By Christine James, Community Manager at HissingKitty.com

Customer feedback is an invaluable aspect of modern-day businesses. Many business owners fail to get the breakthrough in their business because of failed or poorly planned customer feedback. How would you feel to realize that your business is one idea away from greatness? More importantly, that idea lies in the palms of your hands. It is your incentive now to decide whether you’ll embrace it or not. These tips may help you improve your customer feedback and make your business realize its full potential.

1. Reach Out to Customers

A big reason for failure on the part of the management is failure to establish business-customer interactions. Getting your customers to engage with the business frequently requires a good deal of motivation to engage with them first. Customers are drawn to give feedback to a business if the business appears to value customer input. One way of showing that a customer’s input is appreciated in your business is by reaching out and getting the opinions of the customers before they air them out. If enticed in this manner, customers have a lot of feedback to give to the business. This is as simple as sending a follow up email after an order, or even calling customers after a service has been completed.

2. Live Chatting the Customers

Live chatting has become a common channel of business interactions with their customers. It has become so common that the majority of social media apps have featured it in their development. Businesses that adopt this feature have a big chance at turning their fortunes around. Customers enjoy a live chat as much as they enjoy one-on-one customer-business interactions. Introducing them to periodic live chatting, maybe once a month, will get them to respond to the business operations more. Customer feedback is easily solicited in such means as live chatting, where the customers can appraise the service delivery in real-time.

3. Customer Follow-Ups

Interactions with the customer must not always end after the transaction. For better and sustained customer feedbacks, it is imperative that businesses follow up on the customers. For example, in an auto shop that sells spare parts to automobile users, it is vital to check on the customers and assess how your goods are serving them. Getting customer feedback via that perspective will push your customers to esteem to give more feedback as well. Ultimately, you will benefit from the feedback, as an analysis of where you need to do better will be apparent.

4. Establish an Online Community

Customer feedback is easy to come by if one has an online community. An online community is a circle of customers that interact with the business often. They know more about the business than the newer customers and are better placed to give and guide others in providing both positive and negative feedback. This online community is easily developed in social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or elsewhere. The members are usually at the ready to review any business post and share the content with the world. Establishing an online community can help your business generate the customer feedback that may be lacking.

5. Show Positive Customer Feedback to the World

The motivation for customers to share their opinions and reviews in feedback to the business can be lacking most of the time. It is, therefore, on the business to kick it on by sharing pieces of positive feedback shared by other customers. This will give the rest of the customers the needed psyche to share their feedback with the business as usual. Customer complaints are also triggered by hints of other customers sharing their complaints as well too. Therefore, proudly displaying positive reviews by other customers can boost your customer feedback immensely.

6. Bank on Social Media for Feedback

Social media has taken the whole world by storm. Even in the business world, social media is still reigning supreme. With the sites having the majority of the people signed up, it is easy to reach out to the targeted audience for your business. In addition, responses in social media are meaningful and can be construed to help the business perform better. Feedback generated on social media can be unique, given that people express themselves freely as they wish. The interaction is two-way, making it a big chance to use social media to boost customer interaction and generate feedback.

Conclusion

Customer feedback is essential in the growth of a business. For a company to perform exemplarily well, there has to be utmost customer trust, which is in a big part brought about by customer-business interaction. Although the customer feedback may not always be there from the beginning, it can be easily elicited. The above tips show how one can coax feedback from clients in a social and professional way. Try them, and we guarantee your business will boom.

Author Bio:

Christine James believes that every customer has a voice. She is the Community Manager at HissingKitty.com (a customer complaints website) and loves talking to customers on social media about their challenges with Fortune 500 companies. Her work has been published on Huffington Post, Inc., SocialMediaToday, and Thought Catalog. Follow her on Twitter @hissingkittycom.

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