Small businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE are rapidly growing, the average rate of small startups is rising every year in the country. The markets are stable, the economy is growing steadily and the buying power of an average consumer is increasing gradually. Such circumstances are great for small businesses. However, tougher competition demands more efforts to improve quality and experience. The small business owners always face challenges when it comes to resources whether human resources or non-human resources. This means aligning all your available resources with the customers’ needs, demands and desires is crucial to achieve customer happiness and satisfaction. The small businesses have limited audience and limited marketing budget, it is important to align your marketing and communication with your audience. Customer satisfaction and happiness plays a crucial role in business’s success. The small businesses are always eager to grow and for growth the loyal customer base act as a strong foundation. That is why it is crucial to focus on customer loyalty and customer satisfaction.
Every small business owner and stakeholders do market research, keep an eye on their competitors and what other key players are doing in the market. However, the one thing that is usually not focused by the small businesses is the customer feedback. Small businesses usually have very weak or no customer feedback collection strategy. In fact most of the policies and strategic decisions are taken on the bases of expert opinion by the stakeholders and the management, this means most of the decisions are based on guessing or following other businesses. The customer feedback on the other hand can provide a great insight to customers’ mindset and provide highly accurate data which help small business owners to take informed decision and increase the success rate. When it comes to collect customer feedback the small business owners can easily overwhelmed by the sheer number of feedback collection methods and channels. Which is why a dedicated customer feedback collection tool can greatly help small business owners to acquire highly accurate and precise insight. In this blog we will discuss how a customer feedback tool can help small businesses achieve their goals and objectives.
Why Small Business Owners Need to Collect Customer Feedback?
The customer feedback is the customer’s opinion, suggestion and their perception of the brand. The customer feedback can provide insights into each and every business function whether it is directly facing the customers or whether it is an internal process which have indirect impact on customer experience. The customer feedback provide a highly accurate and deeper understanding of what customers like about your products and services and what they don’t admire much or what they don’t want to see. This will help small business owners to develop products/services which are more aligned with customers’ needs. Furthermore the customer feedback also provide valuable information about your customer persona and help you understand your audience which is great for future developments and strategies. The customer feedback also help evaluating the performance of your sales and service teams and will provide a full guide of customer experience and their perception about your brand. The customer feedback data is great source of business intelligence upon which a business can base its future goals and objectives.
Why Customer Feedback Tool is Important for Small Business Owners?
As s small business owner you knows very well that you have limited human resource at your disposal. Collecting customer feedback is a very time and effort consuming task which require businesses to deploy dedicated staff to collect customer feedback from all the visitors. Then the feedback should be converted to digital formats for further processing and analysis. Even afterwards if you want to close the feedback loop you will be needing more resources to follow up with your customers. For a customer feedback campaign hiring new staff would be very expensive for a small business and appointing someone from the existing staff will definitely impact the operations. That is why the customer feedback collection campaign could become very expensive for a small business owner. However, a customer feedback tool can solve all these problems, it not only help you collect customer feedback via various communication channels but it is very much capable of collecting and analyzing the feedback data autonomously.
The customer feedback tool is a software application that can be linked with multiple digital channels to reach out to your targeted audience and collect customer feedback data in a highly structured format. Which makes it easier to integrate the customer feedback data in the decision making processes. Here are some key advantages of using a customer feedback tool.
Customer Feedback Tool Digitalize the Process
The customer feedback tool is a software which digitalize the customer feedback collection process. The customer feedback forms are very difficult to manage and process. The data collection is difficult as the business will have to appoint a person who should be asking customers to provide their feedback and share their opinion via feedback forms. The conversion rate is less, as when the customers are done with their business they are most likely to leave immediately, when someone stopped them and ask them for their 10, 15 minutes, some of the people can get annoyed and refuse to share their opinion. Furthermore when people are conversing with a staff they tend to take a softer tone, most of the time they try to give only positive answers, and in case of open ended questions they try to sugarcoat their responses. Which is another big cause of poor data quality. Furthermore the staff who is assigned for the feedback collection must have to do the data entry to convert these paper forms into digital formats, then the data has to be analyzed and processed in order to generate actionable reports, which usually cause further deterioration in the data quality due to human errors, duplications or such other problems.
However, the digital customer feedback tool is a software application which enable businesses to leverage digital technologies to collect customer feedback. They can simply put touch screens or tablets at their counter to collect customer feedback while they are dealing with the customer service agent or cashier. This makes feedback process simple and very convenient for the customers. There is no manual process involve, the entire process remains digital from the get go. All the data that is being collected will be stored directly on the server, there is no separate data entry required, so the data quality up lift significantly. The businesses can also use digital interactive kiosks at the entrances/exits to allow customers to provide their feedback and share their opinion freely. The digital customer feedback tool is basically a server side application which have smart algorithms and analytical tools to process customer feedback data. All this process is autonomous and there is no manual work involved. The data collection, analysis and reports are fully autonomous and these reports can be distributed to the relevant personals automatically. Above all the small business owners can extract the data and apply their own analytical tools or processes to generate customized reports. All this automation make the feedback collection process very simple and highly accurate and also boost the conversion rate.
Customer Feedback Tool Help Reducing the Cost of the Campaign
The customer feedback campaign is not as that simple as it might look. The small businesses often don’t realize that and this is one of the main reason of failure of such campaigns. Traditionally a CX (customer experience) office or manager conduct the campaign. However, in small businesses usually business owner or the manager manages the campaign. Whatever the case is they business also need staff to collect the feedback. For smaller spaces two persons are enough but for larger spaces up to 5 person could be needed to collect the feedback. Another important thing is that on an average a short questionnaire could take up to 10 minutes sometime even more. Which means for those 10 minutes the staff cannot engage with other visitors. That is why more staff is needed. More staff means more cost, if a business doesn’t hire new staff then they will have to take existing staff which will definitely put load on their peers and could cause more issues. However, with the customer feedback tool only one person is enough to setup and execute the campaign which not only make process more efficient but also reduce the cost.
Customer Feedback Tool Help Targeting the Right Audience
For any customer feedback campaign targeting the right audience is always a challenge. Businesses cannot get the high quality feedback data if they don’t target the right audience. The customer feedback is all about asking customers about your products, services and their experience, but what you should ask and to whom you should ask will make the real difference. Sometimes the customers just fill in the survey as they don’t want to be rude or really want to express their opinion, however, the questionnaire might not be relevant to them. For example, if a customer visit your store and purchased an electronic item, they might not purchase the item you are enquiring for but they will still provide the feedback. This is the problem with the manual feedback. However, with the digital feedback you can easily identify which customer purchased what from you or you can also categorize them on the bases of various perimeters that you are interested in and then share the right questionnaire with them to collect highly accurate data from the most relevant customer strata. Targeting different audience groups for different feedback will provide you the most relevant and highly accurate feedback data.
Customer Feedback Tool Offers Multiple Channels to Share Surveys
Traditionally the customer feedback is collected only in premises when the customers come to visit a business. However, earlier businesses were also hiring survey teams who were going to people’s home to conduct surveys and collect feedback, later on phone calls replaced it, but for small businesses these two options are not practical. That is why they only do in-premises surveys. A digital customer feedback tool allow small business owners to reach out to the farthest of their territories using digital communication channels. The modern customer feedback tools can be integrated with the SMS, WhatsApp, websites, customer portals, online surveys, Email, smartphone apps, and a variety of social media platforms. This can significantly expand the reach and allow small business owners to target and categorize and reach to the right targeted audience group with literally no or very less cost. Furthermore the businesses can use the customer feedback surveys for market research purposes and by reaching out to the non-customer audiences. The digital customer feedback tool also allow small business owners to integrate and deploy a variety of devices such as interactive touch screens, tablets, self-service kiosks and digital signage to collect the customer feedback data from the customers and visitors.
Customer Feedback Tool Significantly Improves the Feedback Data Quality
The primary goal of a customer feedback campaign is to collect valuable business intelligence data, this data is crucial for a business as the future business decisions will be based on this data. Any inaccuracy or poor quality of the feedback data could lead to wrong decisions which could have significant impact on the business’s success and growth. The quality of the customer feedback data depends on various things such as:
- Targeted Audience
- Right Time to ask for Feedback
- Quantity of the Feedbacks
- Analytical Processes
The small business owners should be careful of what they are asking to whom they are asking and when they are asking. For example, the post-sale satisfaction survey is perfect to share with customers within a day or two of their purchase, the NPS or net promoter score question should be asked during or immediately after serving the customer, the product development surveys should be shared with the existing customers and non-customers or with other stakeholders to maximize the quantity of the feedback and so on. There are so many different types of the customer feedback surveys but all should have right timing and right audience in order to generate high quality feedback.
Furthermore there are several other factors that affect the quality of the customer feedback data. For example, too long survey tend to produce less accurate date, especially the last questions. It is due to a psychological phenomenon which suggest if we start something our brain got compelled to complete it. That is why too long surveys produce low quality results, because when a customer starts a survey after 8 to 10 questions they got bored, and start stressing out, so they want to complete it as quickly as possible and they start focusing less on the questions and their answers which deteriorate the quality of the data. However, if such surveys are shared with only highly interested customers then you can produce significantly accurate data. The customer feedback tool help you share the surveys to the right audience to improve the quality of the data. Furthermore when people are answering to a question asked by an employee, they get more generous and start giving positive feedback, which could also impact the results. However, when the customer feedback surveys are shared via emails, smartphone apps, or website, they customer doesn’t have to feel any pressure and they tend to be more honest. It also gives them more time to think about the answer which also improve the quality of the feedback data.
Customer Feedback Tool Help Increasing Customer Engagement
The customer engagement is always good for a business, more engaging customers are tend to be more loyal and loyal customers are considered to be the backbone of a business. The loyal customers are a valuable asset and help small businesses reduce their marketing and onboarding expenses, according to several studies selling to an existing customer is 5 to 25 times less expensive than acquiring a new customer. Communication is a key to building a long term relationship with your customers. Businesses conduct different types of customer feedback campaigns, some are to assess customer experience or product/service quality and some are to increase customer engagement. The customer feedback survey tool allow small business owners to effortlessly set various survey campaigns, these campaigns can be fully or partially automated. For example, a business can schedule a regular NPS score survey to its all customers via email. Hence every 3 months or by the end of the month a simple net promoter score survey will be shared with all the customers via the email. Such tools help increasing the customer engagement and keep reminding them about your brand.
Customer Feedback Tool Help Closing the Feedback Loop and Build Trust
The customer feedback loop is a very important aspect of collecting and utilizing the customer feedback data. The customer feedback loop means a business collect customer feedback data, analyze it and then make changes either to its product or service or internal processes in order to rectify the issues or complaints a customer might have about anything. Then the business will have to notify the customer that on the behalf of their opinion/suggestion we have made this and that changes in our business. This process is called closing the customer feedback loop. The customer feedback loop is a great tool to gain customers’ trust and build strong relationship with them. When the customers know the business is eager to listen to their say and they just not only listen but also act on it this shows them how important they are for the business. The sense of importance and the knowledge that business is taking actions as per their suggestions and feedback will strengthen the bond between the business and the customers. A small business needs to have strong bond with its customers, as it will help them generate more business. A small business owner can easily do that with the help of a digital customer feedback tool. The communication is also simple, as they can send emails to the selective group who were involved in the feedback regarding that particular aspect of the business. That is why closing the feedback loop is very important to build trust among customers.
Customer Feedback Tool Offers Flexible Integration and Central Control
Whether small or large businesses utilize a variety of digital tools to improve their operational capabilities and to work flows. Especially the small business who have limited human resource they utilize digital tools and business solutions to drive efficiency in their processes. A digital customer feedback tool is built using highly advanced technologies which enable it to offer flexible integration with other business tools and third-party databases. This features enables the customer feedback tool to communicate with other systems and fetch or push data to those systems. For example, if the small business owner wants to share an online survey link via email to all the customers who have purchased a particular product or acquired a particular service. For that they will be needing the email database of those customers, which might be stored in their customer relationship management software or sales system. The system integration allow them to automatically fetch that data from the corresponding system and send them the survey email within a few clicks. Furthermore the digital customer feedback tool is usually hosted on online server or cloud which enables it to offer central control and administration. The small business owner can access the feedback data of all connected branches from head office or main branch through the customer feedback tool’s administrative dashboard and make management more convenient and easier.
Conclusion
The small business owners knows very well that they have limited resources, hence they need efficiency in all their internal and external processes. For that they tend to leverage various digital systems and software tools. The customer feedback is a very important function. Whether you own a local or small business with limited territory or whether you are small business on the path of growth and seeking to expand your areas of operations. Whether you want to analyze your current products or services or whether you want to evaluate your employee performance. The customer feedback data plays important role in all these decisions. That is why it is crucial for small businesses to collect highly accurate customer feedback data which can amplify the success rate of their future decisions and help them highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. The customer feedback data also help business to understand their customers and targeted audience and provide them a better understanding of their perception in customers’ minds. That is why small business owners are usually very active in collecting customer feedback.
The traditional customer feedback collection process is very lengthy, time taking, and requires a lot of resources which are difficult for a small business to manage. On top of that the traditional customer feedback collection methods can’t offer high levels of accuracy and quality of the feedback data. That is why the small business owners often look up to acquire a digital customer feedback tool to aid them with their customer feedback campaigns. In this blog we have listed several key advantages of a digital customer feedback tool. RSI Concepts is offering bespoke customer feedback systems to small businesses and large organizations in Dubai and all around the UAE. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you want us to help you implement a highly cost-effective and customized customer feedback tool for your small business, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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