It is the goal of any business to foster and build strong working relationships with their customers. Businesses must listen to and meet the needs of customers in order to generate sales and remain a successful, profitable business. Many times, businesses are faced with customers who stop transacting sales or business deals, and decide to go elsewhere, leaving the businesses wondering – what went wrong?
Why do customers leave? It is a question that haunts many businesses. The relationship seems to be going well with the customer, and then, it happens. The customer goes away. There wasn’t a warning, a complaint, or even a fond farewell. One day, the customer simply stops the business relationship.
There are many reasons why a customer may choose to seek alternate providers or competitor brands to meet their needs. Sometimes businesses can identify a trend, but most of the time, they never know why a customer has left. If a customer ceases a relationship with a particular business and switches to a new business, it is obvious that the customer was displeased with the business’s products or services, or it could be that the new business offers:
- products or services with enhanced capabilities or features;
- incentives to make the switch;
- competitive pricing or cost savings to switch; or
- enhanced capabilities.
There are many reasons why a customer may switch to a new business. Whatever the case may be, it is important to find out why the busniess lost that customer.
Customer Feedback Surveys are designed so businesses can gather measureable feedback from customers. Businesses can use that feedback data to develop strategies to retain current customer relationships, build new relationships, and continue to grow the business. If a business continues to lose customers and they do not take the steps to gather valuable feedback from customers through a customer feedback survey to learn the the root cause of their dissatisfaction, it can never grow and be successful.
Designing and administering regular customer feedback surveys is one way to ensure that customers are satisfied with the products and services offered by your business. Creating and administering customer feedback surveys can be easily done with the help of survey software. Some helpful tips when designing your customer feedback survey include:
- Ensure that you do not make it too complicated. Simplify your questions and response options.
- People are short on time. Do not create a long, drawn-out survey. Be respectful of your customers’ time.
- Add the smallest amount of questions to your survey, but make sure that they are efficient enough to gather the maximum amount of customer feedback.
- To make the completion process easier for your customers, create more close-ended question and very few open-ended questions.
- Rating-scale questions are an easy and quick way for customers to rate your products and services.
Collecting feedback from customers is not only a valuable process to gather meaningful data to help you sustain your business with customers, but it also shows your customers that you genuinely care about their opinions.
