Let Your Clients Tell You How to Improve Your Business
Your client’s feedback can be the difference between improving your business and
losing it right away; knowing where you succeed and where you fail after a sale is
critical to growing your business and achieving perfection in your field. The best
way to get that feedback is by sending surveys to your clients asking questions like:
- How has our product/service worked for you?
- In what ways do you think we can improve our product/service?
- In which areas do you think we could improve our communication
with you? - From one to ten, how many points would you will give us for
“listening to the customer”? - Have you found difficulties reaching someone in our company?
- Would you recommend us to your friends?
- Can you shortly describe your experience with us?
Deeply analyze the answers you get from your clients. Those answers are gold for
you and your company, because they provide valuable opinions from your clients
you won’t be able to have otherwise. It may sound crazy, but we often don’t make
suggestions if people don’t ask us first, and when they do, a feeling of importance
may make us invest the proper time to give the most detailed, sincere suggestions
we can think of.
How much would you pay to know where you succeed and where you fail in your
business? It’s priceless to have that kind of information at your disposition just by
picking up the phone or sending an email to one of your beloved clients. While
hiring a consultant or sending an employee to grab some feedback from your clients
about your product or service can be very tempting, it may not have the same
outcome as doing it yourself! (They are taking the time to answer your questions
after all; why send someone else to make them or to pick up the answers?)
Keep yourself on their minds
The easy way to sell is through your existing clients; that’s a fact. If you can keep
yourself on your client’s minds long enough every several weeks, they will keep
buying from you or they will send you some referrals for you to work withwhich is
even better.
Now, direct mail or newsletter work pretty well in that department, but there is no
replacement for client’s feedback because you will not only get first-hand
information about what you’re doing right and wrong with your business and how
you may improve those aspects, but you will also be putting yourself in your client’s
mind, and that will lead into new contracts and contacts.
Thank-you notes and gifts
Showing clients your appreciation could be an excellent way to start new business,
too! Once you get those feedbacks from your clients, it’s time to send the results
back along with a nice, hand-written thank-you note.
Your client’s time is worth every single second you can invest on this technique, and
if you get it right, you may end up doing it every six months to burst your sales with
new existing challenges.
Javier Cabrera, Founder and CEO of Emaginacin, an Argentinean web design
agency, has been working on the Internet since 1999 for companies like
Ligados.com (DialPad.com equivalent in latin america) or IP International, a VOIP
firm in Argentina.