Interaction and communication with customers today is difficult. While today’s technology is incredibly beneficial in so many ways, it’s also made finding or creating an opportunity to engage with a customer – to spend time with them –more difficult than it’s ever been.
Bluntly, your customers don’t want to waste their time on you. They’re not interested in being sold to, and to them, building rapport with a sales representative feels like lost time. So when you hear the advice, “talk to your customer,” what does that communication look like when so many customers are resistant?
Surveys can be very instrumental in fostering your interaction and communication with customers. There are multiple ways to survey customers and to incentivize them to respond. Disrupting a customer’s day with a salesperson may annoy a customer, but using a survey will put the time and place of engagement in their control.
Surveys often work better than a meeting to get at the core of any issues that may be bubbling beneath the surface. People are often less critical when discussing an issue face-to-face, for fear of offending someone. However, only honest, clear feedback from your customers will help you serve them better, and many times, objective surveys are the best way to gather information without undue influence.
Finally, consider the width and breadth of the internet and all of the nooks and niches where customer reviews and remarks may pop up. Some companies have had their business affected by criticism they weren’t even aware of because they didn’t know to look for those reviews nor did they give their customers a more appropriate avenue – such as a survey – to communicate effective feedback.
These online and customer-researched reviews are significant drivers of decision-making; and many buyers, particularly from the younger cohort, are more apt to do their own research before ever reaching out to make a purchase. If there are negative reviews you are not addressing or curating, these reviews can be poisoning your business’s success. A survey can solicit both positive and negative responses so that you can take action based on those results before a negative review is written.
Keep the interaction and communication with customers open and flowing honestly. Using surveys will cut through time restraints, reluctant attitudes, social hang-ups, and public online reviews that you might ordinarily never see.
