Feedback

Your disgruntled customers could help you turn your fortunes around

Getting back to basics. It’s a concept that’s been widely discussed in areas as diverse as education, psychology and mental health, physical well being, and even governance. The idea is of course that we can get so caught up in newer, trendier ways of doing things, that we skim over the fundamentals of what works. It’s no different in the world of business, and if your small business is failing, you may just have shifted focus away from one of the telltale signs of success or failure: your customers’ feedback.

Without customers, your business doesn’t exist. And without happy customers, you may be going down a dangerous path.

While the temptation to base current and future business decisions on the latest analytics tools and complex charts in fancy PowerPoint presentations may be hard to ignore, this matters little if John, one of your most valuable customers, sends an email to your support department that indicates he won’t be sticking around. Of course, customer analytics and accurate reporting have their place, but they won’t always dig deeper and expose the specific customer pain points you may not be aware of.

To be really useful, your customer feedback needs to be:

• Regularly reviewed and consolidated
• Promptly addressed
• Encouraged via surveys and other proactive tools
• Monitored once a resolution has been put into place

So, how do you go about implementing customer reviews to ultimately better meet your business goals?

Review and consolidate

To start off, you should put a weekly or monthly report in place that contains customer feedback from each department. Maybe someone in your sales department couldn’t close a deal because your offering missed a crucial component — you should be asking yourself if this is something that can be remedied. Of course, your support team’s feedback will be crucial, as they’re dealing with existing customers.

Start small with the number of customer queries that feel manageable, record these, and begin working on solutions.

If your small business is failing, act quickly

If your retention rate is suffering, you can’t afford to waste time and risk losing more customers. It’s important to quickly find out why people are choosing to leave your business and what their specific issues are; if you can appease an irate customer, you’ll go a long way towards improving brand loyalty. Not only that, but you’ll prevent the same issue from affecting a newer customer in the future. Customer-retention tools like Smartlook and Validately can help you build a more loyal customer base.

Did you know? Only 37 percent of shoppers feel like retailers know them.

Proactive customer feedback

Many customers, if unhappy, will simply stop using your services before telling you why. This is where getting proactive customer feedback becomes so useful. You might consider using a conversational bot like Clickatell Touch on your website, which can ask website visitors questions about their experience or offer them assistance. Your email marketing could contain short surveys about the customer experience, and you can use two-way bulk SMS messaging as a simple and effective way to gauge customer sentiment about your business.

Did you know? 30–40 percent of all online surveys are completed on a mobile device. Remember to keep your surveys as short and simple as possible.

Monitor and resolve

Once you’ve properly consolidated a piece of customer feedback, it’s time to put a plan into place. How are you going to fix the issue? What can you do to improve the customer’s experience in the short term? It’s vital to resolve customer pain points and to continue monitoring the outcome.

So… where to from here?

Let’s take, for instance, a computer repair business. They have received a complaint from a customer who wasn’t charged the precise amount he was quoted for an inspection or repair, with an additional fee added to his invoice. Of course, the customer is immediately upset.

A logical sequence of events for this business may be to:

• REVIEW: Check whether this additional fee is commonly added to invoices and consider adding this to their fees page — and anywhere else where it may be applicable. Look for repetition and find out from team members if similar complaints have previously been noted.
• RESPOND: Apologize to the customer quickly, and offer to waive the fee or provide a discount for the inconvenience.
• FEEDBACK: Send a message to a select group of recent customers asking them about their experience — what worked, and what didn’t.
• RESOLVE: Revise the fee structure; improve communication on invoices, in-store, and/or on your website; prioritize information about fees where they are hidden in small print and make them more visible.

“It takes humility to seek feedback. It takes wisdom to understand it, analyze it, and appropriately act on it.”

Stephen Covey, Author of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

We’re at a stage where earning and retaining consumer trust is more important than ever. It’s critical to put together a plan where you are constantly evaluating real customers experiences with your products and services.

So, before you drown yourself in data and another brainstorming session if your small business is failing, remember to keep going back to the basics: delighting, caring for, and listening to your customers.

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