Without customers, there’s no business, and without customer feedback, companies can’t reliably scale or improve.
Any successful business values its clients and appreciates their time in providing feedback.
If you’d like to maximize your business’s ability to collect, analyze, and effectively use feedback from customers, you’ve come to the right place.
We’ll talk about customer feedback, why it’s crucial, present a few options to collect feedback, and give you actionable steps to use this data.
What is customer feedback?
Customer feedback is our client’s opinions of us and their experience with our business or services. It can be negative, positive, or neutral.
Businesses that value their clients and care about improving themselves ask for feedback.
There are many examples of how to get customer feedback: websites, in-app surveys, email, and contact forms.
The data collected from these sources often have positive or negative patterns. Use it as a guide for future business decisions and client interactions. Customer feedback helps us adapt and adjust our businesses to meet customer expectations.
Why customer feedback is important
As solopreneurs, small business owners, and coaches, our businesses are highly personalized and rely heavily on direct client interactions. When we gather customer feedback and consider it for future business decisions, clients feel valued. This helps build customer loyalty.
When unhappy customers come to you with negative feedback, listen to what they have to say and act on it. Rather than seeing an angry customer as a problem, look at the situation as an opportunity to improve. Demonstrate to the client that you take their concerns seriously, prioritize solving the pain points, and follow up with any changes you’ve made.
Customer retention increases when we demonstrate to our clients that we value them and that our support team is doing its best to cater to their needs. Even if we’ve initially upset customers, quick response rates and a great customer feedback strategy can restore confidence in our client base and encourage customers to keep coming back.
5 ways to collect feedback from customers
There are many ways to collect client feedback; pick the ones that best serve your individual business and customer demographics. Here are five ways to do it:
1. Customer feedback surveys
This customizable method of collecting feedback is useful for targeted questions or concerns as well as general questions on the customer experience.
A well-known example of this is the net promoter score (NPS) survey. This survey sorts respondents into three categories based on answers to questions such as, “On a scale of 0 (not likely) to 10 (very likely), how likely are you to recommend this coach to someone else?”
Respondents scoring 0-6 on the scale are known as “detractors” and are likely to impact the business with negative comments.
Passive customers respond in the 7-8 range and are unlikely to significantly impact the business’s reputation.
Customers scoring 9-10 are called “promoters,” as they’re likely to bring in new leads and give great online reviews about our service and promote it on social media.
2. Direct outreach
Face-to-face interviews and phone calls are two common ways of collecting feedback. Because this conversation happens in real time, it’s a great opportunity to ask open-ended questions and deeply understand the client’s experience with us. This type of feedback is especially beneficial for coaches because it’s personalized and unambiguous.
3. Email surveys
This is one of the easiest ways to gather client feedback but ensure they fill out the feedback form thoughtfully with details. Encourage this by assuring them that someone on the other end is receiving their input and will follow up with them soon. And then ensure that it happens.
4. On the website
Our business website can be a great touchpoint to gather information about new features and could even include a customer satisfaction survey. Besides making surveys and other methods of communicating feedback available to customers, we can also gain valuable information from monitoring the most popular features or content on the website to see what appeals the most to potential customers.
5. Social media
This type of feedback relies on interacting with our client base on social media, and can give us access to a wide reservoir of feedback. Examples of how to engage with customers in this way include direct comments and mentions, built-in polling tools, and rating scales.
With all these options, it should be easy to manage customer feedback in a way that works best for our clients and business needs. We may use different methods when targeting different areas of inquiry and switch up platforms as we acquire new customers and provide new products or services.
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What comes next?
Collecting data is one thing, but it’s what we do with it afterward that creates the biggest impact. Here are some steps to take after gathering feedback.
- Identify areas of opportunity: Our loyal customers often offer us insightful feedback as they’ve spent a long time interacting with our business. Integrate their feedback into development roadmaps, and take into account their requests.
- Compare feedback from clients: Our clients will invariably have comments about the most and least useful or enjoyable parts of their experience with us. If most users have similar feedback, it may be a good idea to consider their suggestions.
- Nurture potential advocates: Satisfied customers are loyal customers, and they may even become advocates for our business. Some great ways to nurture potential advocates include personalized “thank you” notes or messages and providing access to community forums or events. This will help them build a personal connection with your brand and may even lead to new referrals.
- Improve marketing strategy: The survey information should give you a clear picture of what customers enjoy about your service. Use this data broadly, or break it down to send targeted emails and marketing campaigns for individual preferences.
The bottom line
Now that you understand why customer feedback is important and how to implement it in your business, try out different methods and see what works best. It’s alright to try different approaches (or even a combination) until you get the results you want.
Clients are the heart of any coaching business. Make them feel valued, heard, and involved. Requesting feedback and consistently implementing it is a great way to boost customer morale. It also strengthens trust in the coach-client relationship.
At Practice, we understand that client relationship management can be tedious and time-consuming. Try our all-in-one app to streamline your customer feedback strategy today.
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