As a small business, it can sometimes seem overwhelming to ask your customers for a review – especially if you are just starting out, and a lot of your customers happen to be family or close friends!
But whether you are just starting out or have been in business for decades, it can feel a little awkward to ask your customers for reviews. Here are three important tips to help you ask your customers for valuable feedback that will help you improve your business.
Tip #1: Ask for Feedback Instead of a Review
While asking for a review and asking for feedback may seem extremely similar, there is a distinct connotation difference between the two – particularly when speaking with customers in 2020. Think back on your personal experiences…
If you get an email, text, Facebook Message, flyer, etc. asking for a review of a product or service, your gut feeling may be a mix of annoyance, frustration, and indifference.
But, if an organization asks you for feedback, it may shift your gut feeling to interest, importance, and willingness.
Why the distinct difference between two seemingly related words? Because we as a society have been inundated with reviews; Google My Business, Amazon Reviews, Yelp!, and even the YouTube comment section on product videos rule our lives. We see reviews as something impersonal – a necessary ask from brands that only have one goal: 5 stars.
In contrast, when you ask for feedback, it conveys a sense of authenticity. You are inviting your customer to share their experience AND offer recommendations and improvements. When you say, “I’d love to hear your feedback,” it implies that you don’t expect all that feedback to be glowingly positive, but rather authentic and challenging.
After all, wouldn’t you rather know everything that your customers think about your brand – good, bad, indifferent – so that you can continue to evolve, grow, and improve over time?
Tip #2: Spend Time Cultivating Your Questions
Do you ever find yourself filling out a feedback survey, and thinking that all the questions are skewed to elicit positive answers from you? Or, does a question just flat out not make sense because of an industry-specific term or acronym? These are two very common mistakes that brands make without even realizing it.
Since you are asking for an outsider’s feedback (your customer), you should ask for an outsider’s help in cultivating the questions. One of our clients said it best to me: “I don’t know what to ask or how to ask it because I eat, sleep, and breathe my business. I’m too close to the trees to see the forest.”
Many digital marketing companies offer feedback survey creation, and they will most likely help you collect, organize, and analyze your results as a part of an online reputation management service.
Tip #3: Utilize a Third Party System
Another common mistake that organizations make when asking clients for feedback is guiding them directly to a public review platform like Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc. While we do still want clients to share their experience on those platforms, we want to first see their feedback internally.
If the feedback a client has for us is positive, we want to hear it straight from them. Then, we can ask them if they would be willing to let us use their feedback as a testimonial or in other promotional ways.
If the feedback a client has for us is negative, then we want the opportunity to correct the situation before it has the potential to impact others’ opinions of the brand. Basically, think of your feedback survey as the ultimate James Bond movie to diffuse the bomb before it ruins the gold for the rest of the world.
While there are thousands of different programs you can use for your survey platform, we recommend choosing something that is easy to set up, will allow you to easily download your results, and will let you use your own branding. If you are working with a digital marketing company on this, they most likely already have a subscription to a program they know and trust.
Just Ask!
Not everyone will give you feedback when you ask for it, so there is a part of this process where you will just have to get used to rejection. But, when done right, feedback can propel your business to the next level in product development and customer service.
If you have more questions about how to get started with asking your customers for feedback, give us a shout!
