SMB or Small business owners need to put in more effort than bigger companies to grow their business. With fewer resources, SMBs need to focus on the customer and work towards creating satisfied customers. The question here is how a business owner will know if the customer is satisfied. The answer is through customer feedback. A customer who is not satisfied or who has problems with the company may not complain but may just go away. This is dangerous as a small business can lose customers and not even know about it.
This is why customer feedback is important. Regular feedback from the customer is important. This will help a small business understand what the customer is thinking. If the customer has any dissatisfaction the feedback will bring this out. This can help the business take prompt action to retain the customer. Feedback is also helpful in finding out areas of improvement that can help the business do better. This will help the business keep its customers happy and acquire new customers. Regular feedback from customers is critical for all companies, more so for small businesses.
Getting Feedback Through Text Survey
There are different ways of getting feedback from customers. The survey method is the best where a survey questionnaire is sent to customers and they are asked to send in their responses. Such surveys can be sent through email or a printed questionnaire. The problem here is printed questionnaires can be filed and ignored. People may not open and download email attachments. The best solution is using text survey through SMS. Text messages have an open rate of 98%, so there is a very high possibility of your customers reading and replying to your message.
A customer satisfaction survey can be created using a text message and sent to customers. This is a more effective way of conducting a survey. It ensures better participation and a small business will receive a better response. This helps the business understand the voice of the customer and take action for improvement.
The following information will help small businesses use text survey to collect customer feedback:
Take instant feedback
Instant feedback can be taken on completion of a transaction. Whenever a customer makes a purchase, a feedback can be sent immediately on completion of delivery. This can be in the form of a question asking for a rating on a scale of 1 to 10 and the customer can reply with the number to indicate the rating. Detailed feedback can also be taken through multiple messages. This will allow customers to send specific issues. This kind of instant feedback is important. If customers are not happy at this stage, it could indicate serious problems. This feedback can be taken after a service call, repair work undergone, annual maintenance done, etc.
Get Regular Feedback
Apart from instant feedback after each transaction, a regular and detailed feedback needs to be taken. The customer may be happy at the time of receiving the product but may find problems at a later stage. A small business owner needs to understand these issues. This will help in understanding actual customer satisfaction levels. This feedback can be sent through text messages containing specific questions related to overall product/service satisfaction and related issues. This feedback can be taken once in six months or once a year.
Tips to ensure effective customer feedback collection through texting
• If a customer has indicated that he is not very happy, then additional feedback surveys may be sent to find out if the customer is happy after action has been taken. Instead of waiting for the end of year to take feedback, such customers can be senta text survey after 3/6 months.
• The survey questionnaire must be brief. Lengthy customers take time and customers may not be interested to submit such feedback.
• The process can be automatedby scheduling survey messages to make the process easy.
• Make sure the feedback questions are reviewed for grammatical accuracy and to verify if the information is correct.
• Sometimes, one common survey may not be effective. It may need to customized for different types or segments of customers.
• Once the feedback is collected it must be analyzed to understand what the customer is saying. Action must be taken on the issues and this must be communicated to the customer. This will make the entire survey process more effective.
The fact that text messaging has a higher read rate and higher response makes it a preferred way of getting feedback. SMBs can contact customers easily through text surveys. It is cost effective and convenient to implement. All that is needed is a database of customers and texting software. Small business owners can get feedback from more customers through text surveys. This will help them improve their customer service and be able to satisfy customers.
