Is your business driving its content marketing efforts based on customer surveys? While content marketing may be the center piece of online marketing conversations, creating content that engages your customers and audience can be quite a challenge. Customer surveys have long been seen as a means of gauging where you stand in terms of your understanding your customers and business service but they can take up so much time, money and effort. However there are ways in which they can be done quickly and efficiently. Let’s first take a look at why we need use surveys in the first place. (Image credit: Flickr)
Customer Surveys: Because What You Don’t Know CAN Hurt You!
Learning what your prospects and customers really think about you can be both a fearsome and instructive thing. Doesn’t it just make sense to discover any problem areas or holes in your customer service you’re unaware of? The best way to get your hands on this type of information is to simply ask them! Developing a thoughtful customer survey can be a super tool to help you learn answers to questions you didn’t know you had!
So why ask at all?
The main incentive for customer surveys is to head off problems before they become part of your reputation, and discover ways to boost your service or products. Much of the time, we never hear about a dissatisfied customer: they’ll simply look somewhere else. CustomerThink.com has found that more than half of consumers have had issues and complaints with the products and services they’ve purchased. Developing a survey helps you find and correct mistakes which might be the difference between hanging onto a customer or not.
What sort of survey questions work best?
Make sure you have a clear goal to your surveys, and you ask questions that require more than ticking a box, or assigning a numerical value to your query. Avoid “Yes” or “No” questions. Allow them to expand on their experiences and feelings. (This can end up being a good way to collect testimonials!)
How exactly should you hold the survey?
There are a lot of ways to conduct customer surveys. If possible, however, choose an an online survey, which provides the person responding to it a decent opportunity to contemplate and form good responses, something which probably wouldn’t happen by using a phone call or face to face encounter. If at all possible, have an incentive for filling out your survey. If you need help with this, consider using a survey company that does the majority of the hard work for you, such as SurveyMonkey.
Whats currently holding your business back from holding regular customer surveys? Let us know in the comments below.
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