Monday, August 10, 2015

Monday Marketing: Customer Feedback Initiatives



Customer engagement is a critical element to your sales and marketing campaigns. For any business, customer engagement can make or break your performance. Just look at the yelp reviews of restaurants as an example. Poorly reviewed businesses will disincentivize individuals from getting to know you and your product/service. And that’s just one element of a potential customer engagement initiative. Engagement with your customer’s allows you to identify, analyze, and fix any weaknesses of your offering. If you sell software, a successful customer engagement program will make it easy for your customers to rate your offering and provide feedback as to what is great and what should be fixed. In the internet age, information moves at the speed of light. Negative reviews or opinions of your business can get dispersed quickly to large amount of individuals, essentially nullifying your marketing outreach efforts.  I’ve provided some examples below of some customer engagement solutions that are easy, cost effective, and quick to implement. 

Yelp


If you think your business can benefit from Yelp reviews and ratings, I recommend you claim your business profile from Yelp for free. Yelp implements a “Freemium” model, where basic services are provided for free and more advanced functionality is offered for a premium. However, it’d be pragmatic for you to sign up for the free service first, and then evaluate whether it’s necessary to pay more for advanced features. Signing up for a free Yelp business account is just the first step of a successful Yelp profile. Yelp offers you a chance to comment on peoples reviews, so you should always take the time to respond to reviews, regardless of whether it’s positive or negative. If positive, you should always thank the individual for taking the time to submit something good about your service or product. If negative, you should apologize that their experience was not satisfactory and invite them to privately contact you to discuss ways to improve your service. Negative Yelp reviews can be detrimental to your business but only if you let it. By responding in a conciliatory manner, other individuals surfing your Yelp page will see that the business owner cares about their business and is willing to discuss ways to improve. Not every business owner takes time to do this, so separate yourself from the pack by showing that you care.


SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a cost effective survey solution that allows entrepreneurs to create customized surveys for customer engagement. The amount of options for survey questions are endless with the SurveyMonkey solution. You can ask questions that rate your service on a scale of 1-10, yes or no, multiple choice, or with comments in a comment box. That’s only a snippet of the options you have with the SurveyMonkey solution. Based on the information you gather, you know how your customers feel about your product, service, customer support, responsiveness, and brand. We strongly recommend that every business owner includes some type of survey solution for their customer engagement strategy, so sign up and take a look at what they have to offer.

Utilizing customer engagement solutions is integral towards the long term success of your company. If you’d like some more information on customer engagement strategies, please don’t hesitate to schedule a 30 minute consultation with me on my schedule! We can discuss different solutions and methods for improving your connection with your customer.

iVirtual Business Services is your Operational & Administrative Solution…because you deserve work/life balance. 
 
 


 

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