A great way to enhance your company’s brand image, products, and customer service is to regularly check in with your customers. Surveys are a fantastic method for this, especially if you ask questions that encourage honest feedback to guide important decisions for your company’s future. Below are five tools to help you survey your customers and improve your business like never before.
1. Postcards
Postcards are powerful tools for polling your customer base, especially if you offer an incentive for taking your survey. The only caveat is you must be careful to encourage customers to give honest answers. Tell them they’ll get the incentive no matter what their responses are. You don’t want overly positive feedback for fear you won’t follow through on your end of the deal.
2. Website polls
There are plenty of tools that can help you conduct polls on your own website. If you run WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, or another CMS, you have access to both free and paid plugins and modules for polling site visitors. Survey Monkey and Poll Daddy are two third-party services that work on any website.
3. Social media polls
Social media, particularly Facebook, represents another outstanding opportunity to poll your customers. Facebook allows you to poll your customers with its built-in features, but you can also take advantage of third-party apps (free and paid) to get more robust reporting.
4. Response cards
Make sure customers get a response card when they make a purchase so they can offer fast feedback on specific buys as well as your company as a whole. Find out if they had a good shopping experience, if your staff was helpful, if your products and services lived up to expectations, and if they would recommend you to friends. Take note of your positives and work to correct the negatives.
5. Phone calls and handshakes
Perhaps the most effective way to poll your customers is to make a quick phone call or, even better, a face-to-face visit. Doing so lends a sense of ownership to your customers, and they’ll not only want to give you honest feedback, they’ll care about helping you grow a better company. Moreover, that personal touch will foster lifelong customer loyalty. Plus, you can solve any issues face-to-face and turn angry customers into happy customers in no time. Reaching out to your customers personally also fuels word-of-mouth marketing – the most valuable kind.
What’s your favorite way to poll your customers?