Regularly seeking feedback from your customers is a great way to learn how to market your business more effectively. It’s also an effective method to improve your services and plug any communication or quality gaps. However, if you’re not receiving a large amount of your business through referrals or word of mouth, you’ve probably got some areas of the business that need fixing.
In this issue of Promotional Consultant Today, we share five questions to pose to customers in order to understand what’s truly important to them and to your business. One word of caution, don’t accept vague answers like “you provide good service.” While that may be true and good to hear, you can’t work with that. Push a bit and ask what good service looks like and even ask about a specific instance in which they felt they got good service.
1. What made you decide to hire us/buy from us in the first place? This is a good baseline question for your marketing. It can get at how effective your advertising, message and lead conversion processes are working. I’ve also heard customers talk about the personal connection or culture that felt right in this question.
2. What’s one thing we do better than others you do business with? In this question you are trying to discover something that you can work with as a true differentiator. This is probably the question you’ll need to work hardest at to get specifics. You want to look for words, phrases and actual experiences that keep coming up over and over again, no matter how insignificant they may seem to you. If your customers are explaining what they value about what you do, you may want to consider making that the core marketing message for your business.
3. What’s one thing we could do to create a better experience for you? On the surface this question could be looked at as a customer service improvement question, and it may be, but the true gold in this question is when your customers can identify an innovation. Sometimes we go along doing what we’ve always done and then out of the blue a customer says something like, “I sure wish it came like this,” and all of a sudden it’s painfully clear how you can create a meaningful innovation for your products, services and processes. Push your customers to describe the perfect buying experience for what you sell.
4. Do you refer us to others, and if so, why? This is the ultimate question of satisfaction because a truthful answer means your customer likes the product and likes the experience of getting the product (you can substitute service here of course). Small businesses can take this a step further and start understanding specifically why they get referrals and perhaps the exact words and phrases a customer might use when describing to a friend why your company is the best.
5. What would you Google to find a business like ours? This is the new lead generation question, but understanding what it implies is very important. If you want to get very, very good at being found online, around the world or around the town, you have to know everything you can about the actual terms and phrases your customers use when they are looking for companies like yours.
Try out these questions; you’ll be surprised at the insights you gain.
Source: John Jantsch is a marketing consultant, speaker and best-selling author of Duct Tape Marketing, Duct Tape Selling, The Commitment Engine and The Referral Engine.
