Running a small business can often leave you feeling that you’re doing everything on your own. On top of everything that’s needed to sell your product or service, you’re also your own accountant, marketer, manager, web designer, social media analyst and cleaner.
When looking for support or advice, you can’t go far wrong in getting the opinions of peers and professionals.
But there’s another group of people out there, who’s advice will be priceless when it comes to improving and growing your business – and sometimes, they’re so obvious that it’s easy to miss them.
Your customers.
Customer feedback, advice and improvements
Your customers are a great source of feedback, advice and improvements. If anyone’s going to have an opinion on your business and what it offers, it’s them. It’s not for nothing that the phrase “The customer is always right” is a popular one.
You’ll have peers, mentors and professionals giving you guidance. And you should listen to them. But it’s by keeping your customers satisfied that you can keep your business growing – especially if you’re able to earn their loyalty.
By giving you their feedback, customers are telling you what they want your business to do. To be. To achieve.
You might not be able to act on everything they’re telling you all the time. But a lot of it will be useful, and give you useful things to think about when you’re looking at improving.
The first thing to consider is – how do you get their input?
How to get feedback from your customers
The first thing you need to look at is how your customers let you know what they think about your products or services.
If you get the odd e-mail, whether that’s from someone making suggestions on how you can improve, or praising what you’re already offering, that’s a great start. But it’s still only a start.
If you really want to know what your customers are thinking, there’s no better way of finding out than asking them.
You could put out a short post on your business’ social media account, inviting them to give their thoughts. Or maybe you could do the same via a newsletter, if you’ve got one. Even the obvious option of chatting to customers when you meet them face-to-face is good.
But given you actually plan on doing something with their answers, going down a more formal road might be better, even if it seems a bit distant.
Remember – you’re not just asking to make conversation. Their feedback is going to guide how you think about your business plans from now on. So the best result for you isn’t just lots of written messages – you want data, which will give you clear insights into how they think you’re doing.
Customer feedback surveys and questions – get the data
There’s plenty of sites out there offering you the chance to set up free, or cheap, surveys. You can absolutely use those to gather people’s thoughts – particularly if you push them out with a social media post or e-mail newsletter.
And through them, you can get your customers to answer fixed questions with fixed answers. That data can be massively important when you come to planning your next steps, because it can give you powerful, measured insights into what people think about your business – customer satisfaction, product ratings or buying habits.
How to use customer feedback
Your customers have filled in surveys, questionnaires or feedback forms. Fantastic – you’ve got that information. Let’s say you’ve even spent time figuring out what the feedback means – maybe a big number of those responding all think the same thing about how your product could improve. In which case, making that improvement is a no-brainer.
As mentioned earlier, you might not have the money or resources needed to put their suggested improvements into effect. But some of them might be easy wins that you can get done quickly, without having to make massive changes to your wider business plans. This could be something as obvious as making online payments easier via your website, adding extra info to your invoices,
But it can help you make big strategic changes, too. It can let you know what your customers really value about what you do. That could give you the confidence needed to stop working on things they’re not interested in, to focus on where they are.
And if you can tie what you learn from your customers with other data gathered about your business, you’re off to a great start.
It’s by efficiently matching they needs of your customers that you can improve your business, and plan for growth.
Planning for growth – investment and improvement
Whether you’re looking to make big changes to your business plans in line with customer feedback, or want to trial a new product or service, we’re here to help you.
We offer loans from £1,000 to £10 million, and equity investment from £50,000 to £10 million. Whatever you’ve learnt from your business customers, we can help you meet their expectations with targeted funding.
