Building Customer Loyalty

3. Customer Feedback

The more you know about customers, the better you can meet their needs.

3.1 Create opportunities for feedback.

• Ask new customers why they chose you over the competition, and existing customers what you could do better.
• Set up a customer hotline, and make sure the number is on every piece of paper you send out.
• Get feedback online by putting an email response form or newsgroup on your website.
• Newsgroups may need filtering or editorial control. Make sure you have time to deal with this before setting it up.
• Consider making all or part of your website registration-only to allow you to get more information about customers.
• Encourage complaints, as only one in ten dissatisfied customers bothers to complain otherwise. Complaints are a vital indicator of what needs to be improved - and how to gain a competitive advantage.
• Carry out occasional customer satisfaction surveys. Keep the questions brief and specific, and offer entry into a prize draw as an inducement to return the form.

3.2 Contact any customer who has stopped buying from you (a lapsed customer) and find out the reason.

• Assign a skilled person to this task, otherwise customers tend to give easy answers, such as "you are too expensive", which may hide the real reasons.

3.3 Monitor and analyse the contact you have with customers.

• Keep a record of customer feedback to help you identify problem areas.Find out what caused each problem.
• Use hit analysis software to discover which of your web pages are most popular.
• Call analysis software lets you monitor selling and levels of satisfaction.