The Importance of Customer Feedback
The key to succession for every business is a good relationship with your customers. While many other aspects play a significant role in helping your business grow, nothing comes close to the importance of retaining your existing customers and adapting to their needs. The most popular way to achieve this is to use a good Software POS and highlight customer feedback.
A good relationship with customers is also known as one of the best marketing strategies for businesses. Look at Apple, for example. Do you regularly see TV or Social Media ads about their products? No. Their multi-billion dollar business is marketed by their customers. Their strategy involves creating a good brand image by satisfying existing customers.
If your business’ existing customers are kept happy, they will gladly spread the message around. No other means of marketing is as productive as an existing customer referring to a friend.
This shows the best way to keep customers happy is to first be informed of what their review about your business is and then adapt to it. Also known as collecting customer feedback.
But the main problem relating to customer feedback remains, how do you recognize their wants and needs? If your business has a large customer base, how do you extract their feedback from them without costing too much time and money to your business?
Well, to ease your worries, here are 4 of the best ways you can get honest and productive customer feedback. Most of these strategies will be greatly helped if your business is equipped with a Software POS System.
Feedback Generation – Social Media
Social media has grown to be the most important platform for businesses. Here is where most of your customers reside, no matter what business activity you partake in. The important thing is to use this situation to your benefit.
To create a good relationship with your customers, your first step should be to create a friendly online presence. Run a Facebook/Instagram page and keep it active. Interact with your customers by commenting and sharing regularly.
Replying to your customers’ comments is seen as a great way to encourage more feedback. This behaviour shows that your business is keen on hearing more from your customers, and respects and recognizes their issues highlighted in customer feedback.
Every now and then, you can create a Facebook/Instagram post and ask your customers for feedback. Remember to create the post with a humbling look instead of an intimidating one.
As commenting doesn’t take much effort from customers, you can generate a mass amount of your customers to share their feedback.
Alternatively, you can also focus on your target market. By using tags that your customers are interested in, or posting in a Facebook group, you may get more meaningful feedback.
Another interesting way is to keep a feedback story up on your social media platforms.
Instagram/Facebook stories appear on the top even before any posts and don’t get lost upon refreshing. If your page keeps uploading a question box of feedback and keeps it running 24/7, you have created extreme ease of access for customers to post in their views.
This also helps with your brand image. Even for potential customers, seeing posts and stories relating to feedback shows good treatment of customers. This attracts even more customers into your business.
Checkout Customer Feedback – Retail POS
In retail, in order to create good customer service, it is known to be best not to disturb the customer while they’re purchasing. As the good that you sell are not your product but your service is, it is best to interact with your customers about their views at the end of their purchasing spree.
This is best done with the help of a POS System. At the check out counter, you can ask your customer for feedback. A good POS Software, like CISePOS, have the option of adding remarks to an invoice. You can use this space to keep a record of customer feedback.
To encourage more customers for feedback, you can choose to offer them a reward. For example, a 10% discount coupon on their next visit. This also keeps a customer to visit you again.
Checkout Customer Feedback – Restaurant POS
In a restaurant business, there are two good ways to generate customer feedback.
One is to ask for feedback against a discount or an offer upon purchase. This encourages more customers to provide feedback.
Subway uses a similar feedback generation strategy. They offer a free cookie upon purchase if you fill out an online survey. Once this is done, the cashier simply adds a free cookie to your order.
However, asking for feedback on orders limits how useful the feedback is. You’re asking for feedback before providing your service. This means the customers can provide meaningless feedback as they haven’t even dined in yet!
The second way is to ask for customer feedback at the end of the service. This is less incentivizing for a customer as the only thing you can offer the customer now is a coupon for their next visit, however, the feedback is highly productive. Restaurant customers usually sit in the outlet for almost an hour. They have a good idea of your business service and can provide a good view of their perspective.
Email and SMS Marketing, and POS Customer Profiling
With a modern POS, your business is helped with the option of customer profiling.
Customer Profiling refers to keeping data of the customers you deal with. This includes their name, address, contact information, etc.
You can use these details to your benefit. With contact information, your business can send out an email or SMS expressing gratification for the customer’s visit and asking for feedback.
‘Thank You for shopping at XYZ Store. Reply to this SMS/Email with your valuable customer feedback on how we can be better at servicing you next time?’
This notification can be pleasant for the customer and encourage more interaction between the two of you. Don’t overdo it, though! Spamming these messages can in turn annoy the customer.
With a Software POS, you can use the generated feedback in a more productive way. From your customer profiles, you can categorize and summarize their feedback based on their area, age, and gender. This can generate very useful reports on customer feedback.
To register for a good POS software, check out CIS Free POS demo right now.
Learn more on why choose CISePOS: https://www.cisepos.com/why-cisepos.php