Tips for collecting customer reviews to better your small business Essay

Tips for collecting customer reviews to better your small business
Running a small business without asking your customers' feedback is like trying to cross the road with your eyes closed. The customer point of views from the feedback can have a very positive effect on your companys performance.
There were very limited options for collecting customer reviews before the Internet and social media. But now, it only takes a quick email, a Facebook status update or a tweet from your customer to let you know, and others, how your business is.
Following are some tips for collecting reviews to improve your small business
1. Contact Forms
Use contact forms on your website to facilitate an easy communication between customers and your organization. Try not to guide the feedback process by allowing customers to answer only predefined questions. It's to your own benefit to keep the feedback as free streaming as possible. Use a ticket management system in the backend of contact forms so that every customer contact can be managed and tracked easily.
2. Forums
User forums are one of the best approaches to know what customers think about your products or services. These forums can either be hosted by you or by third parties. Monitor these forums for important insights and interact regularly with other members of the forum.
But forum management does not work on a fire and forget basis. An irregular mediator or a lazy owner is the quickest way to transform an online forum into a dead one. A dead forum hosted by you is similar to an abandoned social media profile.
3. Social Networks
Depending on what your product is, social networks can be extremely useful in connecting with customers and collecting feedback. Interacting with your business sector and mining information from social network is a simple task to do with various tools, both free software and business sellers are available.
A presence on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube is a great way to get started. But this is just the beginning. If you are a restaurant then you should consider Yelp. If you are a tour company, then consider TripAdvisor.
4. Live Chat
Live Chat is a great tool for customer feedback. Live chat is very useful for talking with a customer on the phone or face to face, you can get real time customer feedback.
Adding a live chat feature on your website is very easy these days. Always select a good solution that comes with useful features like analytics and live chat transfer.
5. Surveys
Surveys are widely used to collect customer reviews. Surveys can uncover many things that you might have ignored otherwise. Design the questionnaire by yourself so that the questions are short and relevant. Do not have hundreds of questions in your survey questionnaire.
Be straightforward about the objectives of the survey and provide sufficient motivation for users to participate. At the very least, create a report out of the results of the survey and deliver it to the participants.