It’s often said that “the customer is always right”.  Given this, any savvy business should be looking to ask their customers plenty of great-quality questions to help shape their business ideas.  Regular surveys are a great way to engage with your customer base and get some incredible feedback.  Here are five reasons to survey your clients throughout the year.

1 – It lets them know you care

Surveying your clients is a form of keeping in touch with them and keeping in touch shows you care.  A lot of marketing resources are dedicated to generating new business and this is completely understandable.  However, it’s much cheaper and easier to keep the customers you have then to get new customers. And when a company takes the time to follow up with a customer, it shows you care and is likely to stick in their mind.  This level of care will shine through when the client speaks about your business and could also lead to referral business.

2 – To find out where you’re not meeting their expectations

Surveys play a vital role in client satisfaction.  No company can get every aspect of their service right all of the time.  But any company can give their clients the opportunity to give feedback when things do go wrong.  And you should make this feedback process as easy as possible. This gives you the chance to put things right for that specific client and also to think about whether you need to make changes to your services moving forward.

3 – To improve your customer service

Getting survey feedback from any customer is useful, but when you have multiple client responses, you can begin to spot trends.  Clients are normally happy to tell you what could be better, particularly if it relates to the customer service they received.  If many of them highlight the same thing as an issue relating to your service, then you can spot an obvious requirement for improvement.  Knowing about it gives you the chance to train your team and improve customer service levels.

4 – To discover services that your customers are looking for and opportunities for growth

Surveys are a great way to carry out cost-effective market research, straight from the mouths of your target audience.  Got a new service you’re thinking of launching?  Why not include a question related to it in your survey and see if people react positively, prior to committing any time or funding to the project.  Additionally, a more open question such as “what other services would you like to see from us?” could give you some ideas that you had never even thought about.

5 – To learn what you’re doing well and should shout about

It’s easy to think that surveys are just about finding out where you have issues in service delivery.  But many customers will be equally happy to tell you about all the things you’re great at too.  And this is equally important because there is success to be found by replicating the stuff you’re doing to make customers happy.  Additionally, these can make great sound bites for your business to shout about when looking for new clients.  It’s powerful in your marketing to be able to quote the positive statistics that come out of your surveys.