Building relationships with customers and keeping them happy is key to the success of any business. Otherwise unhappy customers are unlikely to result in repeat sales and could sour the reputation of a business by giving negative reviews to others. While getting feedback in a traditional brick and mortar business is relatively straightforward, this isn’t always the case with an ecommerce business. Nonetheless, it’s important to get customer feedback. Here are some reasons why and some ideas for getting quality feedback.
First of all, feedback is helpful for determining what the overall needs and wants of your demographic are. While the specific needs of individuals may differ, the customers of each industry will typically have a common list of needs and wants. By gaining a basic understanding of what your customers expect, you can gear your business to meet those expectations. Otherwise, losing touch with your demographic is kind of like blindly throwing darts and hoping that you hit the target.
Another major reason for getting customer feedback is so that you will know what your business is doing right and what needs to change. If you get consistently positive feedback on a particular area like product selection, you can simply keep doing what you’re doing. If you keep getting complaints on another area like customer service, this will let you know that you need to make some key changes.
Even though negative feedback may seem painful or unwanted at the time, it can actually help you out more than positive feedback in many cases. This is because it will force you to address any areas that are lacking and improve your relationships with customers. Besides this, you can convert a considerable amount of customers into repeat customers by getting feedback. As long as you can provide customers with what they’re looking for, it’s reasonable to expect that they will come back for more and share your business with others.
While it’s not always easy to get extensive feedback when running an ecommerce business, there are ways to get at least some feedback. For example, using systems to manage customer feedback will automatically send your customers a customer satisfaction survey after they make a purchase. This will allow them to provide a rating that is good, poor or bad and write a brief sentence or two about their experience with your business. Once you get a reasonable amount of data, you should be able to spot trends and take the necessary actions to address any common complaints.
Author: Jennie is a customer service consultant and author. Away from the office she enjoys spending time with her family and scrapbooking.