Want more reviews? Keep it simple.

Do you lack customer feedback? Are you trying to get feedback and reviews from your customers but are struggling to see the results.

Don’t worry, it’s a common concern amongst business owners. We see it all the time. It is especially frustrating for small business owners who have limited resources and are trying their best to impress and build great relationships. They put a lot of effort into trying to obtain feedback, so what can YOU do to get results?

The answers is easy: Keep it Simple.

Why do we do it?

Let’s look first at why we want to collect the views of our customers and why it is important.

Feedback is great, it will help you understand your customers, grow your business and make you a solid organisation in your chosen sector. It is the cheapest tool you have for managing the future of your business, and it is also the most powerful.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently issued a report to say that £23.3 billion pound a year is spent in the UK by customers after consulting online feedback and reviews — That is how important this is! If you are not doing this you are MISSING OUT!

You need your customer feedback to be relevant, timely and authentic. If done correctly it grabs the attention of new customers and increases sales and satisfaction.

It also helps you deal with any after-sales issues and keep in contact with your customers.

A lot of businesses understand that feedback and reviews are important, but at the same time they can’t get customers to leave feedback for them.

Are you struggling to get feedback and reviews from your customers? Do you incentivise feedback, say through reward schemes or monthly prize draws? What can you do? Sound familiar?

Barriers & Solutions

Lets look at the key barriers preventing people giving you feedback and how they can be overcome.

• Too complicated
• Time consuming
• Not relevant

Businesses (including large international corporate companies) go wrong by over complicating things.

There are a multitude of survey companies out there on the internet, many are free, where you can easily create complex surveys with multiple questions and answers. Companies think they must use all of these features. They see the simple text-box as archaic and old fashioned.

But let’s think: What does your customer want? They just want to be able to leave you feedback quickly and easily, they do not want to jump through hoops and answer lots of questions they probably think are irrelevant to them.

So what can you do:

• A simple textbox is all you really need. Let your customers give you the answers they want to provide. Don’t restrict them to pre-set questions. You will LEARN a lot more about your business this way.
• Give customers lots of ways to stay in touch: Mobile / Text Messaging / Email / Website. If they can do it their way they are much more likely to do it.
• Listen to the feedback given, try and put yourself in their shoes. Be understanding and respond quickly.
• Action their feedback: Will they see their feedback has been actioned when they next do business with your company?

To Summarise

You don’t need to pay lots of money incentivising customer feedback with gifts and prizes. Think about it from the customers perspective. What do they want? Keep it simple and you will get results.

Checkout this video to see how easy it can be for your customers to give you feedback — Don’t over complicate it.

Originally published at feedbackhub.co.uk.