This article from Mentor Parag Kumar will discuss how to effectively make sure you are listening to your customers needs and wants so that you can provide them with the best customer service. If you enjoyed this article and would like to find out more about how Parag can help your business, you can contact him here.
Listening to your customers needs and wants?
‘Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.’ So is quality.
Through your products and services you are fulfilling your customers’ needs and wants, both – said and unsaid.
Through initial surveys you can know if the need for the product or service exists, and where, for whom.
Once you have launched your product / service, you may just carry on selling it (or trying to sell); or, you can find out how the market is responding to it and accordingly make changes if so required, and remain current.
How do you know you are fulfilling your customers needs and wants consistently?
In the second case, you will need to know if you are fulfilling intended needs and wants consistently. How do you do it? By collecting ‘Customer Feedback’. And how do you do that?
One autonomous way is to get customer complaints. Is that enough? Most customers don’t complain, they just leave, and may give you bad publicity too. Also, complaints are only from dissatisfied customers. What about customers who want more from your product, or who are satisfied, and why?
Depending on the nature of your product or service, and also how you interact with your customer, you may design both,
How should you collect customer feedback?
The ways to collect feedback include methods such as:
- Surveys
- Questionnaires
- Satisfaction scales
- User Experience
- Interviews and so on;
The contact points used to collect feedback include times and ways such as:
- Points of sale/service
- Post sales
- Periodically
- One time
- Recurring
- Emails
- Websites
- Apps, and so on.
You will need to be really creative and give it some serious thought.
How should you use that customer feedback data you have collected?
Once you have collected the information through above means, it needs to be arranged into meaningful data and then analysed to see whether your product/ service is effective and the customer is satisfied, as also the new requirements that come through such exercise.
You must keep assessing your feedback process to know if you are getting relevant information or not, and accordingly improve and fine tune your process.
