The Survey Says

Who’s your best audience and your worst critic? Besides yourself, it’s your customers, and any small business should institute a variety of tactics for soliciting their feedback—whether good or bad— and putting it to use.

Reaching out to your customer base doesn’t have to be an expensive endeavor, although earmarking dollars for professional assistance on surveys or focus groups can be a smart strategy for some businesses at a particular juncture. Without blowing a budget, though, here are a few simple ways in which to reach out:

• Start by listening. Even in the most informal of settings, it’s always important to ask customers what they like or don’t like about your product or service. Talk with them on the phone or during a transaction to get answers. While you shouldn’t make specific promises, it’s critical that you make use of the information or at least acknowledge their input. Otherwise, you run the risk of alienating customers by asking for feedback, but not doing anything about it.
  
• Surveys. This can be as simple as postcard surveys handed out to customers when they’re in your place of business doing a transaction or mailed as part of your bill. Another way to solicit feedback is by posting surveys on your Web site. The trick is to keep it simple and fun. That’s the tactic SitStay.com takes for the monthly poll it runs on its site, which markets products for dogs. The poll, which asks a few pointed questions in a casual, almost quirky way, has been instrumental in helping the company learn about its customers’ needs and desires. “We get direction as to what type of customers we have and where to put our focus,” says Kent Krueger, chief dog lover and owner of the Lincoln, NE, company.

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