What kind of products, services, or information does your customer want? Are you regularly asking them?
Sometimes getting your customers and prospects to open up about what they want is difficult at best. You call them up and they haven’t thought about it, so you don’t get good information. Or you send them a survey in the mail, it sits on their desk for a while until they finally decide it’s junk and it makes its way into the recycle bin.
To get good information you have to reach your prospect when they are thinking, “wouldn’t it be really great if company X provided this service!” Of course you represent company X.
When they come to this realization it might be when they are reading your email. Or it might be when they are visiting your blog. Or it might be when they are on your site looking to make a purchase. Or, if you really planned things well, it will be when they are getting a regular email communication from you.
However it is that your customer or prospect is thinking about you is not relevant to this article. What is important is that when they are thinking about you, that you provide them a way to give you the feedback you need.
How about using an online survey tool? We often use Survey Monkey. It’s quite easy to create small surveys and there’s no cost for the basic level of service. To see an example of a free survey, here’s one I created that has only a single question…
Go ahead, click on the link. As long as you’re there you might as well complete the survey. I’m looking for additional blog topics you might be interested in. Contribute your ideas and see them come to life right here!
Besides collecting new ideas your survey could ask about a user’s experience on your site, what do they like or dislike? It could introduce them to a new service and help you refine some preferences before you release it. It could even allow you to discover what people think of certain price points. How you use a survey is only limited by your own imagination.
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