Helping Your Business Achieve Success

It’s To Your Success

Customers are the lifeblood of business, whether you’re a vampire or not. Driving your business further and further starts with those you service. In any industry, if your customers aren’t happy, your business isn’t successful. You could have the best food in the city, but if your customer experience is poor, nobody will want to dine there. Now, there is a rare exception to poor customer experiences. Dick’s Last Resort is a restaurant chain where they are intentionally rude to their customers. I have been to Dicks Last Resort and if you’re looking to get berated, wear a hat that has something ridiculous on it, have good food and laugh…a lot, this is a really great place to visit.

How do you know?

How do you know if you’re giving customers a good experience? You have to ASK. In order to best understand your customers, you need to have a conversation with them to ensure that you’re providing them with everything they’re looking for. There are surveys that you could leave with your customer and have them fill out, but that involves them answering questions and submitting their results, filtering those results and then deciding what to do with them.  Surveys are great though, do not mistake that! Surveys serve their purpose and get you the results you’re looking for; it’s just a matter of customers finding the time to fill them out on their own. The best way is to have them fill it out right on the spot when you are with them. This way they’re engaged with you and they’ll help you out. Plus, it’s harder to say no to someone in person.

Another way to collect customer feedback would be to select a few customers to interview and record those conversations. This way you have a true conversation with them and you could use the audio or the recording to create a customer testimonial video. People LOVE testimonial videos because they can see actual customers, who are just like them, giving their opinion and comments. It also shows that you (the company) took the time to speak directly with your customers to gather their feedback.

Another way would be to send out an email or call customers and ask them a few questions. Email is much more difficult since I, along with many other people, glance over emails like these. Phone calls are tough as well because you need to catch the person when they’re home.  But this option yields great results since you’re speaking directly with them.

Naturally there are other ways to gather customer input, but these are typically the most common options for businesses to collect customer feedback.

Making it easy

Are there actually programs that will do this for me? It’s 2018, there is literally an app for anything. There’s an app that tests you to see how long you can hold your finger on the screen, a complete time waster, so yes, there are programs that will help gather customer surveys! At Coolfront, we use a company called To Your Success which makes customer follow up easy. With a very simple process, they delight every customer with cookies (or another small gift), gather customer feedback, understand the customer experience and then showcase the positive reviews. It’s that simple!

And I have to say they are truly amazing cookies; but nothing beats this really great service!