When your goal is business growth, what influences your business strategy? What knowledge would make the biggest impact on how you operate today? Having the correct insights to develop your strategy is often what key decision makers need to make the right calls.
A customer survey can be one of the most powerful ways to get the insights you need to develop your business strategy. Essentially, you are getting invaluable insights into what works, what you can improve and what your customers think about you.
Ultimately, it is a key driver of your business; these are 10 of the ways how you can use it to create a better business.
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1. Get performance feedback
Ask your old customers who haven't bought your products or used your services for a while to tell you what went wrong, and what you can do to get them back as customers. With this knowledge, you can work on improving on your weaknesses.
This is also great for knowing how your customer service is working and what needs to be improved, as you can use your online survey to get external feedback on how your employees are doing.
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2. Create more loyal customers
An intelligent online customer survey, especially one based a methodology such as the Net Promoter Score℠(NPS®), can help you uncover your most loyal customers and influencers.
They're the perfect candidates to become your promoters and brand ambassadors and you'll learn what makes them stay loyal. It’ll also be a nice way to keep in touch, maintain your relationship with them and show that you care. Just the mere act of showing customers that you're listening goes a long way.
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3. Create a world-class customer experience
Online customer surveys are a great and relatively inexpensive tool to drive ongoing communication between you and your customers.
A simple survey, asking a few strategic questions can really drive a major change in your customer experience, understanding your customer journey and how people interact with your brand throughout multiple touch points.
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4. Keep in touch and say thank you
The survey acts as a reminder that you’re there, keeping you top of mind.
Simply ask how they're doing and what suggestions they might have for making your offering even better. Use it strategically and reward your most loyal customers: consider offering customers some valuable rewards for answering your surveys.
Saying thank-you goes a long way, and is easy to do with the right survey software.
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5. Boost your employee engagement
Surveys aren't just for customers. Employee engagement and retention strategies benefit from an employee-focused survey as well.
These surveys ask your employees what motivates them, how they feel about their work and their workplace, and ultimately why they decided to work for your company and what you could do to improve their experience.
Happy employees leads to happier customers—it's easier to provide world-class customer service when you believe in the brand you are representing, after all.
6. Rapid product feedback
Survey customers who have just bought your product. Ask them what they think about it and why.
The answers could highlight valuable insights into how you can improve product features or address any design flaws while the product is still fresh in the mind of those who have purchased it.
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7. New product development
Explore what opportunities there are for new products by asking your customers what expectations haven’t been met by your current products.
Ask if they have any clever new ideas into what products they would need and what they would actually spend their hard earned cash on.
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8. Understanding your market
If you’re looking to grow your business or get established into a new service area, getting to know your new market is crucial. A survey helps to identify who your audience are (or should be) and how you can reach out to them effectively.
Alternatively, you may want to double check that you're targeting the right customer niche. Get an insight into a new target market by surveying them to ask about their demographics, income, interests, likes and dislikes and so on.
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9. Reporting for senior management
The valuable feedback you gain from your surveys can also help with senior management reporting, as they can pinpoint what the key drivers and metrics are across departments and different role types.
This makes it easy to determine trends over time and drive a business case for change. Authentic qualitative and quantitative data which is traceable provides a strong foundation and valuable information.
10. Measure data over time
Ensure the feedback you receive from your survey is actioned and kept up to date on a regular basis.
Use your surveys to connect with customers again and measure your progress over regular periods of time. Make it worth your while—leverage what you learn from this feedback and compare your results over time to see how you’ve improved.
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Check out our free eBook on Everything you need to know about online customer surveys to make sure you nail your surveys every time!
