Do you know why your customers come to you instead of going to a competitor?
Do you ask your customers about how you can improve the experience you provide?
How often do people tell you that you’re doing a good job?
It’s important for your business to be able to answer these questions. The last one in particular can be hugely rewarding and remind you of why you got into your business in the first place.
We’ve found a free, simple, and awesome tool to get feedback from customers.
It’s called Survey.io. All you do is enter your business details and contact info, and it creates a simple web survey that you can send out to your current customers (perhaps with a little incentive – a free service for one lucky survey respondent, or 15% off for responding).
Before we dig into it, you can see an example created survey here.
When you’ve got an existing clientele, I think these are the most interesting questions:
What would you likely use as an alternative if our product were no longer available?
This helps you understand your competitors. The cool part is that the way your customers think about (replacing) your service can be very different from how you think about it. Understanding how your customers think will help you understand the true value and benefits of the service you provide.
What is the primary benefit that you have received from our product?
This helps you understand the benefits your customers get from your service in their words, not yours. You might be surprised at how your customers describe the benefits they get from your business! And if you notice a lot of your customers describing your business using specific wording, it’s probably a good idea to incorporate this language into your marketing materials.
Have you recommended our product to anyone? If so, please explain how you described it.
Two important things to learn here. First, word-of-mouth referrals are highly correlated with customer loyalty (for more insight here, read about Net Promoter Scores). Word of mouth marketing is the cheapest marketing you can do and it’s dependent on having a great product or service worth talking about.
Second, as with the previous question, it helps you understand how your customers talk about your business and the benefits they get from it. You can use this to underscore the difference between your service and your competitors’.
What type of person do you think would benefit most from our product?
This helps you understand whether there’s a whole new class of potential customers out there that you haven’t even thought about. It’s the beauty of having a whole bunch of people with varied experiences and backgrounds use your product!
How can we improve our product to better meet your needs?
This is a no-brainer :) A friend of mine used this tool recently and 95% of customers gave him the same piece of feedback – his price was too high. It’s important to take this with a grain of salt, but that’s a pretty overwhelming pattern and worth seriously considering. The crazy part is that if he hadn’t asked, he never would have found out!
I highly recommend checking out Survey.io. It’s super simple, gives you valuable insight into your customers, and the price is right!