The ultimate goal for every business is to satisfy and retain its customers. And the key to achieving this goal is to know your customers inside out and make better business decisions throughout.
But most businesses make the mistake of letting their personal biases and assumptions take over their decision-making process. They make assumptions or a few positive remarks the basis of their decisions. When their strategies and ideas don’t pan out as good as they were in their minds, they wonder, where did they go wrong?
For starters, they didn’t take any historical data into consideration which provides empirical evidence to make calculated, data-driven decisions with lesser variances. Most marketers, product managers, and business owners spend a lot of time predicting how their customers will behave or react to their decisions rather than asking.
So, instead of ignoring data and trying to predict what the customers might like, why not just ask them and collect data from this reliable source to help make the right and better business decisions?
Conducting customer research with the means of customer surveys will help you correctly gauge your customers’ preferences, behavior, and ongoing trends. But running a simple customer survey form is not enough these days. You’ll need to make it engaging, rewarding while providing a seamless user experience.
So, in this article, we are going to explore 5 unique and effective ways to use customer surveys to make better, data-driven business decisions.
5 Ways to Use Customer Surveys to Make Better Decisions
- Embedding Surveys in Online Platforms
Customer surveys, when embedded in different online platforms like your website, emails, or blogs, are great for improving overall customer communication. This allows you to gather customer feedback on various aspects like product features, overall content, onboarding process, communication frequency and quality, and more in real-time.
Based on the data gathered in real-time, you can make effective and necessary changes to your marketing, sales, and product strategies. This means your strategies will be customer-centric and data-driven, which can help you gain a competitive advantage and clear your path to the top.
When your customers are asked to contribute opinions about their experience with you, they feel heard and a part of your business which directly translates into more engagement and loyalty.
- Gathering Insights for Budget Allocation
Every business has a finite budget for all of its departments; be it marketing, operations, sales, and research & development. The budget allocation is done based on overall business strategy and the forecasted return on investment. Hence, every department gets a limited budget for its operations and it’s every manager’s job to get the most return on the investment.
Using customer surveys strategically can help marketing, sales, and product departments gather insightful insights that can help them get a better understanding of what’s important to the leads and customers.
For the marketing department, surveys can gauge the effectiveness of their strategies among different customer groups and help them allocate their funds effectively so they can maximize ROI.
The sales department can gather insights regarding the most preferable communication medium of their customers, their frequent queries and pain points, and more. Based on the data, they can allocate resources accordingly to handle different mediums, create sales collateral, improve customer onboarding and invest in better software.
When the budget is allocated effectively, it gives departments like marketing and sales to explore new technologies and software, making them early adopters. For example, they can explore digital adoption platforms like Walkme or Whatfix, which is among the top Walkme alternatives. Such software can help your business make the most of the available digital opportunities.
- Optimizing Content Marketing Strategy
The content you create only benefits you when your readers and customers can resonate with it. Your content needs to answer their questions and solve their doubts. And instead of assuming and trying to predict their questions, why not just ask them?
“It’s always better to ask than to assume.”
It’s one of the most valuable lessons I learned from one of my teachers when I was a teenager and miraculously, this lesson applies in every situation, professional or personal.
So, make use of customer surveys – reach out to your customers on a monthly or quarterly basis to know what they think about your published content and what kind of content they’d like to read in the future.
This will help give a customer-centric direction to your content marketing strategies, making them more effective than ever.
You can also embed a poll on your blog using tools like Hotjar to gauge if they find your published content valuable. You can also track their overall experience with your content using Hotjar and optimize the user experience based on the data.
- Effective Product Roll-outs
Product updates and upgrades are as important as the base product itself. How and what you develop and launch affects the desirability of your product.
Using customer surveys you can gather quality feedback that can help you maximize the potential of your product, its design, and function. The entire process is simple to strategize and implement and can be replicated before finalizing every product update.
Such feedback can not only help you in the development stage, but it can also help you market your product to the right customer groups.
To craft such surveys, you can ask your customers about their experience with the new features, what they liked about them, what they’d like to change or improve, and what features they’d like to see in the future. You can always ask them to select the top three features they are looking forward to in your next update and based on that, you can prioritize your development.
This step in your development cycle can really help make your product launches effective and seamless. And this directly impacts your business growth and customer satisfaction.
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The potential and applications of customer surveys are infinite. You can use them to streamline your entire onboarding process, improve customer service strategies, offer targeted products and services, validate new product ideas, and whatnot.
But don’t forget to have proper goals and execution strategies for your surveys. Without them, you’ll just be wasting resources and bringing more chaos and doubt into your business. Start by specifying what you want to learn from surveys, how you plan on utilizing the information, and how they’ll impact which decisions.
Happy Surveying!
Guest Author Bio: Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.